World War II & Holocaust Vocabulary
The Holocaust
Aktion
German military or police "action" or "strike" usually directed against Jews in a ghetto for the purpose of intimidating the populace or rounding up the populace for deportation to a death camp. The Jews in the Krakow ghetto suffered a wave of Aktionen, including the deportations of early June 1942, October 1942, and March 1943. It was during the June 1942 Aktion that Oskar Schindler observed the Jewish girl dressed in red whose flight from the SS he would later describe.
Allies
The nations, including the United States, Britain (and Dominions),and the Soviet Union, as well as the Free French of Charles De Gaulle, that joined in the war against Germany and the other Axis nations. The Soviet Union, under Josef Stalin, was an ally of the Nazis between August 23, 1939, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed, and June 22, 1941, when Hitler attacked Russia. On September 17, 1939, during the German attack on Poland, the Soviets dutifully occupied the Polish territories east of the Bug River. It is the border today. Britain became an ally of the Soviet Union only after Stalin and Hitler went to war. The United States became an ally of the Soviet Union only after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Hitler, allied to Japan (he called them "yellow Aryans") declared war on the United States. In sum, the Soviets and the Western Allies found common ground only in their opposition to the Nazis, and as soon as the war ended the Soviet Union and the Western Allies went their separate ways. The result was the Cold War that lasted until 1989.
Anschluss (or Union)
The incorporation of Austria by Nazi Germany on March 13, 1938. The majority of Austrians, disillusioned by economic hardship and inspired by the booming example of Nazi Germany, greeted German troops with flowers, giving the Anschluss the sobriquet "The flower war." When the Nazis seized power in Vienna, Austrian storm troopers humiliated Viennese Jews by forcing them to scrub the streets. The historian (and then radio broadcaster) William Shirir, who was present in Vienna, described the humiliation of the Jews in the Austrian capital as "an orgy of sadism." According to the famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, a disproportionately large number of Austrians played leading roles in the destruction of the Jews, particularly in Poland. One of the leading Nazis, Adolf Eichmann, was himself an Austrian and picked his associates from among his fellows. It is said that anti-Semitism was stronger and more visceral in Austria than it was in Germany. As one Viennese has said, "He was not an anti-Semite the man who did not hate Jews much."
Anti-Semitism
Acts or negative feelings against Jews which take the form of prejudice, dislike, fear, discrimination and persecution. Anti-Semitism is deeply imbedded in Western culture. For centuries, many organized Christian religions preached that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Jews were blamed for being either capitalists or communists. By the time the Nazis began the extermination process, many non-Jews had long been conditioned to view the Jews less than human.
Aryan
A term used by the Nazis to describe Caucasians of non-Jewish descent. The Nazis believed that the ideal Aryans---blond-hair and blue-eyed North Europeans---were a master race ("herrenvolk") destined to rule the world. The opposite of the Aryan was the "untermenschen" (subhuman) which included Slavs (Poles, Russians, Czechs) and Jews. Thus, in short order, the Nazis reduced all people into basic groups: superior, and inferior; Aryan, and subhuman. The Jew, of course, was at the bottom of the list of subhuman. Indeed, the Jew was the "eternal enemy" of the Aryan people.
Aryanization
This is the legal term given to the one-sided process by which German authorities expropriated Jewish businesses (and the businesses of other "enemies of the Reich") in Germany and in the occupied-territories. The expropriated businesses were handed over to German supervisors or commissioners. Oskar Schindler, upon his arrival in Krakow in 1939, obtained his enamel factory through this process of "Aryanization."
Auschwitz-Birkenau
This was the death camp located thirty-five miles west of Krakow which was the destination of a large number of Jews deported from the Krakow ghetto. In the summer of 1944, when Oskar Schindler arranged for his Jewish workers to be transferred to a new factory in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, 300 of the Schindlerfrauen (Schindler women) were mistakenly routed to Auschwitz-Birkenau (one account has it Gross-Rosen, another Nazi camp). The women were released when Schindler succeeded in bribing the camp's commandant.It is at Auschwitz-Birkenau that the Schindlerfrauen are herded into a shower where they fully expect to be gassed. Instead, water is emitted from the pipes. The Jews not selected for immediate extermination were forced to shower both upon arriving and departing Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Germans were terrified of typhus, which, ironically, was one of the few weapons the Jews possessed.
Authoritarianism
Believing in or characterized by unquestioning obedience to authority, as that of a dictator, rather than individual freedom of judgment and action. Nazi Germany was a "Fuehrer state" based upon the "Fuehrer principle," namely, that everything the "leader" said was an order to be fulfilled with the utmost sense of duty. In 1934, at the time the German president von Hindenburg died, Hitler ordered the armed forces to swear an oath of loyalty to himself personally. Many German soldiers felt bound to that oath, and thus a sense of honor bound them to a criminal regime.
