Glossary

Note: Terms below are defined in reference to the period covered in the text, 1933–1946.

Aktion (operation or action): In the National Socialist context, German authorities often employed this term to mean a campaign to further Nazi racial goals, such as Aktion T4 (the “euthanasia” program) or Aktion Reinhard, the killing of the Jews of the General Government.

Aliyah (Hebrew: “ascent”): In the context of the Zionist movement, this term describes the mass settlement of Diaspora Jews in Palestine to establish a Jewish homeland. In the period between 1933 and 1941, more than fifty-two hundred Jews left the German Reich for Palestine. The Youth Aliyah movement organized by German-Jewish educator Recha Freier and others in 1933 helped more than five thousand Jewish youths to emigrate before September 1939. As British restrictions on Jewish settlements in Palestine increased in the mid-1930s, the illegal Aliyah (Aliyah Bet) gained in significance; the movement continued until the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.

See Brian Amkraut, Between Home and Homeland: Youth Aliyah from Nazi Germany (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006); Recha Freier, Let the Children Come: The Early History of the Youth Aliyah (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961).

American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJJDC, AJDC, Joint, or JDC): Founded in 1914, the Joint provided assistance to Jews around the world, particularly in eastern Europe. During the Nazi era, this umbrella agency for aid organizations in the United States was involved in emigration planning and relief work in Germany, until 1939 providing an increasing share of the budget for German Jewish organizations, such as the Reichsvertretung. The Joint’s efforts continued after the war began and extended beyond the Reich into countries occupied or controlled by Germany.

See Yehuda Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1939–45 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1981).

Anschluss (literally, “connection” or “joining”): Nazi officials employed this euphemism to describe the German annexation of Austria in March 1938. Although it constituted an act of aggression on the part of Germany against its independent neighbor and resulted in mass arrests and anti-Jewish violence, the Anschluss met with widespread popular support in both Austria and Germany. Austria, renamed the Ostmark, remained a part of the German Reich until the end of World War II.

See Evan Burr Bukey, Hitler’s Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

Appell (roll call): A practice followed at least twice a day in the vast Nazi concentration camp system, Appell was usually performed in the early morning and again in the evening on the Appellplatz (roll call yard). Camp officials forced emaciated and exhausted prisoners to stand at attention for hours on end, even in inclement weather, while SS guards, assisted by prisoners, counted and inspected the inmates and distributed daily punishment for real or invented infractions. The Appell functioned both as a means of furnishing a prisoner head count and as a punitive measure.

Arrow Cross: The Arrow Cross Party was a fascist political movement in Hungary during the 1930s and 1940s, modeled after Germany’s National Socialist Party. Led by Ferenc Szálasi (1897–1946), the Arrow Cross promoted an ideology that fused Hungarian nationalism with a virulent antisemitism. In October 1944, with German support, Szálasi launched a successful coup to dislodge Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy. During their brief time in power, the Arrow Cross initiated a reign of terror, torturing and murdering Budapest Jews in the streets and reinitiating deportations of Jews from the capital. In the immediate postwar, Hungarian authorities tried and executed Szálasi and other leaders of the Arrow Cross Party.

See Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2000).

“Aryan”: The word “Aryan” derives from Sanskrit. Since ancient times, the peoples of modern-day Iran have used the term to describe their lineage, language, and culture. In linguistic terminology, “Aryan” refers to a subfamily of the Indo-European languages, and before the term’s adoption and perversion by National Socialist ideologues, it was the name employed to describe the parent language of the Indo-European language family. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, linguists and ethnologists began to argue that speakers of the Indo-European languages constituted a distinct race, separated in the racial hierarchy from the Semitic peoples (i.e., Jews). Nazi ideology used the construct of an “Aryan” ideal type to denigrate “non-Aryans,” particularly Jews, in the attempt to create a racially homogenous Volksgemeinschaft. In German-occupied Europe, Jews described the municipal district beyond the ghetto walls, inhabited by non-Jews, as the “Aryan side.”

See Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

“Aryanization”: Derived from the vocabulary of Nazi antisemitism, this term denotes the process of expropriating Jews and excluding them from German economic life. Beginning in early 1933, the process gathered pace over time. The events surrounding the Anschluss of Austria and the pogrom of Kristallnacht in 1938 triggered a wave of exclusionary measures that culminated in the forced “Aryanization” of the remaining Jewish-owned businesses later that year. German allies and satellites, such as Hungary and Vichy France, often adopted such “Aryanization” policies.

