Other Victims, the Demographic Toll, and Postwar Justice

Nazi genocidal violence extended well beyond the Jewish population. The Roma people of Europe suffered systematic persecution and extermination, known as the Porajmos or Samudaripen, with estimates ranging between 200,000 and 500,000 Roma victims killed during the Nazi period. The Aktion T4 program targeted people with physical and mental disabilities, systematically gassing thousands of psychiatric patients from 1939 onward, and the technical expertise and personnel developed for Aktion T4 were later put directly to use in building the gas chambers of the extermination camps. Gay men were persecuted and imprisoned under a strengthened Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, Jehovah's Witnesses were persecuted for refusing loyalty oaths and military service, and Soviet prisoners of war suffered extreme mortality, estimated at several million, treated more brutally than other Allied prisoners; the jurist Raphael Lemkin coined the term "genocide" in 1944 to conceptualize these crimes more broadly.