Glossary
Anschluss
The union of Germany and Austria in March 1938. A few weeks later, in April, a plebiscite was held to secure public endorsement. The results of this vote were interfered with to ultimately indicate 99% of the population approved of the union.
Antisemitism
Prejudice towards or hatred of Jewish people. The history of anti-Jewish sentiment stretches so far back in time – to the early Christian era – that it has been termed the ‘longest hatred’. In the nineteenth century, traditional anti-Jewish prejudice fused with new ideas and trends to produce modern antisemitism: the notion that Jews were different and inferior on account of their race.
‘Aryan’
Term originally applied to speakers of Indo-European languages. The Nazis and other racists used it to describe people of white European origin, especially northern Europeans who were believed to have been responsible for the great achievements of European civilization and thus superior to all other ‘races’. Such ideas were not introduced by the Nazis but rather originated in the late nineteenth century.
Ashkenazi
Term originally applied to the Jews of Germany. Following the migration of German Jews to countries such as Poland in the Middle Ages, the majority of Ashkenazim lived in eastern Europe.
Auschwitz-Birkenau
Concentration and extermination camp in the Polish town of Oświęcim. Created as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners in 1940, it became an extermination camp in early 1942. Eventually, it consisted of three main sections: Auschwitz I, the concentration camp; Auschwitz II (Birkenau), an extermination and slave labour camp; Auschwitz III (Monowitz), a slave labour camp. Auschwitz also had numerous sub-camps. More than 1.1 million people lost their lives in Auschwitz-Birkenau, including approximately 1 million Jews, 75,000 Poles, 21,000 Sinti and Roma, and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war.
Concentration camp
Prison camp in which inmates were forced to undertake hard labour. The first Nazi concentration camps, with the exception of Dachau (created March 1933), were generally small and temporary. From 1936 onwards larger camps such as Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Mauthausen were established, usually linked to economic enterprises run by the SS. Most inmates were political opponents of the Nazis or so-called ‘asocials’ (such as gay men, beggars and habitual criminals). Although more than 30,000 Jews were held in camps after Kristallnacht in 1938, the camps in Germany and Austria (unlike those in Poland) had a limited role in the Holocaust until late 1944 when they began to receive tens of thousands of prisoners evacuated from the East, causing catastrophic conditions in which huge numbers of Jews and others died.
Eugenics
Term derived from ancient Greek (meaning ‘good birth’), first coined by the British scientist Francis Galton. As an idea, eugenics was influenced by other trends in social and scientific thought in the late nineteenth century, including Social Darwinism, which applied Darwin’s idea of ‘survival of the fittest’ to the human world. In order to combat ‘degeneration’, eugenicists aimed to improve the health and well-being of the population through ‘positive’ measures, such as providing financial incentives to couples seen to be of ‘good’ racial stock, and, often, ‘negative’ policies like sterilization. Eugenics became an international movement (for example, University College London had a chair in eugenics) which acquired different characteristics from country to country. In Germany, eugenics developed into Rassenhygiene – ‘racial hygiene’.
Euthanasia
Term normally used to describe a painless, voluntary death for the terminally ill. The Nazis used the term for the programme of state-sponsored murder of around 200,000 people with mental and physical disabilities in Germany and Austria. The Nazis also murdered an unknown number of disabled people in Poland during the war.
Extermination camp
Nazi camp for the mass murder of Jews, primarily by poison gas. Four camps were created in Poland in 1941-42 which existed solely for the murder of Jews: Bełżec, Chełmno, Sobibór and Treblinka. Almost every person brought to these camps was murdered immediately: only a small number of Jews from each transport were selected to work in the camp (e.g. sorting the property of victims, disposing of the bodies) and most of them were soon murdered. In addition, the already existing Auschwitz-Birkenau camp became an extermination camp in spring 1942. Because Birkenau was also a slave labour camp, larger numbers of Jews were selected to work, giving them a slightly higher chance of survival. A number of other camps, notably Majdanek, have sometimes also been described as extermination camps.
General Government
Political unit, essentially a German colony, created in 1939 by the Nazis from those areas of Poland which were not directly incorporated into Germany or the Soviet Union. It included many of Poland’s major Jewish communities such as Warsaw, Kraków and Lublin.
Genocide
Term first coined in World War II by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to describe the deliberate and systematic destruction of a religious, racial, national or cultural group. In 1948 the United Nations introduced the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This established genocide as a crime which members were obliged to act against.
