See Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933–2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Deportation: Deportation was an integral mechanism in the implementation of the “Final Solution.” In this volume, the word has two contexts. First, it was the process of uprooting individuals, most notably Jews, from their home communities and transporting them to ghettos, camps, or extermination centers in the East. Second, deportation was a method of transferring Jews from ghettoized communities, such as the Warsaw and Łódź ghettos, to killing centers for “liquidation.”
Der Stürmer: see Julius Streicher.
Deutsches Jungvolk: see Hitler Youth.
Displaced persons (DPs) and Displaced persons camps: At the end of World War II in Europe, some 7 to 9 million people had been displaced by the conflict. This number included 2 to 3 million former camp inmates—Jews and non-Jews—who had survived concentration and forced labor camps, killing centers, and forced death marches into the German interior in the last months of the war. By the end of 1945, more than 6 million individuals had returned to their countries of origin or succeeded in immigrating to other countries. Remaining behind were some 2 million refugees and displaced persons, among them 250,000 Jews. In order to deal with the massive postwar refugee crisis, a series of DP camps were established in Allied zones throughout Germany and Austria and in occupied areas of Italy. Originally run by Allied authorities within their zones of occupation, responsibility for the camps eventually devolved to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
See Angelika Königseder and Juliane Wetzel, Waiting for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post–World War II Germany, trans. John Broadwin (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001); Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees from the First World War through the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
Drancy: Located 20 kilometers (almost 12.5 miles) southeast of Paris, a former housing complex served as a transit and internment camp for the German occupiers and their French collaborators after the invasion of France in May 1940. On August 21, 1941, Drancy became an internment camp for Jews. Although SS captain Theodor Dannecker, leader of the Judenreferat in Paris and Adolf Eichmann’s representative in France, had ultimate authority over the camp (he was succeeded by Heinz Röthke as of July 1942), its direct administration was originally entrusted to French officials. The first deportation left Drancy on March 27, 1942. Of a total seventy-five thousand Jews deported from French soil, predominantly to Auschwitz and Sobibór, some sixty-five thousand passed through Drancy.
See Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II (Hanover, NH : University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2001).
Eichmann, Adolf (1906–1962): Raised in the Austrian city of Linz, Adolf Eichmann joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932 in Austria before moving to Germany, where he joined Reinhard Heydrich’s Security Service. Following the Anschluss of Austria, Eichmann began to serve a key function among German officials as an expert for “Jewish affairs.” With the coming of war, he became one of the chief agents of Nazi anti-Jewish policy and played a pivotal role in the deportation of European Jews to the killing centers of the “Final Solution.” In hiding after the war, he was abducted by the Israeli secret service in Argentina in May 1960 and put on trial in Jerusalem. Sentenced to death by the court, he was hanged in June 1962.
See Hans Safrian, Eichmann’s Men, trans. Uta Stargardt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2010).
Eichmann Trial: The trial of Adolf Eichmann began on April 10, 1961, following his arrest in Argentina in May 1960. Israeli officials brought Eichmann to trial on the basis of Israel’s Nazi and Nazi Collaborators’ Punishment Law of 1950. Eichmann was found guilty and sentenced to death on December 11, 1961. Hanged on May 31, 1962, Eichmann remains the only person executed by the state of Israel. Prime Minister David Ben Gurion expressed the wish that the televised trial might educate audiences concerning the genocide of European Jewry. The depositions of survivors at the trial have contributed greatly to the wealth of eyewitness testimony concerning the Holocaust.
See State of Israel Ministry of Justice, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings of the District Court of Jerusalem, 9 vols. (Jerusalem: Trust for the Publication of the Proceedings of the Eichmann Trial in cooperation with the Israel State Archives and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, 1992–1995).
Einsatzgruppen (literally, “task forces”): In the context of the Holocaust, this word refers to mobile killing units composed primarily of German SS and police personnel operating in Soviet territory. Under the command of the German Security Police and Security Service, the Einsatzgruppen had among their tasks the murder of perceived racial or political enemies found behind German combat lines in the occupied Soviet Union. Many scholars believe that the systematic killing of Jews by these forces represented the first step of the “Final Solution.” During the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen followed the German army into Soviet territory, carrying out mass killing operations, often with the aid of indigenous auxiliary support. By the spring of 1943, the Einsatzgruppen and Order Police battalions had killed over 1 million Soviet Jews and tens of thousands of Soviet political commissars, partisans, Roma, and institutionalized disabled patients.
See Christopher Browning with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Ronald Headland, Messages of Murder: A Study of the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Service, 1941–1943 (London: Associated University Presses, 1992).
