# Axis Rule in Occupied Europe [[Raphael Lemkin]]'s 1944 study of Nazi occupation law — the book that coined the word **genocide** (Greek *genos*, race or kind, plus Latin *-cidium*, killing). Built from Lemkin's documentation of Axis occupation decrees, it defined genocide as a colonial, two-phase project: destroy the national pattern of the oppressed group, then impose the pattern of the oppressor — an administrative process operating through law, bureaucracy, dispossession, cultural destruction, and engineered deprivation, not only mass killing. The conceptual foundation for the 1948 Genocide Convention (see [[Genocide]]).