Goebbels, Josef (1897–1945): Serving from 1926 as Gauleiter of Berlin, Josef Goebbels became the architect of the Nazi propaganda machine, with its radical antisemitism and mystification of Adolf Hitler as Führer. In March 1933, Hitler appointed him Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda). Goebbels also directed the policies of the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer), particularly in matters of race, and played a key role in the instigation of Kristallnacht and subsequent anti-Jewish measures, including the deportation of Jews from Berlin to ghettos, concentration camps, and extermination centers.
See Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006).
Göring, Hermann (1893–1946): A World War I flight commander and participant in the 1923 Nazi putsch attempt in Munich, Hermann Göring provided an important link for Adolf Hitler’s movement with Germany’s conservative elite. Göring amassed an array of functions, particularly in the area of rearmament and economic policy; for instance, he was named Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan in October 1936 and Hitler’s official successor in September 1939. In 1941, Göring charged Reinhard Heydrich with development of a “total solution to the Jewish Question.” The highest-ranking Nazi in the dock at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Göring was convicted and sentenced to death in 1946.
See Richard J. Overy, Göring: The “Iron Man” (London: Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1984).
Gymnasium: This is a German school providing secondary education in preparation for college study, much like college-preparatory high schools in the United States.
Hereditary Health Law (Erbgesundheitsgesetz): see Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases.
Heydrich, Reinhard (1904–1942): After his dismissal from the German navy in 1931, Reinhard Heydrich received a commission from SS chief Heinrich Himmler to create a secret service for the Nazi Party, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), or Security Service, which Heydrich headed until his death. In 1936, he became head of the Security Police main office that combined the Gestapo and the Criminal Police. The Security Police, together with the SD, increasingly controlled the Third Reich’s anti-Jewish policy. In the autumn of 1939, Heydrich merged the two agencies into the newly created Reich Security Main Office, which became the single most important agency for the implementation of the Holocaust through deportation, and mass murder. Attempting to bring the “Final Solution” under his closer control, Heydrich invited leading officials from state and party agencies to the Wannsee Conference held on January 20, 1942. Heydrich died as the result of an assassination attempt by Czechoslovak partisans in Prague; as a reprisal for his death, the Czech city of Lidice was destroyed and its inhabitants murdered or deported to concentration camps.
See Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002).
Himmler, Heinrich (1900–1945): An early Nazi Party member and a participant in the November 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, Heinrich Himmler was appointed by Adolf Hitler in early 1929 to become the leader of the SS (Reichsführer SS) . After 1933, Himmler advanced rapidly from his initially small power base in Bavaria as police president in Munich to become head of the Gestapo in Prussia in 1934 and chief of the German police in mid-1936. During the war, Himmler further expanded his SS and police apparatus to uphold Nazi control in the Reich and in German-controlled countries and to play the key role in executing the genocide of European Jewry.
See Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).
Hirsch, Fredy (Alfred) (1916–1944): Aboard one of the first transports to Theresienstadt in the winter of 1941, popular Jewish youth leader Fredy Hirsch became deputy director for youth services in the ghetto. In September 1943, Hirsch was deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz and absorbed into the Theresienstadt family camp in Birkenau. There, Hirsch and a staff of counselors and teachers organized educational and social activities for the camp’s youngsters and sought to improve their physical welfare. On March 8, 1944, the family camp was liquidated, and most of the children, along with their family members and teachers, were murdered. On March 7, Hirsch apparently committed suicide in his quarters.
See Nili Keren, “The Family Camp,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994), 428–40.
Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend): In July 1926, this official youth organization of the Nazi Party was officially incorporated into the SA. Following the Nazi assumption of power, Baldur von Schirach assumed the leadership of the Hitlerjugend, organizing a general membership of boys from fourteen to eighteen and a corresponding junior branch, the German Young Volk (Deutsches Jungvolk, or Pimpfe). Hitler Youth members received both physical and paramilitary training and ideological indoctrination. On December 1, 1936, the Law Concerning the Hitler Youth (Gesetz über die Hitlerjugend) called for the assimilation of all German youth into the appropriate youth organizations and made membership obligatory.
Horthy, Miklós (1868–1957): In 1920, Miklós Horthy was declared regent and head of the Hungarian state, a position he held until October 1944. A political conservative, Horthy forged an alliance with Nazi Germany in an effort to regain Hungarian crown lands ceded following World War I. The Horthy regime imposed harsh antisemitic measures against Hungarian Jews beginning in 1938. German troops moved to occupy Hungary on March 19, 1944, and began to deport Hungarian Jews in May of that year. Faced with a worsening military situation, Horthy called a halt to these deportations on July 7, 1944. When Horthy negotiated with Soviet authorities and prepared to announce an armistice, German officials arrested him on October 15, 1944, and installed a new government under the fascist and radically antisemitic Arrow Cross. Following Hungarian defeat and his release by the Allies, Horthy emigrated to Portugal, where he died in 1957.