Axis
Germany, Italy, and Japan, signatories to a pact signed in Berlin on September 27, 1940, to divide the world into their spheres of respective political interest. The three nations were later joined by Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. The term "axis" was derived from the 1937 propagandistic observation that the world revolved around the "axis" between Rome and Berlin. It is of note that Hitler declared war on America in fulfillment of his obligation to Imperial Japan.
Baum Gruppe (Herbert Baum Group)
Small, clandestine anti-Nazi organization founded in Berlin at the beginning of the Nazi regime by Herbert and Marianne Baum. It was composed of young people, primarily Jewish members of the Communist party, as well as a number of Zionists. Its activities centered around increasing education, political, and cultural awareness, but it also engaged in one act of spectacular sabotage: The bombing of an anti-Soviet exhibit in Berlin. Most of the members were denounced, tried, and executed between July 1942 and June 1943.
Belzec
This was the Nazi death camp located about one hundred and fifty miles east of Krakow. It is the graveyard of Galician Jewry. The early deportations of Jews from Krakow were sent to Belzec where they were gassed immediately. An estimated 600,000 Jews were murdered at Belzec between March 1942 and December 1942, a short but lethal period of time. Today the site of the former death camp at Belzec is a pine forest. There is no hint of its ignominious place in history, except for the bits of human skeletal remains everywhere to be seen.
Brunnlitz
Brunnlitz was the industrial town in German-occupied Czechoslovakia where Schindler relocated his Krakow factory in late 1944 as the Soviet Red Army advanced towards Krakow from the east. The weapons factory that Schindler established in Brunnlitz was a sub-camp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Labor camps exploiting Jewish and foreign labor like Brunnlitz were located throughout the Greater German Reich. Brunnlitz, under Schindler, was one of the few camps where Jews were not treated brutally.
Buchenwald
Located in Weimar, Germany, this was one of the first concentration camps to begin operation (1937). German and Austrian Jews and Gypsies arrived in 1938. Thousands of Jewish men were sent to Buchenwald at the time of Kristallnacht in November 1938. Before the United States Army liberated the camp in 1945, the prisoners had seized control of the camp. The Nobel Prize Laureate Eli Wiesel was liberated at Buchenwald, having survived Auschwitz-Birkenau beforehand.
Bystanders
Individuals, or governments, who were indifferent to the plight of the Jews, and other victims of the Nazis. Bystanders did not come to the aid of Jews and other persecuted groups. The great majority of the European populace were bystanders to the destruction of Jews.
Chelmno
This was the first death camp established by the Nazis. It opened on December 7, 1941, the same day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on the other side of the world. Chelmno is a village in western Poland. At Chelmno, the Nazis forced the Jews to strip in the confines of an old castle, herded them into large vans, murdered them by carbon monoxide, and dumped the bodies into pits dug in a nearby forest. The bodies were burned. From this initial death camp, the Nazis, by experimentation, developed more efficient and lethal death camps, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Jews were murdered by poisonous gas (Zyklon-B) that hitherto had been used to kill rodents. Only two Jews survived Chelmno.
Collaborators
The cooperation between the citizens of a country and its occupiers. There were Nazi collaborators in most of the countries occupied by the Nazis. The Germans relied heavily on foreign troops (Ukrainian, Bylorussian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, etc.) in the extermination campaign against the Jews. They did this for two reasons: 1) German soldiers were needed at the military front and could not be spared for Jewish Aktionen in the occupied territories; 2) the psychological consequences of murdering unarmed civilians were viewed as harmful to German personnel. In the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Krakow, the Nazis were assisted by Ukrainian and Lithuanian auxiliary troops who had been trained by the SS. Not infrequently, Polish police, known as the "blue police," assisted the Germans in the roundup of Jews. Collaboration was not the sole province of Eastern and Central Europe. The French police, for example, assisted the Nazis in rounding up the Jews in Paris in the summer of 1942. Finally, collaborators included Jewish informers and Jewish ghetto police who aided the Nazis in deporting their Jewish neighbors --hoping, in exchange, to save themselves and their families.
Concentration Camp
A prison where the Nazi regime sent people considered by them to be dangerous. Some concentration camps were "killing centers" that employed either carbon monixide or poison gas to systematically kill hundreds of thousands of people, the great majority of them Jews. Other prisoners were typically worked or starved to death. Persons held in the camps were political and religious dissidents, resistors, homosexuals, as well as racial and ethnic victims of the Nazi regime and its collaborators (see "victims"). Of the more than 100 camps that existed, the largest were Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Stutthof, Maidanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.