‘Germanisation’
Policy pursued by the Nazis in occupied Poland and, to some extent, the Soviet Union and the Czech lands which sought to make these territories ethnically German. This took the form of the expulsion of many local inhabitants and the settling of ethnic Germans as well as the ‘reclaiming’ (i.e. abduction from their families) of children considered to potentially have German blood (e.g. those with German surnames or blonde hair).
Ghetto
Section of a town or city where Jews were forced to live. Ghettos had existed in many parts of Europe in the Medieval and the Early Modern periods. They were revived by the Germans following the invasion of Poland: the first Nazi ghetto was created in Piotrków Trybunalski in October 1939. More ghettos were established in 1940 although widespread ghettoisation only began in 1941. Ghettos were also created in the Soviet Union from late 1941 onwards, usually for Jews of working age who had survived the Einsatzgruppen massacres. Many, though not all, ghettos were ‘closed’, i.e. surrounded by walls with exit forbidden. Ghettos were characterised by overcrowding, hunger, disease and exploitation for slave labour. All were eventually liquidated with the Jews deported to extermination camps or shot.
‘Gypsies’
Commonly used term, often considered pejorative, to describe the Romani people, an ethnic group who trace their origins to northern India. Although Romani are stereotypically seen as nomadic, many ‘Gypsies’ lived in settled communities. The principal Romani groups were Roma and Sinti. The Nazis regarded ‘Gypsies’ as racially inferior and a danger to ‘Aryan’ society. Although policy varied from country to country, around 220,000 Roma and Sinti were murdered.
Holocaust
Literally ‘completely burnt sacrifice’ (Greek). Term most commonly used to describe the mass murder of approximately 6 million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators. Although other groups were victims of Nazi persecution and genocide, only Jews were targeted for complete destruction. Thus, when used by historians, the term refers specifically to the murder of Europe’s Jews rather than to Nazi persecution in general.
Nuremberg Laws
Two anti-Jewish laws enacted in September 1935 during the Nazi Party conference in Nuremberg which provided the basis for removing Jews from all spheres of German life. The Reich Citizenship Law effectively deprived Jews of German citizenship and associated rights. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour outlawed marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews as well as prohibiting Jews from employing non-Jewish female servants of childbearing age and displaying the German flag. Supplementary laws defined who was a Jew, with a range of categories created for Germans of mixed ancestry. The laws were also applied to German Sinti and Roma.
Operation Barbarossa
Code name for the German invasion of the Soviet Union which began on 22nd June 1941.
Persecution
The oppression, harassment or maltreatment of a person or group.
Porrajmos
Also spelled ‘Porajmos’. A Romani term meaning ‘devouring’ used by ‘gypsies’ to describe the murder of Roma and Sinti during the Second World War.
‘Racial science’
A phrase generally used to refer to the fusion of racial thought and supposed scientific rationality or practice. The term could be used to refer to thinking about race in a wide range of different disciplinary contexts – from anthropology and biology to sociology and psychology.
Sephardi
Term used to describe Jews of Spanish and Portuguese origin. Following their expulsion from Spain in 1492, Jews mainly settled in the Ottoman empire at the invitation of the Sultan.
Shoah
Literally ‘catastrophe’ (Hebrew). A term for the Holocaust preferred by many Jews.
Shtetl (plural: shtetlach)
A Yiddish word typically used to describe a small town in eastern Europe with a majority Jewish population. Before 1939 there were thousands of shtetlach across Poland, the Baltic States, the western Soviet Union, and Transylvania.
SS
Nazi Party organisation which was originally created as Hitler’s bodyguard. Under the leadership of Himmler, the SS grew to become a ‘state within a state’ which controlled the concentration camps and racial policy, ran its own businesses and had its own armed forces.
Star of David
A traditional symbol of the Jewish people, used by the Nazis and others as a method of identifying and discriminating against Jews, beginning with Poland in 1939. Depending on the country, it took the form of an armband or a badge.
T4
Code name for the operation (approved by Hitler in October 1939) in which 70,000 German and Austrian adults with disabilities were murdered in gas chambers at six killing centres, mostly former hospitals, between 1939 and 1941. Officially ended in August 1941, partly because of public protests, although killings of disabled people continued by other means to the end of the war. Many T4 staff were transferred to Poland to run the Aktion Reinhard extermination camps.