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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.
ANTI-SEMITISM
Prejudices and/or discrimination towards Jews.
APPELL
(German)
Roll call of concentration camp prisoners, taken
at many different times of the day or night often taking hours at a
time.
ARYAN RACE
"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.
(See NUREMBERG LAWS.)
AUSCHWITZ
Concentration and extermination camp in upper Silesia, Poland, 37
miles west of Krakow. Established in 1940 as a concentration camp,
it became an extermination camp in
early 1942. Eventually, it consisted of three sections:
Auschwitz
I, the main camp; Auschwitz II (Birkenau), an extermination camp;
Auschwitz III (Monowitz), the I.G. Farben labor camp, also known
as Buna. In addition, Auschwitz had numerous sub-camps.
BADGE
A distinctive sign which Jews were compelled to wear in Nazi Germany
and in Nazi-occupied countries. It often took the form of a yellow
Star of David. Badges were also used to identify categories of
prisoners in the concentration camps.
BELZEC
One of the six extermination camps
in Poland. Originally established in 1940 as a camp for Jewish forced
labor, the Germans began construction of an extermination camp at
Belzec on November 1, 1941, as part of Aktion Reinhard. By the time
the camp ceased operations in January 1943, more than 600,000 persons
had been murdered there.
BERGEN-BELSEN
Located
in northern
Germany,
transformed from a prison-exchange camp into a concentration camp in
March 1944. Poor sanitary conditions, epidemics, and starvation led to
deaths of thousands, including Anne and Margot Frank in March 1945.
BLOCKALTESTE
(German)
Block
elder and inmate functionary in charge of a single concentration
camp barracks.
BUCHENWALD
Concentration
camp in north central Germany, established in July 1937. One
of the largest concentration camps on German soil, with more than
130 satellite labor camps. It held many political prisoners.
More than 65,000 of approximately 250,000 prisoners perished at
Buchenwald.
“CANADA”
A complex of thirty barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau
where the personal belongings stole from new arrivals were sorted
and stored. It was a coveted place for prisoners to work because
of the possibility of sneaking something to eat or to wear. It was
nicknamed for the country of Canada which symbolized abundance to
the camp prisoners.
CHELMNO
An extermination camp established in late 1941 in the Warthegau region
of Western Poland, 47 miles west of Lodz. It was the first camp where
mass executions were carried out by means of gas. A total of 320,000
people were exterminated at Chelmno.
CONCENTRATION
CAMPS
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).
DACHAU
First concentration camp,
established in March 1933 near Munich, Germany. At first Dachau held
only political opponents, but over time, more and more groups were
imprisoned there. Thousands died at
Dachau from starvation, maltreatment, and
disease.
EICHMANN, ADOLF
(1906-1962)
SS
Lieutenant-colonel and head of the "Jewish Section" of
the Gestapo. Eichmann participated in the Wannsee
Conference (January 20, 1942). He was instrumental in implementing
the "Final Solution" by organizing
the transportation of Jews to death camps from all over Europe.
He was arrested at the end of World War II in the American zone,
but escaped, went underground, and disappeared. On May 11, 1960,
members of the Israeli Secret Service uncovered his whereabouts
and smuggled him from Argentina to Israel. Eichmann was tried in
Jerusalem (April-December 1961), convicted, and sentenced to death.
He was executed on May 31, 1962.
EINSATZGRUPPEN
(German)
Mobile units of SS and SD (Security Service) which
followed German armies into the Soviet Union in June 1941. They were
ordered to shot all Jews, as well as Communist leaders and Gypsies. At
least a million Jews were killed by Einsatzgruppen.
EVIAN CONFERENCE
(July 6, 1938)
Conference
convened by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in July 1938 to discuss
the problem of refugees. Thirty-two countries met at Evian-les-Bains,
France. However, not much was accomplished, since most western
countries were reluctant to accept Jewish refugees.
EXTERMINATION CAMPS
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."
GENOCIDE
The deliberate and systematic destruction of a religious, racial,
national, or cultural group.
GESTAPO
In German, Geheime Staatspolizei. Secret State Police. A symbol of the
Nazi reign of terror.
GHETTO
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.
GYPSIES
Popular term for Roma and Sinti, nomadic people believed
to have come originally from northwest India.
Traveling mostly in small caravans, Gypsies first appeared in
Western Europe
in the 1400s and eventually spread to every country of Europe. Prejudices toward Gypsies were and are widespread. Approximately
250,000 to 500,000 Gypsies are believed to have perished in Nazi
concentration camps, killing centers and Einsatzgruppen
and other shootings.