Conformity
Acting in accordance with popular opinion, rather than following the dictates of one's own conscience. It might be argued that the Nazi era was an act of mass conformity.
Dachau
The first concentration camp, opened in 1933 near Munich, Germany. An example of a camp that was not equipped for mass extermination program with poison gas, though many prisoners from all nations died of overwork, starvation and disease. In addition to Jews, a large number of Polish priests were murdered at Dachau. The camp was liberated by the U. S. Army in 1945. Today the camp is a museum.
Deportation
The forced relocation of Jews, Gypsies, some Poles , and resistance fighters from their homes to other localities, usually to ghettos or Nazi concentration camps and killing centers. The Nazis, who engaged in subterfuge at every turn, described these brutal deportations with the seemingly innocuous term "resettlement." The deportations were generally carried out by use of trains in which Jews were crammed into cattle cars. By the time the train arrived at the death camp, the journey had rendered the Jews almost eager for the next step, not knowing what that might be.
DEF (Deutsche Email Fabrik)
This is the name of the factory Schindler established in Krakow. The building still stands and houses yet another factory. When Schindler arrived in Krakow in September 1939, he purchased, at a very low price and by the process of "Aryanization," the old Jewish Rekord factory in a suburb of Krakow. With the benefit of Jewish capital, Jewish labor, and Jewish expertise, he reorganized the factory and began producing enamel bowls and other kitchenware for the German army. Schindler named his new business Deutsche Email Fabrik, or German Enamel Factory (DEF). It became the "haven" for an estimated 1,100 Krakow Jews. Schindler repeated a fortune from his factory, but later spent much of it bribing Nazi officials on behalf of the Jews.
Dissent
To differ in belief or opinion (especially from official government policy). The opposite of "dissent" is "conformity." Not infrequently the Nazi murderers explained their actions to postwar investigators by saying they did not want to appear "cowardly" in front of their comrades. Few expressed "dissent." The majority sought "conformity." Oskar Schindler, and other Righteous Gentiles, might be described as "dissenters." They broke with the norm. Eugenics and Population Biology Research Station(at the Reich Health
Office for Racial Hygiene and Population Biology
The department responsible for the racial and genealogical registration of Jews, gypsies and other targeted groups. The registration of individuals by religious and ethnic category eventually permitted the Nazi regime to conduct a campaign to "racially purify" Germany by segregating, sterilizing, deporting, and murdering members of these groups.
Einsatzgruppen
Mobile killing commando units which closely followed invading armies into the Soviet Union, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Their purpose was to immediately kill the Jewish population by shooting them or packing them into vans and gassing them. The four Einsatzgruppen teams worked in close cooperation with the German army, the Wehrmacht, which did not interfere in the least bit with the murderous activities in their vicinity. These units were responsible for two million deaths. Not infrequently, the commanders of Einsatzgruppen were educated, cultured people, including lawyers, professors and pastors. The murder tactics of the Einsatzgruppen initiated the pattern of mass murder that evolved into the stage marked by the death camps.
Euthanasia Program (the T4 program)
A Nazi government program created to kill mentally and physically handicapped Germans deemed "incurably sick." The program murdered 90,000 people and was eventually ended due to protests by religious leaders and victims' families. The T4 death technicians were later transferred to Poland where they continued to apply their techniques in the death camps. The euthanasia program was brought to a halt by public pressure, including protests from German religious leaders. The Nazis were very sensitive to public opinion. Hitler didn't want to have a problem on the home-front when he was fighting a war on several other fronts. It is also of note that the first people the Nazis murdered were Germans. Hitler viewed everything in terms of racial survival: If a German was not healthy, he or she was not "worthy of life."
The Final Solution
Euphemism used by the Nazis to describe their plan to exterminate all European Jews. The full name of the plan was "The Final Solution of the Jewish Question."
Genocide
The deliberate and total extermination of a culture. The Jews, and to some extent the Gypsies, were slated for genocide during the Nazi regime.
Gestapo
The secret political police in Nazi Germany created to eliminate political opposition. The Gestapo enforced Nazi rule through terror, arrest and torture.
Ghetto
Term used to describe the compulsory "Jewish Quarter" -- the poor sections of cities where Jews are forced to reside. During the Nazi occupation of Europe, the Jews were forced into ghettos as a centralizing point to facilitate later deportation to the death camps. The ghettoes were sealed by surrounding barbed wire or walls. Established mostly in eastern Europe, the ghettos were characterized by overcrowding, malnutrition, and heavy labor. All were eventually dissolved (or "liquidated") and the Jews murdered.
