During World War II , the euphemism '' čišćenje terena '' ( " cleansing the terrain " ) was used by the Croatian Ustaše to describe military actions in which non-Croats were purposely killed or otherwise uprooted from their homes . Viktor Gutić , a senior Ustaše leader , was one of the first Croatian nationalists on record to use the term as a euphemism for committing atrocities against Serbs . The term was later used in the internal memorandums of Serbian Chetniks in reference to a number of retaliatory massacres they committed against Bosniaks and Croats between 1941 and 1945 . The Russian phrase очистка границ ( '' ochistka granits '' ; lit . " cleansing of borders " ) was used in Soviet documents of the early 1930s to refer to the forced resettlement of Polish people from the border zone in the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SSRs . This process was repeated on an even larger scale in 1939 – 41 , involving many other groups suspected of disloyalty towards the Soviet Union . During The Holocaust , Nazi Germany pursued a policy of ensuring that Europe was " cleansed of Jews " '' ( Judenrein ) '' . In its complete form , the term appeared for the first time in the Romanian language ( '' purificare etnică '' ) in an address by Vice Prime Minister Mihai Antonescu to cabinet members in July 1941 . After the beginning of the invasion of the USSR , he concluded : “ I do not know when the Romanians will have such chance for ethnic cleansing . " In the 1980s , the Soviets used the term " ethnic cleansing " to describe the inter-ethnic violence in Nagorno-Karabakh . At around the same time , the Yugoslav media used it to describe what they alleged was an Albanian nationalist plot to force all Serbs to leave Kosovo . It was widely popularized by the Western media during the Bosnian War ( 1992 – 95 ) . The first recorded mention of its use in the Western media can be traced back to an article in '' The New York Times '' dated 15 April 1992 , in a quote by an anonymous Western diplomat
The Holocaust
The Holocaust
Ethnic cleansing