Einzelaktion: This was an individual or spontaneous action against Jews.
Eugenics (also racial hygiene): Together with virulent antisemitism, eugenics, or racial hygiene, formed a governing tenet in the development of Nazi ideology and helped to inspire some of the Nazi regime’s most radical and deadly policies. An international movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it endorsed “selective breeding” as a way to build a better society. Eugenicists sought to define “valuable” members of their community and encourage them to reproduce. They also aimed to discourage society’s “unworthy” from reproducing, often through proposed voluntary or compulsory sterilization measures. Many eugenicists concerned themselves with the “problem” of the mixing of races. Finally, eugenicists wished to divert vital resources from the “unworthy” to society’s “valuable” members. During the era of the Third Reich, Nazi authorities implemented policies that applied the concepts of racial hygiene in its most concrete and radical forms. In 1933, Adolf Hitler’s cabinet promulgated the Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases, which mandated the compulsory sterilization of four hundred thousand “hereditarily ill” Germans. With the coming of war, German authorities inaugurated a clandestine “euthanasia,” or T4, program which claimed the lives of some two hundred thousand mentally and physically disabled patients during the war years. Finally, the genocide of 6 million European Jews and hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) may be interpreted as the Nazis’ most radical application of racial hygiene.
See Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
“Euthanasia” program (Operation T4): “Euthanasia” was a euphemism for the National Socialist state’s first program of mass murder, a radical eugenic measure targeting disabled children and disabled adult patients living in institutional settings in Germany and Germ
an-annexed territories. In the autumn of 1939, Adolf Hitler signed an authorization vesting Philipp Bouhler, director of the Führer Chancellery, and Karl Brandt, Hitler’s attending physician, to spearhead the killing operation. Bouhler and Brandt initiated a child “euthanasia” program through which at least five thousand physically and mentally disabled children were murdered during the war years. By 1940, Brandt and Bouhler had commenced an adult killing campaign known as Operation T4 (Aktion T4). At least 70,273 institutionalized mentally and physically disabled adults were murdered at the “euthanasia” gassing installations between January 1940 and August 1941. In August 1941 Hitler ordered a halt to the adult “euthanasia” gassing measure. At this time, many T4 functionaries were recruited as German personnel for the Operation Reinhard extermination camps of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. In the summer of 1942, the adult “euthanasia” killing program resumed in a decentralized format. In all, historians estimate that some two hundred thousand institutionalized mentally and physically disabled people were murdered as a result of Operation T4 and its corollary programs between 1939 and 1945.
See Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
Fort IX: Located outside the city of Kovno (today Kaunas) in Lithuania, Fort IX served as the primary killing site for the Jews of the Kovno ghetto and for Jews deported from western Europe to Kovno during the German occupation from 1941 to 1944. The largest mass shooting at Fort IX took place on October 28 and 29, 1941, during the Grosse Aktion in the Kovno ghetto, which claimed the lives of ninety-two hundred Jews.
See U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1997).
Frank, Anne (1929–1945): Annelies Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on June 12, 1929, the second daughter of businessman Otto Frank and his wife, Edith. Upon Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, the Franks fled to Amsterdam in order to evade the Nazis’ anti-Jewish measures; when German troops invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, the family again faced Nazi persecution. On July 5, 1942, Anne’s sister, Margot, was summoned for deportation; on the following day, the family went into hiding in an annex attached to Otto Frank’s office building. During their time in hiding, Anne kept a diary, detailing the events that took place in the “secret annex.” On August 4, 1944, the Franks’ hiding place was discovered. The inhabitants of the annex were transferred to Westerbork and on September 3 to Auschwitz. Sometime the following month, Anne and her sister Margot arrived at Bergen Belsen, where both succumbed to typhus in late February or early March 1945. Otto Frank, the sole survivor of the group, returned to Amsterdam in the summer of 1945, where he recovered Anne’s journal. Published in English in 1952, the work has become one of the world’s most widely read books and transformed its author into a symbol of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust.
See Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition, eds. David Barouw and Gerrold van der Stroom, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans, B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday, and Susan Massotty (New York: Doubleday, 2001).
Frank, Hans (1900–1946): Receiving his law degree in 1926, Hans Frank became an early legal adviser for the fledgling Nazi Party and founded the National Socialists’ Lawyers League (NS-Rechtswahrerbund) in 1928. In October 1939, Adolf Hitler appointed Frank to administer the Generalgouvernement (General Government), the unincorporated portion of German-controlled Poland. In his role as the powerful chief civilian administrator of this region, Frank issued persecutory decrees for the region’s Polish and Jewish populations and ordered forced labor for its residents. In the immediate postwar, the International Military Tribunal found Frank guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the trial of the major Nazi criminals at Nuremberg and sentenced him to death. Frank was hanged on October 16, 1946.