H.I.A.S
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, an international organization
established in 1884 to help resettle immigrants.
HOLOCAUST
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.
JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES
A religious sect originating in the United States
with approximately 20,000 members in Germany
in 1933. Witnesses, whose religious beliefs did not allow them to
swear allegiance to any worldly power, were persecuted as “enemies
of the state.” About 10,000 Witnesses from Germany and other countries
were imprisoned in concentration camps.
Of these, about 2,500 died.
JOINT
American Jewish joint Distribution Committee, an organization founded
in 1914 to provide emergency aid for European Jewish war victims.
JUDENRAT
(PLURAL: JUDENRÄTE)
Council of Jewish
representatives in communities and ghettos set up by the Nazis to
carry out their instructions.
JUDENREIN
"Cleansed of Jews," denoting areas where all Jews had been either
murdered or deported.
KAPO
Prisoner in charge of a group of inmates in Nazi
concentration camps.
KINDERTRANSPORT
Evacuation of Jewish children during the 1930’s, mostly from Germany
to England and South America; organized by Jewish aid organizations.
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.
LODZ
City in western Poland
(renamed Litzmannstadt by the Nazis), where the first major ghetto
was created in April 1940. By September 1941, the population of
the ghetto was 144,000 in an area of 1.6 square miles (statistically,
5.8 people per room). In October 1941, 20,000 Jews from
Germany,
Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were sent to the Lodz Ghetto. Those
deported from Lodz during 1942 and June-July 1944 were sent to the
Chelmno
extermination camp. In August-September 1944, the ghetto was liquidated
and the remaining 60,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz.
MAJDANEK
Mass extermination camp in eastern Poland. At first a labor camp for
Poles and a POW camp for Russians, it was turned into a gassing center
for Jews. Majdanek was liberated by the Red Army in July 1944, but not
before 250,000 men, women, and children had lost their lives there.
MAUTHAUSEN
A camp for men, opened in August 1938, near Linz
in northern Austria, Mauthausen was classified by the
SS as a camp of utmost severity. Conditions there were brutal, even
by concentration camp standards. Nearly 100,000 prisoners of various
nationalities were either worked or tortured to death at the camp
before liberating American troops arrived in May 1945.
MEIN
KAMPF
(German)
This autobiographical book (My Struggle)
by
Hitler
was written while he was imprisoned in the Landsberg fortress after
the "Beer-Hall Putsch" in 1923. In this book, Hitler propounds
his ideas, beliefs, and plans for the future of Germany.
Everything, including his foreign policy, is permeated by his "racial
ideology." The Germans, belonging to the "superior"
Aryan race, have a right to "living space" (Lebensraum)
in the East, which is inhabited by the "inferior" Slavs.
Throughout, he accuses Jews of being the source of all evil, equating
them with Bolshevism and, at the same time, with international capitalism.
Unfortunately, those people who read the book (except for his admirers)
did not take it seriously but considered it the ravings of a maniac.
MENGELE, JOSEF (1911-1978?)
SS
physician at
Auschwitz,
notorious for pseudo-medical experiments, especially on twins and
Gypsies. He "selected" new arrivals by simply pointing
to the right or the left, thus separating those considered able
to work from those who were not. Those too weak or too old to work
were sent straight to the gas chambers, after all their possessions,
including their clothes, were taken for resale in Germany. After
the war, he disappeared. The corpse of a Wolfgang Gerhard, who died
in a swimming accident in 1979, was discovered in Brazil in 1985
and identified as Mengele.
MISCHLINGE
(German)
Nazi term for persons having one or two Jewish grandparents; part of
the definition of Jewishness based on bloodlines which were
established by the Nuremberg Laws. Accordingly many Germans of mixed
ancestry faced anti-Semitic discriminations.
MUSSELMANN
(German)
Concentration camp
slang word for a prisoner who had given up fighting for life.
NIGHT AND FOG DECREE
Secret order issued by
Hitler
on December 7, 1941, to seize "persons endangering German security"
who were to vanish without a trace into night and fog.
NUREMBERG LAWS
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.
PARTISANS
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.
POGROM
Russian word for “devastation.” Organized violence against Jews, often
with understood support of authorities.
PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF
ZION
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.
RAVENSBRUCK
Concentration camp
for women opened in May 1939, 56 miles north of Berlin. An estimated
120,000 prisoners were inmates there, including many political prisoners,
Jews, Gypsies, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
REICH
(German)
German word for "Empire".
RIGHTEOUS AMONG THE NATIONS
Term applied to those non-Jews who, at the risk of their own lives,
saved Jews from their Nazi persecutors.