See Avraham Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews, 1933–1943 (Hanover, NH: University of New England Press, 1989).

Auschwitz: The Auschwitz complex was the largest camp of its kind established by the Nazi regime. Located outside Oświęcim, Poland, near Kraków, the complex comprised three camps: Auschwitz I, established in May 1940; Birkenau (Auschwitz II), built in early 1942; and Monowitz, or Buna (Auschwitz III), established in October 1942. Auschwitz I, the main camp, resembled most German concentration camps in that its primary aim was to incarcerate real and perceived enemies of the German Reich; like Monowitz, it also deployed a significant number of forced laborers both on-site and in SS-owned construction and war-related enterprises. Birkenau, with sections for men and women and temporary family camps for Roma (Gypsies) and for Jewish deportees from Theresienstadt, housed the largest prisoner population and accommodated the complex’s killing center. From 1942 through the late summer of 1944, trains carrying transports of Jews arrived at Birkenau from every corner of Axis-occupied Europe. It is estimated that the SS and police deported more than 1.3 million people to Auschwitz. Of these, camp authorities gassed about 1.1 million. In mid-January 1945, as Soviet forces approached the complex, officials began evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps. Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz complex on January 27, 1945, freeing some seven thousand ailing prisoners who had remained at the camp following its evacuation.

See Wacław Długoborski and Franciszek Piper, eds., Auschwitz: 1940–1945, trans. William Brand, 5 vols. (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000); Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939–1945 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990); Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994).

Bełżec: Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka comprised the killing centers of Operation Reinhard (Aktion Reinhard). Located directly on the Lublin-Zamo´s´c-Rava Russkaya railroad line, the spot was chosen by Reinhard planners in order to tap the municipalities of Lublin, Kraków, and Lvov, all cities with a large Jewish population. Christian Wirth served as Bełżec’s first commander, succeeded by former Operation T4 administrator Gottlieb Hering in June 1942. Operations began at Bełżec on March 17, 1942. Initial gassings still employed the pure bottled carbon monoxide utilized at “euthanasia” installations; later, carbon monoxide gas generated by diesel engine became the standard mode of killing here and at all Reinhard extermination centers. Between March and December 1942, approximately 434,500 Jews and an undetermined number of Poles and Roma were deported and murdered at Bełżec.

See Bogdan Musial, ed., “Aktion Reinhardt”: Der Völkermord an den Juden im Generalgouvernement, 1941–1944 (Osnabrück: Fibre Verlag, 2004).

Bergen-Belsen: A concentration camp established by German authorities near Celle in northwestern Germany in 1940, Bergen-Belsen first served as a POW camp, first for French and Belgian soldiers and then for Soviet POWs until 1943. Converted into a concentration camp in that year, Bergen-Belsen also served as a holding camp (Aufenthaltslager) for privileged Jews whom German authorities hoped to exchange for German civilians interned abroad. In the war’s last stages, Bergen-Belsen became a reservoir for thousands of Jewish prisoners evacuated from concentration camps in the East. Overcrowding, insufficient provisions, and poor sanitation led to deplorable conditions in the camp, and tens of thousands perished of disease and malnutrition in Bergen-Belsen’s last months. Between May 1943 and April 1945, some thirty-seven thousand prisoners died at Bergen-Belsen. British forces liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, freeing some fifty-five thousand ailing and emaciated prisoners. More than thirteen thousand former prisoners, too ill to recover, perished in the weeks following liberation.

See Suzanne Bardgett and David Cesarani, eds., Belsen 1945: New Historical Perspectives (Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006).

Biebow, Hans (1902–1947): Born in Bremen, German businessman and Nazi official Hans Biebow headed the German administration of the Łódź ghetto from October 1940 until August 1944. Biebow encouraged the establishment of ghetto factories and workshops and gleaned enormous profits both from these forced labor enterprises and from the stolen property of the incarcerated community. Eager to maintain this flow of proceeds, he helped to ensure the ghetto’s continued existence until the summer of 1944. Following the decision to liquidate the Łódź ghetto, Biebow helped to organize the final deportations of ghetto residents to the Chełmno and Auschwitz killing centers. He was tried and sentenced to death by a Polish court in Łódź in April 1947 and executed.