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC): This humanitarian organization was begun in the mid-nineteenth century to aid victims of international conflict. The ICRC has often been criticized for failing to make the rescue of Jews and political victims of Nazi persecution a priority during the war years. Under pressure from Danish authorities, German officials allowed a rare and highly choreographed visit of ICRC representatives to a sanitized Theresienstadt in June 1944.
See Jean-Claude Favez, The Red Cross and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Jewish Badge (also Jewish Star or Yellow Star): One of the most ubiquitous antisemitic measures employed in German- and Axis-controlled Europe was the mandatory wearing of the Jewish badge. The effort to impose a distinctive mark on the Jewish population marginalized Jews and rendered them more vulnerable to official and spontaneous discriminatory actions. Hans Frank issued the first decree imposing the Jewish badge in occupied Poland in November 1939, ordering all Jews over the age of twelve living in the General Government to wear an armband affixed with a blue Jewish star on the right sleeve of their outer garment. Similar regulations, with various discrepancies regarding the badge’s appearance and the age of the wearer, were enacted in other districts of Poland and in areas occupied by German forces following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. German Jews were forced to wear the Jewish badge on September 15, 1941, shortly before the first deportations of Jews from the Reich. Legislation mandating the Jewish badge was soon adopted in western lands occupied by Germany and in German satellite states.
See Diemut Majer, “Non-Germans under the Third Reich”: The Nazi Judicial and Administrative System in Germany and Occupied Eastern Europe, with Special Regard to Occupied Poland, 1939–1945, trans. Peter Thomas Hill, Edward Vance Humphrey, and Brian Levin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum, 2003).
Jewish Order Service (also Jewish Order Police): This refers to the Jewish police force in the ghettos of eastern Europe created by local Jewish Councils on the order of the German authorities to police the ghettos and enforce German commands and decrees. When deportations began and German authorities compelled the Jewish Order Police to assist in the operations, aversion to the Jewish Order Police among ghetto residents turned to hostility and fanned resistance among underground organizations.
Judenrat (Jewish Council; pl.: Judenräte): During World War II, German authorities established Jewish Councils among Jewish communities in areas under their jurisdiction. These Jewish municipal administrations were required to ensure that Nazi orders and regulations were implemented. In ghettoized communities, Jewish Councils also worked to provide community services for their incarcerated population. Used as a tool to implement Nazi anti-Jewish policy, Jewish Councils often incurred the distrust and odium of their communities, and they remain a controversial feature of the Holocaust among survivors and postwar scholars.
See Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (New York: Macmillan, 1972).
Kapo (also capo): In the Nazi concentration camp system, Kapos were prisoner functionaries selected by, and under the command of, the SS Kommandoführer. Most often chosen from among the criminal and political prisoner population in the camps, Kapos oversaw the work production of their units, accounted for the prisoners under their supervision, and distributed punishment to those under their command. In the latter capacity, many Kapos earned a reputation for extreme cruelty and mistreatment of other prisoners.
Kibbutz (Hebrew: “gathering”): In the early twentieth century, the kibbutz was a form of collective settlement instigated by the Zionist movement in Palestine and based on ideas about shared forms of production, education, and ownership popular among reformist circles since the late nineteenth century.
See Michael Brenner, Zionism: A Brief History (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2003).
Kinderaktion (children’s action): This refers to the roundup and deportation of children from a ghetto or concentration camp. Because very young children were not usually utilized for forced labor, Nazi authorities viewed them as “useless eaters” and targeted them for early deportation measures. A large percentage of the 15,500 people deported during the Gehsperre from the Łódź ghetto to Chełmno in September 1942 were children under the age of ten. Children figured as a large proportion of victims in the Dünamünde Aktion, in which thirty-eight hundred Jews from the Riga ghetto were massacred in March 1942. In addition, children’s actions took place in Kovno on March 27 and 28, 1944, and in the context of the first great deportation from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka in July 1942.
Kinderblock (Children’s Block, Auschwitz)): In the brief months of its existence, the Theresienstadt family camp at Birkenau was a haven for children who might otherwise have been murdered directly upon arrival at Auschwitz. Fredy Hirsch, earlier deputy director for youth services in the Theresienstadt ghetto, arranged with Birkenau camp officials to create a separate children’s block (Block 31) where youngsters might receive educational instruction, engage in structured play, and obtain more appropriate and nutritious meals. The Kinderblock was dissolved with the liquidation of the Theresienstadt family camp in early July 1944.
See Nili Keren, “The Family Camp,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994), 428–40.
Kindertransport (children’s transport): Following Kristallnacht, the British government agreed to permit an unspecified number of children under the age of seventeen to enter Great Britain from Germany and German-annexed territories. Private citizens or organizations had to guarantee to pay for each child’s care, education, and eventual emigration from Britain. The first Kindertransport arrived in Harwich, Great Britain, on December 2, 1938, bringing some two hundred children; the very last Kindertransport sailed from the Netherlands for Britain on May 14, 1940, the day on which the Dutch army surrendered to German forces. In all, the rescue operation brought about nine to ten thousand children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland to Great Britain.
See Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
Korczak, Janusz (1878–1942): This was the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit, an eminent Polish pediatrician, pedagogue, and children’s author, born in Warsaw on July 22, 1878. In 1911, Korczak came to direct the Dom Seriot orphanage, which incorporated his innovative approaches to child care. Over the course of his career, he founded Poland’s first national children’s newspaper, wrote influential books on parenting and child psychology, and worked within the juvenile court system to defend the rights of children. In 1940, when German authorities established the Warsaw ghetto, Korczak resettled there with his young Jewish charges. On August 5, 1942, SS officials ordered the children living at the orphanage to appear for deportation. Refusing to abandon his charges, Korczak led a column of children to the Umschlagplatz and boarded the train with his wards. The group was gassed upon arrival at Treblinka.
See Janusz Korczak, Ghetto Diary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Janusz Korczak, King Matt the First, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986); Betty Jean Lifton, The King of Children: A Biography of Janusz Korczak (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988).
Kraus, Gilbert and Eleanor: Inspired by the Kindertransport campaign that brought young Austrian and German refugees to Great Britain, Philadelphia attorney Gilbert Kraus and his wife, Eleanor, led a successful effort in the summer of 1939 to bring a group of Jewish refugee children to the United States. Under the aegis of the Brith Sholom lodge, a Jewish fraternal organization headquartered in Philadelphia, the Krauses visited Nazi Germany, choosing fifty Jewish children from Vienna and securing visas for the youngsters to travel to the United States. The Krauses and their lodge personally vouched for the financial maintenance of the children and arranged foster homes for them in the Philadelphia area.
Kraus, Michal (Michael) (1930–): Michal Kraus grew up in the town of Nachod (today in the Czech Republic), where his father, Karl, was a physician. In December 1942, the Krauses were deported to Theresienstadt. In December 1943, the family was transported to Auschwitz II–Birkenau and absorbed within the Theresienstadt family camp. In June 1944, Michal’s mother, Lotte, was transferred to the Stutthof concentration camp, where she perished in January 1945. In early July, Auschwitz camp officials liquidated the family camp; Karl Kraus was gassed on July 11, 1944. Michal numbered among eighty-nine young boys spared by physician Josef Mengele and survived Auschwitz as a “runner,” assigned to convey communications and supplies among officials in Birkenau. In early 1945, Kraus endured a series of forced marches from Auschwitz; on May 5, 1945, he was liberated by American forces at Gunskirchen in Upper Austria. Returning to Czechoslovakia, the teenager reconstructed his Holocaust experiences in an extraordinary three-volume chronicle, completed in 1947.
Kristallnacht or Reichskristallnacht (Crystal Night or Night of the Broken Glass): On the night of November 9 to 10, 1938, a nationwide pogrom against German Jews erupted throughout Germany and annexed Austria, as well as in areas of Czechoslovakia recently occupied by German troops. Kristallnacht had its roots in the shooting of Ernst vom Rath, a German official stationed in Paris, by a young Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, on November 7, 1938. Vom Rath’s death two days later coincided with the anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch; the Nazi Party leadership used the occasion to launch a night of antisemitic excesses. The pogrom was initiated primarily by Nazi Party officials and conducted by members of the Nazi Party, the SA, and the Hitler Youth. The violence destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Greater Germany. Rioters smashed windows, plunder
ed homes, and looted Jewish-owned shops and businesses. Kristallnacht claimed the lives of at least ninety-one Jews. In its aftermath, SS and police units arrested some thirty thousand Jewish males, incarcerating them in concentration camps until each prisoner could produce papers for emigration abroad. The events of Kristallnacht represented an important turning point in Nazi antisemitic policy. After the pogrom, anti-Jewish measures radicalized dramatically, with a concentration of powers for their implementation resting more and more concretely in the hands of the SS.
See Walter Pehle, ed., November 1938: From “Reichskristallnacht” to Genocide, trans. William Templer (New York: Berg, 1991); Alan E. Steinweis, Kristallnacht, 1938 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009).
Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities (Gesetz gegen die Überfüllung deutscher Schulen und Hochschulen): Nazi efforts to expel Jewish pupils from German public schools began with the April 25, 1933, Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools. In the years that followed, regional ordinances further limited Jewish school attendance in certain areas, but a comprehensive national ban came only with the Decree on Schooling of Jews of November 15, 1938, which dismissed all Jewish pupils from German schools.
See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews. Vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: Harper Collins, 1997).
Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses): Also known as the Hereditary Health Law (Erbgesundheitsgesetz) of July 1933, this legislation ordered the compulsory sterilization of persons suffering from specific diseases or impairments. Five of the disabilities designated in the ordinance represented psychiatric or neurological disorders, including schizophrenia, manic-depressive (bipolar) disorder, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea, and “hereditary feeblemindedness.” Four physical conditions also warranted sterilization under the new law: hereditary deafness, hereditary blindness, serious hereditary physical deformity, and severe alcoholism. From January 1, 1934, until the end of World War II, some four hundred thousand Germans were forcibly sterilized under the auspices of the Hereditary Health Law.
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