Raphaël Lemkin invented the concept of genocide. The term was prominently used in the indictment before the International Military Tribunal (IMT). In the course of the Nuremberg trial, all four prosecution authorities employed Lemkin. In the twelve subsequent trials before the purely US-American Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT), the prosecution further defined and differentiated 'genocide.' In these tribunals, the term even made its way into a verdict. In all thirteen Nuremberg trials, the lawyers involved brought the persecution and extermination of European Jews to trial-sometimes explicitly the mass murder, sometimes persecution and exploitation measures, which resulted nevertheless in exclusion, expulsion, and death. Lemkin's study of Nazi occupation policy became an essential reading for Nuremberg lawyers. He also corresponded with members of the American and British prosecution authorities during the IMT and NMT trials. But what impact did he have on the Nuremberg Trials? Building on the research of recent years, my working hypothesis is that Lemkin had virtually no influence on the course of these processes-although the concept of 'genocide' did. The original concept was very broad and open to various interpretations, however, over the years of the Nuremberg proceedings the concept was narrowed down to the crime of direct and planned mass murder. 1 A final definition of genocide was only given with the drafting of the Genocide Convention, which standardized the term (even though there are still problematic ambiguities, but this is another issue that is not to be dealt with here). What has not been sufficiently emphasized in research to date is the question of the interdependence of the concept of 'genocide' and the mass murder of the European Jews or the 'Holocaust' between 1944 and 1948. The assumption underlying this essay is that the extermination of Europe's Jews and 'genocide' were not used congruently in the Nuremberg trials. To illustrate this, I will deal here with both the question of how the persecution and murder of the Jews was interpreted in the Nuremberg trials and how the concept of 'genocide' was used. At the same time, I will mention a few other persons next to Lemkin who influenced the historical interpretations of the past and the legal concepts in early postwar period. The aim of the paper is to unravel the nexus of the 'Holocaust' and 'genocide' during the years 1945 to 1948, i.e. in a pre-Genocide-Convention time (as an established norm) and a presingularity-of-the-Holocaust thesis time (as a narrative of memory politics). 2 The historicization of the criminal prosecution for the persecution and mass murder of the Jews in the Nuremberg trials, on the one hand, and the historicization of the application of the concept of 'genocide,' on the other, is valuable for several reasons. First, the singularity of the Holocaust was controversially discussed in Holocaust and Genocide Studies for many years (without having led to an agreement), 3 secondly, the use of the term 'genocide' in the G...

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