Birkenau (Auschwitz II–Birkenau): Birkenau, with its sections for men and women and its temporary family camps for Roma and for Jewish deportees from Theresienstadt, housed the largest prisoner population within Auschwitz and accommodated its killing center. In all, some 1.1 million Jews were transported there. New arrivals underwent the process of selection. Young and able-bodied Jews were often chosen for labor and registered as prisoners at the camp. The sick, the weak, young children, and the aged were murdered upon arrival. Gassing operations continued at Birkenau until November 1944.]

See Wacław Długoborski and Franciszek Piper, eds., Auschwitz: 1940–1945, trans. William Brand, 5 vols. (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000); Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939–1945 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990); Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994).

Block, Elisabeth (1923–1942): Living with her parents and two siblings in rural Bavaria, Elisabeth Block began a diary in 1933 in which she made few direct references to the persecution of her fellow German Jews. In the spring of 1942, she was deported with her family via Munich-Milbertshofen to Piaski in the Lublin district. On an unknown date, Elisabeth and her family were transferred to a killing center, presumably Bełżec or Sobibór, and murdered there.

See Elisabeth Block, Erinnerungszeichen: Die Tagebücher der Elisabeth Block, ed. Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte (Rosenheim: Bayerische Staatskanzlei, 1993).

Boder, David (1886–1961): Born in Latvia, David Boder was a professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In 1946, he headed a pioneering project to interview Holocaust survivors. Boder recorded over 120 hours of oral testimony, a significant source of primary documentation concerning the Holocaust.

See Alan Rosen, The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Boycott of April 1, 1933: When Adolf Hitler’s regime came to power in late January 1933, Nazi authorities proclaimed their intention to eliminate Jews from German economic life. On March 28, 1933, the Nazi Party leadership announced a boycott effort against Jewish-owned shops and businesses to begin on April 1. On the morning of the boycott, local party action committees stationed SA or SS men outside Jewish-owned stores and enterprises, encouraging passersby to buy their wares only in “German” stores. Despite the best efforts of central planners such as Der Stürmer publisher Julius Streicher, the boycott failed to win the public support the Nazis hoped for, and international condemnation of the measure ensured that the centralized boycott campaign would be confined to a one-day affair. However, depending on the degree of local antisemitic sentiment, so-called wild boycotts continued throughout the 1930s, forcing many Jewish-owned businesses into insolvency or liquidation.

See Karl Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933–1939 (London: André Deutsch, 1970).

Brandt, Karl (1904–1948): Born in Alsace, Karl Brandt was from 1934 Adolf Hitler’s attending physician. Along with Philipp Bouhler, director of the Führer Chancellery, Brandt headed the planning and implementation of the “euthanasia” program, beginning in 1939. In July 1942, Hitler appointed him General Commissioner for Sanitation and Health (Generalkommissar für das Sanitäts- und Gesundheitswesen) and, later, Reich commissioner, which placed Brandt in control of all German military and civilian medical institutions. In 1946, Brandt served as chief defendant at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, in which an American military tribunal sentenced him to death. He was executed on June 2, 1948.

See Ulf Schmidt, Karl Brandt, the Nazi Doctor: Medicine and Power in the Third Reich (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007).

Buchenwald: Together with its over 130 satellite camps, Buchenwald, near Weimar in eastern Germany, was one of the largest concentration camps within the Reich proper. Established in July 1937, most of its early inmates were political prisoners, who played an important role in the camp’s prisoner infrastructure and its underground resistance. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, German SS and police sent about ten thousand Jews to Buchenwald. Between July 1937 and April 1945, the camp held some 250,000 persons from all countries of Europe; recidivist criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), and German military deserters numbered among its prisoner population. In the camp’s later stages, the SS also incarcerated prisoners of war, resistance fighters, prominent former government officials of German-occupied countries, and foreign forced laborers there. At least fifty-six thousand prisoners were murdered in the Buchenwald camp system, over eighteen thousand of them Jews. On April 11, 1945, as U.S. troops neared the camp, Buchenwald prisoners stormed the watchtowers, seizing control of the camp. Later that afternoon, U.S. forces arrived at Buchenwald, liberating more than twenty thousand prisoners, among them over nine hundred young children.

See David A. Hackett, ed. and trans., The Buchenwald Report (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).