Goeth, Amon (pronounced Gert)
Like many of the Nazi criminals in Poland, Amon Goeth was Austrian. Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter, has written, "Austrians accounted for only eight per cent of the population of the Third Reich, yet Nazis from Austria were responsible for half of the murders of Jews committed under Hitler." Born in Vienna to a family long involved in book printing, Goeth joined the still clandestine Nazi party in 1930. The Austrian Nazi party was legalized in March 1938, when Hitler seized Austria in the bloodless Anschluss. Goeth joined the SS before the war. In March 1942, he played a leading role in the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Lublin, a city in eastern Poland, and in Tarnow, a small city east of Krakow. In Krakow, Goeth lent his considerable expertise to the liquidation of the ghetto in March 1943. He was also given command of the Plaszow labor camp outside Krakow. During the next year, Goeth ruled Plaszow and its Jewish prisoners as if it were a personal fiefdom. Helen Rosenzweig, one of Goeth's Jewish servants, said, "Physically he was a very large man. He decided who would live and who would die. There was a slap, a kick, a push. But I guess my time wasn't up. When he had guests I had to look pleasant or the beatings were limitless." "I knew Goeth," said Anna Duklauer Perl, a survivor with no connection to the book or movie. "One day he hung a friend of mine just because he had once been rich. He was the devil." After the war, Goeth was captured and returned to Poland for trial. He was hanged at Plaszow on September 13, 1946.
Gypsies
Collective term for the Romani and Sinti nomadic people originally from northwest India. Like the Jews, the gypsies were targeted for destruction.
Holocaust
The systematic, bureaucratic annihilation of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and their collaborators during World War II. Although Jews were the primary victims, up to one-half million Gypsies and at least 250,000 mentally or physically disabled persons were also victims of genocide. In addition, three million Soviet prisoners of war were killed because of their nationality. Poles, as well as other Slavs, were targeted for slave labor, and as a result ten of thousands perished. Homosexuals and others deemed "antisocial" were also persecuted and often murdered. In addition, thousands of political and religious dissidents such as communists, socialists, trade unionist, and Jehovah's Witnesses were persecuted for their beliefs and behavior and died as result of maltreatment.
Jew
A person whose religion is Judaism. The Jewish faith is not comprised of any one ethnic group, but rather has followers among all nationalities, races and ethnic groups. The principal difference between Jews and Christians is that Jews believe that the Messiah has yet to come; Christians believe that Christ, who was Jewish, was the Messiah.
Jewish Ghetto Police (OD)
In Poland, as in other occupied territories, the Nazis established Jewish police forces by which the they controlled the Jewish population in the ghettos. In Krakow, the Jewish police, armed with truncheons, assisted the Nazis in the liquidation of the ghetto. In the film Schindler's List, a young Jewish boy saves Mrs. Dresner. It is a touching scene, but it should be remembered that the little boy was in the service of the Nazis, and, although he saved one Jewish life, his efforts were mainly directed at rounding up Jews for their deportation to an unknown yet ominous destination.
Jewish Council (Judenrat)
In the cities and towns of the German-occupied territories, the Nazis established a Jewish Council or Judenrat (also known as "a council of Jewish elders"). The councils, often comprising prewar leaders of the Jewish community, transmitted German orders to the Jewish population. The role of the Jewish Councils is the subject of intense debate. On one hand, it is argued that the Jewish Councils abetted the destruction of Jews, while, on the other hand, it is argued that the Councils attempted to alleviate Jewish suffering in the period before the Jews understood that destruction was the German aim. Once the nature of the Nazis' genocidal plans became known, some Judenrat members believed that following German orders to deport some Jews (like the sick or elderly) was the best way to save the remnant of the Jewish population and, not least, themselves.
Killing Centers
Camps maintained to systematically kill Jews. Gas chambers were built especially for that use. There were five such camps, all in Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. Poland was the setting the Nazis chose for the Holocaust. Pope John Paul II, himself a Pole, has said, "The assassins did this on our land, perhaps to cover it with infamy. But no land can be covered in infamy."
Krakow (or Cracow)
This is the architectural gem of a city in southern Poland where Schindler lived between 1939 and 1944. The ancient seat of Polish kings, Krakow was designated the capital of Nazi-occupied Poland, the so-called "Generalgouvernement" which was the administrative unit comprising those parts of Poland not incorporated into the German Reich. When German troops attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, fifty-six thousand Jews lived in Krakow, equivalent to the entire Jewish population of Italy. This number swelled as refugees from the countryside sought safety in Krakow. The Jews of Krakow were deported to the death camps in a serious of brutal Aktionen. They had lived in Krakow for seven centuries, and many had become leaders in industry, the arts and science.