SA
(German, abbreviation: Stürmabteilung)
The storm
troops of the early Nazi party; organized in 1921.
SELECTION
Euphemism for the process of choosing victims
for the gas chambers in the Nazi camps by separating them from those
considered fit to work (see
MENGELE, JOSEF).
SHTETL
(Yiddish)
Small Jewish town or village.
SOBIBOR
Extermination camp in the Lublin district in
Eastern Poland (see
BELZEC;
EXTERMINATION CAMP).
Sobibor opened in May 1942 and closed one day after a rebellion
of the Jewish prisoners on October 14, 1943. At least 250,000 Jews were killed there.
SONDERKOMMANDO
(German)
German word for "special squad." In the context of extermination
camps, it refers to units of Jewish prisoners forced to take away
bodies of gassed inmates to be cremated and to remove gold fillings
and hair.
SS
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 were assigned to the battlefield, the organization is best known
for carrying out the destruction of European Jewry.
ST.
LOUIS
The steamship
St. Louis was a refugee ship that left
Hamburg in the spring of 1939, bound for
Cuba.
When the ship arrived, only 22 of the 1128 refugees were allowed to
disembark. Initially no country, including the
United States,
was willing to accept the others. The ship finally returned to
Europe
where most of the refugees were finally granted entry into England,
Holland, France and Belgium.
STRUMA
Name of a boat carrying 769 Jewish refugees which left Romania late in
1941. It was refused entry to
Palestine or
Turkey, and was tugged out to the Black Sea where it sank in February
1942, with the loss of all on board except one.
DER
STÜRMER
(The Attacker)
An antisemitic German weekly, founded and
edited by Julius Streicher, which was published in
Nuremberg between 1923 and 1945.
SUDENTENLAND
Mainly German-speaking region that was part of Czechoslovakia between
the two world wars. Annexed by
Germany
in October 1938.
TEREZIN
(Czech), THERESIENSTADT (German)
German name for
Czech town of
Terezin,
located about 40 miles from
Prague. When the deportations from central
Europe to the extermination camps began, certain groups were initially
excluded such as partners in a mixed marriage and their children, and
prominent Jews with special connections. They were sent to the
Theresienstadt ghetto, which was established in November 1941. Nazis
used the ghetto/camp as a “model Jewish settlement” to show Red Cross
investigators how well Jews were being treated. In reality, thousands
died there from starvation and disease, and thousands more were
deported and killed in extermination camps.
TREBLINKA
Extermination camp
in northeast Poland
(see
Extermination Camp).
Established in May 1942, 870,000 people were murdered there. The
camp operated until the fall of 1943 when the Nazis destroyed the
entire camp in an attempt to conceal all traces of their crimes.
UMSCHLAGPLATZ
(German)
Collection point. It was a square in the
Warsaw Ghetto where Jews were rounded up for deportation to Treblinka.
UNDERGROUND
Organized group acting in secrecy to oppose the government or, during
war, to resist occupying enemy forces.
WALLENBERG, RAOUL (1912-19??)
Swedish diplomat who, in 1944, went to Hungary on a mission to save as
many Jews as possible by handing out Swedish papers, passports and
visas. He is credited with saving the lives of at least 30,000 people.
After the liberation of
Budapest, he was mysteriously taken into
custody by the Russians and his fate remains unknown.
WANNSEE CONFERENCE (January 20, 1942)
Lake near Berlin where the Wannsee Conference was held
to discuss and coordinate the "Final Solution." It was attended by many high-ranking Nazis, including Reinhard
Heydrich
and Adolf
Eichmann.
WARSAW GHETTO
Established in November 1940, the ghetto,
surrounded by a wall, confined nearly 500,000 Jews. Almost 45,000
Jews died there in 1941 alone, due to overcrowding, forced labor,
lack of sanitation, starvation, and disease. From April 19 to May
16, 1943, a revolt took place in the ghetto when the Germans
attempted to raze the ghetto and deport the remaining inhabitants
to
Treblinka .
The uprising, led by Mordecai Anielewicz, was the first instance
in occupied Europe of an uprising by an urban population.
WESTERBORK
Transit camp in northeastern Holland for almost 100,000 Jews who were deported
between 1942 and 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Theresienstadt,
and
Bergen-Belsen. Anne Frank and her family were held at Westerbork
between August 8, 1944 and September 3, 1944, when they were put on the last transport to
Auschwitz.
YIDDISH
A language that combines elements of German and Hebrew, usually
written in Hebrew characters and spoken by Jews chiefly in eastern
Europe and areas to which eastern Europeans have migrated. |