Buna (Auschwitz III–Monowitz): Auschwitz III–Monowitz, also known also as the Buna labor camp, was the first and largest Auschwitz satellite camp for forced labor and later operated as the administrative headquarters for all Auschwitz satellite camps employing prison labor in factories. Construction of the camp began in April 1941. The great majority of forced laborers at Monowitz worked at the IG Farben Buna Werke, a large synthetic rubber plant located only 300 meters (984 feet) from the camp. Due to IG Farben’s continual need for forced labor, Buna held as many as eleven thousand prisoners in 1944. With the approach of the Soviet army, German authorities evacuated Buna on January 18, 1945. From Gleiwitz, a subcamp of Auschwitz, most of these prisoners were transferred to Buchenwald and Mittelbau. More than eight hundred ill and exhausted prisoners remained at the camp following evacuation and were liberated by Soviet forces on January 27, 1945.

See Wacław Długoborski and Franciszek Piper, eds., Auschwitz 1940–1945: Central Issues in the History of the Camp, trans. William Brand (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000), 1:108–15.

Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM, or League of German Girls): In 1930, the Bund Deutscher Mädel in der Hitler-Jugend (League of German Girls within the Hitler Youth) was founded as the official female branch of the Hitler Youth organization. Before the Nazi rise to power in January 1933, the BDM did not attract a mass following, but membership expanded rapidly throughout the 1930s, until participation for eligible girls became compulsory in 1936. The BDM’s core constituency consisted of girls from fourteen to eighteen years of age, with a corresponding junior branch, the Jungmädel (Young Girls’ League), for girls aged ten to fourteen. In 1938, a third component, the BDM Union for Belief and Beauty (BDM-Werk Glaube und Schönheit), offered a voluntary association for young women aged seventeen to twenty-one.

See Gisela Miller-Kipp, “Auch Du gehörst dem Führer”: Die Geschichte des Bundes Deutscher Mädel (BDM) in Quellen und Dokumenten (Weinheim/Munich: Juventa Verlag, 2001).

CENTOS (Central Organization for Orphan Care): Founded in 1924 to unite voluntary child-care organizations throughout Poland under one agency, CENTOS operated aid organizations for children and youth, including orphanages, boarding and trade schools, day-care centers, food- and clothing-distribution centers, and children’s camps. It also provided funding to foster families. Prior to the German invasion of Poland, CENTOS functioned in more than two hundred Polish cities and cared for tens of thousands of children. CENTOS was very active in the Warsaw ghetto, operating over one hundred care institutions for forty-five thousand children, among them Janusz Korczak’s well-known Orphans’ Home. Dr. Adolf Berman and Józef Barski assumed the directorship of CENTOS in the Warsaw ghetto in January 1940.

See Barbara Engelking and Lacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

Chełmno (Kulmhof): In late 1941, the National Socialist regime established the first stationary killing center to murder Jews within the context of the “Final Solution” at Chełmno. German authorities chose the site because of its location along a central road that linked it to the city of Łódź. An abandoned manorial estate and adjacent forest formed the nexus of the camp, which was planned as a killing site for the Jewish population of the Wartheland, including the inhabitants of the Łódź ghetto. Mass-murder operations began at Chełmno on December 8, 1941. The killing center employed gas vans to murder its victims. Herbert Lange initially commanded the small number of SS and police functionaries at the site until his replacement by Hans Bothmann in the spring of 1942. From mid-January 1942 until March 1943, thousands of Łódź ghetto inhabitants, as well as Jews from the surrounding districts, were murdered at Chełmno. In the spring of 1943, these deportations actions ceased, and SS personnel dismantled the camp. In the spring of 1944, however, German authorities decided to liquidate the Łódź ghetto, and for a brief period, Chełmno was again the site of killing operations, until mid-July 1944 when the last Łódź ghetto inhabitants were deported to Auschwitz. In all, at least 152,000 persons, the vast majority of them Jews, were murdered at Chełmno.

See Archives of the District Museum in Konin, Chełmno Witnesses Speak, ed. Łucja Pawlicka-Nowak, trans. Juliet D. Golden (Konin: Council for the Protection of Memory of Combat and Martyrdom in Warsaw/District Museum in Konin, 2004).

Collection camp (Sammellager): These were holding locations where regional Jewish populations were detained before their deportation from Germany. Under the supervision of the Gestapo, collections camps served as assembly points where deportees were ordered to appear and register themselves and their property before their transport to ghettos, concentration camps, or killing centers in the East.