Kristallnacht (Crystal-Night)
The Night of Broken Glass - November 9-10, 1938. The night Nazi police and collaborators subjected Jews to an onslaught of anti-Semitic violence. Nazis vandalized and burned synagogues and Jewish business, and randomly terrorized Jews. This macabre event made it very clear that there would be no future for Jews in Nazi Germany. The following day, the streets of Germany were littered with the glass from the broken windows of Jewish stores. This broken glass gave the pogrom its name: Kristallnacht, or Night of the Broken Glass.
Nazism
The political doctrine of the Nazi party. Nazism advocated anti-Semitism, racism, militarism, one-party rule, anticommunism and a rigid authoritarian dictatorship.
Nazi Party (NSDAP, or National Socialist German Workers' Party)
After the German defeat in the First World War, the embittered ex-soldier Adolf Hitler joined the NSDAP in Munich, Germany. Hitler quickly took over the Nazi Party and, abetted by the economic dislocation and frustrations of the world depression, the Nazis won the largest number of votes of any political party in Germany in the elections of 1932. On this basis, the aged Reichspresident, Hindenburg, appointed Hitler chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. The Nazis, whose obscure birthplace was a smoke filled beer hall in Munich, took over the reins of the potentially most powerful nation in Europe. The precepts of the Nazi party: the superiority of the German people; German domination of Europe; the extermination of inferior peoples, particularly the Jews, who were characterized as the archenemy of the German people. Like many Germans, Schindler joined the Nazi party both for reasons of opportunity (one simply could not advance in Nazi Germany without being a member of the party) and for reasons of nationalism, or German patriotism. Although he apparently was appalled by the early Nazi atrocities in the Sudetenland, in Czechoslovakia in 1938, there is no reason to believe that Schindler disagreed with the national goals of the Nazis, particularly the subjugation of Poland. As the author Keneally writes, probably quite rightly, Schindler approved "of the national business, though he did not like the management."
Nuremberg Trials
Trials of Nazi war criminals conducted by former military opponents of Germany after World War II. The trials resulted in several executions and prison sentences, though thousands of Nazi war criminals escaped prosecution. Testimony at the trials gave wide publicity to the Nazi policy of mass murder.
Occupied-Territories
Those nations overrun and occupied by the Nazi government. This included most of Europe between 1939 and 1945. Britain, however, resisted German air raids in 1940-41 which were intended to break British resolve. They did not, and Britain avoided an invasion. Hitler turned his attention to the Soviet Union, which he invaded on June 22, 1941. The brutal policies typical of the Nazis were more severe in Eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union, and in Yugoslavia than they were in Western Europe. The Nazis felt a racial affinity for the people of Western Europe and only contempt for the people of the East.
Peer pressure
Social pressure to conform to the beliefs and behaviors exerted by those people of about the same age, status, etc.
Perpetrators
In the Holocaust, those persons, agencies, or governments who assist in or gain from the persecution of others.
Prejudice
A negative, inflexible attitude toward a group (ethnic or religious) impervious to evidence or contrary argument. In most cases racial prejudice is founded on suspicions, ignorance, and irrational hatred of other races, religions or nationalities.
Plaszow
On March 13, 1943, after three years of various Aktionen, the Nazis launched the final liquidation of the Krakow ghetto. Yet many Jews were "essential workers" engaged in war production, such as the Jews who worked in Schindler's enamel factory, and for these remaining Jews a labor camp had been established in the Krakow suburb of Plaszow, on the site of two Jewish cemeteries and beside a quarry. This camp was commanded by the Viennese SS officer Amon Goeth, a sadist whom Schindler befriended and in whose villa overlooking the camp Schindler often stayed following drunken and lust-filled parties. The setting at Plaszow was macabre: Jewish gravestones had been uprooted by the Nazis and laid out as pavement stones. The stones remain at Plaszow today, and apparently for this reason Jewish representatives prohibited Stephen Spielberg from filming at the original camp. Spielberg was also prohibited from filming at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the film, the scene at Auschwitz-Birkenau is actually outside of the original camp, with the original camp in the background. The Jewish slaves in Plaszow worked in nearby factories run by Germans. Though they were treated brutally, Plaszow was not a death camp on the model of Auschwitz-Birkenau or Belzec where the gassing was immediate. Plaszow was typical of the thousands of little work camps that were to be found outside of virtually every city and village in every corner of the Third Reich.
Racism
The belief that a racial group is inferior because of biological or cultural traits.