In the early twentieth century , possibly the first to use the term was journalist Melville Chater in 1925 , to describe the burning and sacking of Smyrne in 1922 . Winston Churchill used it in 1929 ( Tatz , 2003 ) , and other contemporaneous writers used it before World War II to describe the Armenian Genocide of World War I . The Armenian Genocide is referenced in the title of a 1922 poem " The Holocaust " ( published as a booklet ) and the 1923 book " The Smyrna Holocaust " deals with arson and massacre of Armenians . Before the Second World War , the possibility of another war was referred to as " another holocaust " ( that is , a repeat of the First World War ) . With reference to the events of the war , writers in English from 1945 used the term in relation to events such as the fire-bombing of Dresden or Hiroshima , or the effects of a nuclear war , although from the 1950s onwards , it was increasingly used in English to refer to the Nazi genocide of the European Jews ( or Judeocide )
Armenian Genocide
Armenian Genocide
Names of the Holocaust