AKTION (German)
Operation involving the mass assembly, deportation, and
murder of Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
ANSCHLUSS (German)
Annexation of Austria by Germany on March 13, 1938.
"Aryan" was originally applied to people who spoke
any Indo-European language. The Nazis, however, primarily applied the term to
people of Northern European racial background. Their aim was to avoid what they
considered the "bastardization of the German race" and to preserve
the purity of European blood.
Immediately upon their assumption of power on January 30,
1933, the Nazis established concentration camps for the imprisonment of all
"enemies" of their regime: actual and potential political opponents
(e.g. communists, socialists, monarchists), Jehovah's Witnesses, gypsies,
homosexuals, and other "asocials." Beginning in 1938, Jews were
targeted for internment solely because they were Jews. Before then, only Jews
who fit one of the earlier categories were interned in camps. The first three
concentration camps established were Dachau (near Munich), Buchenwald (near
Weimar) and Sachsenhausen (near Berlin).
EINSATZGRUPPEN (German)
Battalion-sized, mobile killing units of the Security Police
and SS
Security Service that followed the German armies into the Soviet Union in June
1941. These units were supported by units of the uniformed German Order Police
and auxiliaries of volunteers (Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian).
Their victims, primarily Jews, were executed by shooting and were buried in
mass graves from which they were later exhumed and burned. At least a million
Jews were killed in this manner. There were four Einsatzgruppen (A,B,C,D)
which were subdivided into company-sized Einsatzkommandos.
The original meaning of this term was an easy and painless
death for the terminally ill. However, the Nazi euthanasia program took on
quite a different meaning: the taking of eugenic measures to improve the
quality of the German "race." This program culminated in enforced
"mercy" deaths for the incurably insane, permanently disabled,
deformed and "superfluous." Three major classifications were
developed: 1) euthanasia for incurables; 2) direct extermination by
"special treatment"; and 3) experiments in mass sterilization.
Nazi camps for the mass killing of Jews
and others (e.g. Gypsies, Russian prisoners-of-war, ill prisoners). Known as
"death camps," these included: Auschwitz-Birkenau,
Belzec,
Chelmno,
Majdanek,
Sobibor,
and Treblinka. All were located in occupied Poland.
FINAL SOLUTION
The cover name for the plan to destroy the Jews of Europe -
the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." Beginning in December
1941, Jews were rounded up and sent to extermination
camps in the East. The program was deceptively disguised as
"resettlement in the East."
Governor-General of occupied Poland from 1939 to 1945. A
member of the Nazi Party from its earliest days and Hitler's personal lawyer,
he announced, "Poland will be treated like a colony; the Poles will become
slaves of the Greater German Reich." By 1942, more than 85% of the Jews in
Poland had been transported to extermination
camps. Frank was tried at Nuremberg, convicted, and executed in
1946.
The Nazis revived the medieval ghetto in creating their
compulsory "Jewish Quarter" (Wohnbezirk). The ghetto was a
section of a city where all Jews from the surrounding areas were forced to
reside. Surrounded by barbed wire or walls, the ghettos were often sealed so
that people were prevented from leaving or entering. Established mostly in Eastern
Europe (e.g. Lodz, Warsaw,
Vilna, Riga, Minsk), the ghettos were characterized by overcrowding, starvation
and forced labor. All were eventually destroyed as the Jews were deported to
death camps. .
HOLOCAUST - SHOAH
The destruction of some 6 million Jews by the Nazis and
their followers in Europe between the years 1933-1945. Other individuals and
groups were persecuted and suffered grievously during this period, but only the
Jews were marked for complete and utter annihilation. The term
"Holocaust" - literally meaning "a completely burned
sacrifice" - tends to suggest a sacrificial connotation to what occurred.
The word Shoah, originally a Biblical term meaning widespread disaster,
is the modern Hebrew equivalent.
JUDENRAT (PLURAL: JUDENRÄTE)
Council of Jewish representatives in communities and ghettos
set up by the Nazis to carry out their instructions.
"Cleansed of Jews," denoting areas where all Jews
had been either murdered or deported.
Prisoner in charge of a group of inmates in Nazi concentration
camps.
KRISTALLNACHT (German)
Night of the Broken Glass: pogrom unleashed by the Nazis on
November 9-10, 1938. Throughout Germany and Austria, synagogues and other
Jewish institutions were burned, Jewish stores were destroyed, and their
contents looted. At the same time, approximately 35,000 Jewish men were sent to
concentration camps. The "excuse" for this action was the
assassination of Ernst vom Rath in Paris by a Jewish teenager whose parents had
been rounded up by the Nazis.
MUSSELMANN (German)
Concentration
camp slang word for a prisoner who had given up fighting for life.
Two anti-Jewish statutes enacted September 1935 during the
Nazi party's national convention in Nuremberg. The first, the Reich Citizenship
Law, deprived German Jews of their citizenship and all pertinent, related
rights. The second, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor,
outlawed marriages of Jews and non-Jews, forbade Jews from employing German
females of childbearing age, and prohibited Jews from displaying the German
flag. Many additional regulations were attached to the two main statutes, which
provided the basis for removing Jews from all spheres of German political,
social, and economic life. The Nuremberg Laws carefully established definitions
of Jewishness based on bloodlines. Thus, many Germans of mixed ancestry, called
"Mischlinge," faced antisemitic discrimination if they had a
Jewish grandparent.
Irregular troops engaged in guerrilla warfare, often behind
enemy lines. During World War II, this term was applied to resistance fighters
in Nazi-occupied countries.
A major piece of antisemitic propaganda, compiled at the
turn of the century by members of the Russian Secret Police. Essentially
adapted from a nineteenth century French polemical satire directed against
Emperor Napoleon III, substituting Jewish leaders, the Protocols maintained
that Jews were plotting world dominion by setting Christian against Christian,
corrupting Christian morals and attempting to destroy the economic and
political viability of the West. It gained great popularity after World War I
and was translated into many languages, encouraging antisemitism in France,
Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. Long repudiated as an absurd and
hateful lie, the book currently has been reprinted and is widely distributed by
Neo-Nazis and others who are committed to the destruction of the State of
Israel.
Term applied to those non-Jews who, at the risk of their own
lives, saved Jews from their Nazi persecutors.
Euphemism for the process of choosing victims for the gas
chambers in the Nazi camps by separating them from those considered fit to work.
Abbreviation usually written with two lightning symbols for Schutzstaffel
(Defense Protective Units). Originally organized as Hitler's personal
bodyguard, the SS was transformed into a giant organization by Heinrich
Himmler. Although various SS units fought on the battlefield, the
organization is best known for carrying out the destruction of European Jewry.
UMSCHLAGPLATZ (German)
Collection point. It was a square in the Warsaw Ghetto
where Jews were rounded up for deportation to
Treblinka.
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