See Chris Klessman, “Hans Frank: Party Jurist and Governor General of Poland,” in The Brown Elite, ed. Ronald Smelser and Rainer Zitelmann, trans. Mary Fischer (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 39–47.
Freiberg, Berel Dov (also Fraiberg, 1927–): Born in 1927, Berel Dov Freiberg was one of the very few youngsters to survive the Sobibór killing center. In 1942, he and other family members escaped the Warsaw ghetto but were caught in a roundup near Lublin in eastern Poland. Freiberg was deported to Sobibór in May 1942, aged fourteen. Surviving as a member of a Sonderkommando unit, he participated in the Sobibór Uprising on October 14, 1943, and was one of nearly seventy Sobibór prisoners to survive the war. The only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, Freiberg emigrated to Israel, where he testified at the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem in 1961.
See Dov Freiberg, To Survive Sobibor (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2007).
Gas van: Shooting was the most common form of killing used by the Einsatzgruppen. Yet, in the late summer of 1941, Heinrich Himmler requested that a more convenient mode of killing be developed. The result was the gas van, a mobile gas chamber mounted on the chassis of a cargo truck that employed carbon monoxide from the truck’s exhaust to kill its victims. Gas vans made their first appearance on the eastern front in the late fall of 1941 and were eventually utilized, along with shooting, to murder Jews and other targets in most areas where the Einsatzgruppen operated. They were also employed at Chełmno, the first extermination center of the “Final Solution.”
See Mathias Beer, “Die Entwicklung der Gaswagen beim Mord an den Juden,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 35 (1987): 403–417.
Gauleiter: Resulting from the stratification of the Nazi Party after 1925, a man serving as Gauleiter acted as the regional party head in a Gau, or region, and maintained a strong personal connection to Adolf Hitler in his capacity as Party leader. In acting as a kind of regional governor, the Gauleiter’s functions as a Party official increasingly became intertwined with state functions at the regional level.
Gehsperre: In early September 1942, German officials announced an Allgemeine Gehsperre (general curfew) in the Łódź ghetto. From September 5 to 12, 1942, German forces brutally seized all those unfit for labor for deportation. Ghetto elder Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski had famously pled with ghetto inhabitants to “give me your children” to fill the German-imposed quota, thereby averting a communitywide deportation. Approximately 15,500 individuals were transported to their deaths at Chełmno; the vast majority of these victims were young children and adults over the age of sixty-five.
See Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, ed. and trans. Robert Moses Shapiro (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006).
Geltungsjude: A term used based on the First Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law of November 14, 1935, to describe a “Mischling” of the first degree (with two Jewish grandparents) who was legally treated as a “full Jew” based on his/her marriage to a Jewish spouse or practice of the Jewish faith.
See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).
Generalgouvernement (General Government): The Generalgouvernement was the unincorporated portion of German-occupied Poland, governed by the civil administration of Governor General Hans Frank. After the German invasion and defeat of Poland in the autumn of 1939, Adolf Hitler ordered the creation of the General Government as a territory in which to concentrate Jews and other undesirable racial elements resettled from the Polish territories incorporated into the Reich, including Danzig, West Prussia, Eastern Upper Silesia, and Posen (Pozna´n).
Germanization: Implemented under the rubric of such efforts as the Generalplan Ost (General Plan East), Germanization aimed to homogenize ethnically the eastern annexed and occupied territories with Germans by deporting or killing the local Slavic and Jewish populations, settling Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) in their place, and allowing a small proportion of the local population to remain as forced laborers. Implementing German
ization involved multiple agencies, including the Reich Security Main Office, the Race and Settlement Main Office, and the office of the Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums, or RKFDV).
See Isabel Heinemann, “Rasse, Siedlung, Deutsches Blut”: Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003).
Gestapo (acronym for Geheime Staatspolizei, or Secret State Police): As the chief executive agency charged with fighting internal “enemies of the state,” the Gestapo functioned as the Third Reich’s main surveillance and terror instrument, first within Germany and later in the territories occupied by Germany. After 1933, the Gestapo became part of a complex apparatus of state and party police agencies and maintained special administrative offices to supervise anti-Jewish policies. After 1934, the Gestapo was placed under SS chief Heinrich Himmler, then became part of Reinhard Heydrich’s Security Police apparatus in mid-1936; in September 1939 the Gestapo was merged with the Security Service (SD) into the Reich Security Main Office.
See George C. Browder, Foundations of the Nazi Police State: The Formation of Sipo and SD (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1990).
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