Compulsory sterilization: see Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases.

Crematorium (Krematorium, Auschwitz): Five crematoria complexes with adjoining gas chambers were the primary means of murdering European Jews in Auschwitz II–Birkenau. Crematorium I, housing three large furnaces, was first used in September 1940 to incinerate the bodies of prisoners who had died or been murdered in Auschwitz and its satellite camps. Concealed behind large hedges, Crematoria II through V and their connected gas chambers were operational in Birkenau by the summer of 1943. After selection, victims were assembled in the crematoria yards. Under the guise of delousing, the victims undressed in a room connected to the gassing chamber. The Zyklon B gas used generally killed its victims within thirty minutes. Sonderkommando units then sorted the victims’ clothing and valuables in the anterooms of the crematoria, while others of their number incinerated the corpses of the gassing victims. In the summer of 1944, the crematoria reached a burning capacity of twenty thousand corpses per day. Following the Sonderkommando revolt in October 7, 1944, in which Crematorium IV was severely damaged, Heinrich Himmler ordered the destruction of the Auschwitz gassing apparatus.

See Franciszek Piper, “Gas Chambers and Crematoria,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994), 157–182.

Dachau: Established in March 1933, the Dachau concentration camp was the first regular concentration camp established by the National Socialist government. Located near Munich, Germany, the early prisoner population consisted chiefly of political prisoners and other ideological opponents of the Nazi regime. In time, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, homosexuals, “asocials,” and recidivist criminals were also interned there; in the wake of Kristallnacht, more than eleven thousand Jewish men were briefly incarcerated at Dachau as well. The Dachau camp was a training center for SS concentration camp guards and became the model for all Nazi concentration camps. Prisoners at Dachau engaged in forced labor, both at the main camp and in over 160 subcamps. The total number of prisoners incarcerated at Dachau between 1933 and 1945 exceeded 188,000. Over forty thousand died at the camp between January 1940 and May 1945, as did an unknown number of unregistered prisoners. American forces liberated Dachau on April 29, 1945.

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 German-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 Germanization 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).

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, plundered 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.

See Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986); Paul Weindling, “Compulsory Sterilization in National Socialist Germany,” German History 5 (1987): 10–24.

Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor (Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre, or Blutschutzgesetz): see Nuremberg Laws.

Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service: (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums): The Civil Service Law decreed the enforced retirement of Jews and “politically unreliable elements” from the German civil service. Signed by Adolf Hitler on April 7, 1933, the measure marked the National Socialists’ first major piece of anti-Jewish legislation.

See Karl Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933–1939 (London: André Deutsch, 1970).

Lebensborn (Fount of Life): This Nazi organization was established in 1935 in an effort to reverse Germany’s dwindling birthrate and to increase the number of “racially valuable” offspring. Instigated by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, the effort provided financial assistance and maternity care to the wives of SS men and also to unmarried mothers, a group that concerned Nazi racial hygienists and population planners. Lebensborn administrators encouraged unwed mothers to give up their infants after birth, and the organization managed both orphanages and adoption services that placed Lebensborn children with “deserving” German families. Some seven thousand children were born in the organization’s homes in Germany between 1936 and 1945. Lebensborn officials played a more insidious role in placing children from eastern Europe chosen for Germanization with adoptive families in Germany.

Lidice: On May 27, 1942, Czechoslovak parachutists Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík succeeded in fatally injuring Reinhard Heydrich, a key planner of the “Final Solution” and the governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Following the assassination attempt, Gestapo intelligence erroneously linked the Czech village of Lidice with the assassins. On June 10, 1942, German SS and police shot the village’s 173 men and boys on the outskirts of Lidice. The town itself was razed to the ground. With few exceptions, the female adult population of Lidice was deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Forcibly separated from their mothers, the children of Lidice received a racial screening by SS personnel. Nine children who possessed sufficient “Germanic” background to make them candidates for Germanization were placed with adoptive German parents. The remaining children of Lidice were transported to Łódź and are believed to have been gassed at Chełmno in early July 1942.

See Jolana Macková and Ivan Ulrych, eds., Fates of the Children of Lidice: Memories, Testimonies, Documents, trans. Elias Khelil (Nymburk: Lidice Memorial, 2004).

Łódź ghetto (also Litzmannstadt ghetto): The Łódź ghetto was established in February 1940 and initially held 164,000 inhabitants. Appointed head of its Judenrat by German authorities, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski displayed energy and organizational skill in overseeing the ghetto’s workshops and social agencies, but he was viewed as a controversial and divisive figure. The ghetto boasted an impressive array of social services, including schools, hospitals, and a postal system. Living conditions there were deplorable, however, and some 20 percent of the ghetto’s population died as a result of starvation and disease. From January to September 1942, German authorities deported over seventy thousand Jews and five thousand Roma to Chełmno. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis decided to liquidate the Łódź ghetto, then the last remaining ghetto in Poland. In June and July 1944, the Germans deported thousands of Jews to Chełmno; in August 1944, the surviving population of the ghetto was deported to Auschwitz.

See Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, ed. and trans. Robert Moses Shapiro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006).

Majdanek (Lublin/Majdanek): This was a vast forced labor and concentration camp near Lublin. Constructed in October 1941, it incarcerated Jews temporarily spared from Operation Reinhard killing operations in order to serve as forced labor in the Lublin District. Tens of thousands of Jewish forced laborers too weak to work were murdered in the Majdanek gas chambers and in shooting operations or died through mistreatment and starvation. After uprisings at Sobibór and Treblinka, Heinrich Himmler ordered SS and police forces to shoot over forty thousand Jewish prisoners in the Lublin District, including eight thousand from Majdanek, at the camp under the auspices of Operation Harvest Festival (Erntefest) on November 3, 1943. Soviet forces liberated an intact Majdanek on July 24, 1944.

Mauthausen: After the incorporation of Austria in the Anschluss in March 1938, German authorities established the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz, Austria. The camp held recidivist criminals and asocials in the first years of its existence. After World War II began, the number of prisoners in Mauthausen increased greatly, including more than seven thousand Spanish republicans turned over by Vichy authorities in France. Of more than two hundred thousand prisoners who passed through the Mauthausen camp system between August 1938 and May 1945, over one hundred thousand died there, including fourteen thousand Jewish prisoners. U.S. forces liberated Mauthausen on May 5, 1945.

See Hans Marsalek, The History of Mauthausen Concentration Camp, trans. Max Garcia (Vienna: Austrian Society of Mauthausen Concentration Camp, 1995).

Mengele, Josef (1911–1979): In 1937 Josef Mengele joined the Nazi Party; the following year, the same year in which he received his medical degree, he joined the SS. After service with the Waffen-SS, Mengele was transferred to Auschwitz, on May 30, 1943. He began as the medical officer responsible for Birkenau’s Gypsy camp; several weeks after the Gypsy camp’s liquidation, Mengele became chief camp physician of Auschwitz II (Birkenau) in November 1943. Associated more closely with selection duty than any other medical officer at Auschwitz, Mengele also became infamous for his deadly medical experimentation, particularly with twins. With the aid of his prosperous family, Mengele evaded postwar prosecution and fled to South America; in declining health, he drowned while swimming near Bertioga, Brazil, on February 7, 1979.

See Sven Keller, Günzburg und der Fall Josef Mengele: Die Heimatstadt und die Jagd nach dem NS-Verbrecher (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2003); Office of Special Investigations, In the Matter of Josef Mengele: A Report to the Attorney General of the United States (Washington, DC: Office of Special Investigations, 1992).

Mischling (mixed-breed, hybrid; pl.: Mischlinge): This was a racial category formally introduced into the Third Reich’s anti-Jewish politics following the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws. This term also applied to children of other mixed “races.”

See Jeremy Noakes, “The Development of Nazi Policy towards the German-Jewish ‘Mischlinge,’ 1933–1945,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 34 (1989): 291–354.

Monowitz (Auschwitz III): see Buna.

Muselmann (pl.: Muselmänner): Concentration camp inmates used this term to describe ailing or exhausted fellow prisoners who had lost the will to live. Given their inability to work or stand for roll call (Appell) for significant lengths of time, Muselmänner might survive for only a short while. The origin of the term is uncertain but is believed to stem from the German word for “Muslim,” as many Europeans at the time believed Islam to have a fatalistic element.

Mussfeld, Erich (also recorded as Mussfeldt) (1913–1948): A baker by profession, Erich Mussfeld joined the Nazi Party in 1939. He first served as a guard at the Majdanek concentration camp and was transferred to Auschwitz in May 1944. There he supervised the Sonderkommando at the Birkenau crematoria. In January 1947, an American military tribunal sentenced Mussfeld to a life term; shortly thereafter, he was extradited to Poland where he was sentenced to death and executed on January 24, 1948, in Kraków for crimes committed at Auschwitz.

Nuremberg Laws: This phrase is frequently used to describe the two basic pillars of Nazi antisemitic legislation: the Reich Citizenship Law (Reichsbürgergesetz) and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor (Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre). This legislation was promulgated, together with the Reich Flag Law, on September 15, 1935, during the annual Nazi Party rally and at a specially convened session of the Reichstag in Nuremberg, Franconia. The first law restricted citizenship, and thus full protection under the law, to those of “German or related blood.” The Law for Protection of German Blood and German Honor proscribed marriage and sexual contact between German “Aryans” and Jews. Subsequent regulations defined a “Jew” as someone with at least three Jewish grandparents (according to their religious affiliation) or as someone descended from two Jewish grandparents who him- or herself practiced the Jewish religion or was married to a Jew. Persons with two Jewish grandparents, but without Jewish religious affiliation or a Jewish spouse, came to be defined as “Mischlinge of the first degree” (Mischlinge ersten Grades). Persons with one Jewish grandfather or grandmother were labeled “Mischlinge of the second degree” (Mischlinge zweiten Grades). With later clauses added, the Nuremberg Laws formed one of the basic laws of the Third Reich that facilitated the deportation, murder, and expropriation of German Jews.

See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 61–78; Karl A. Schleunes, ed., Legislating the Holocaust: The Bernhard Loesener Memoirs and Supporting Documents (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001).

Nyiszli, Miklós (1901–1956): A Hungarian physician, Miklós Nyiszli was deported in June 1944 with his wife and young daughter to Auschwitz. Volunteering to work as a physician in the prisoner barracks, Nyiszli came to the attention of Birkenau camp physician Josef Mengele, who forced the doctor to aid in his medical experimentation upon Auschwitz prisoners. In 1946, Nyiszli published a harrowing account of his experiences as a prisoner-physician in Dr. Mengele boncoló orvosa voltam az Auschwitzi krematóriumban.

See Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, trans. Tibère Kremer and Richard Seaver (Hungarian ed., 1946; New York: Frederick Fell Publishers, 1960).

Obshestvo Remeslenofo zemledelcheskofo Truda (ORT, or Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor): This was a Jewish self-help organization founded in 1880 in Russia to provide Jews with occupational training in agriculture and trade. The organization expanded in the interwar years to nearly every country of eastern and central Europe with a significant Jewish population, often in cooperation with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. During World War II, ORT continued vocational training in many ghettos in eastern Europe. With the Jewish displaced persons crisis after the war, ORT, in cooperation with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, trained forty to forty-five thousand individuals, providing Jewish displaced persons with skills often critical to securing an immigration visa.

Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE, or Children’s Aid Society): Begun by physicians in Russia in 1912 as Obshchestvo Zdravookhraneniya Yevreyev (Society for the Protection of the Health of Jews), the organization expanded into many European countries with significant Jewish populations and focused increasingly on the welfare of children in its care. Relocating to Paris in 1933, the organization assumed the name Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants. OSE ran a number of orphanages in France for Jewish refugee children and, when the deportations of Jews in France began in 1942, organized an underground effort to smuggle many of the children from OSE orphanages to the safety of neutral countries.

Oneg Shabbat (In Celebration of the Sabbath; also Oneg Shabbas and Oneg Shabes): Established by Warsaw historian and social worker Emmanuel Ringelblum, Oneg Shabbat was a clandestine archive that documented the history of the Warsaw ghetto and its inhabitants. With the aid of his assistant, Rabbi Simon Huberband, archive secretary Hersh Wasser, and a core of other professionals and volunteers, Ringelblum collected diaries, letters, and testimonies of ghetto residents, compiled hundreds of documents concerning the German occupation, and commissioned studies of the ghetto by experts. The activities of Oneg Shabbat continued until the first large-scale deportation action, when Ringelblum directed that the underground archive’s material be buried in milk cans and metal boxes within the ghetto. After the war, Hersh Wasser helped to recover much of the archive’s materials, which are reposited in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.

See Joseph Kermish, To Live with Honor and Die with Honor: Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives “O.S.” (Oneg Shabbath) (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986); Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emmanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

Operation Reinhard (Aktion Reinhard or Aktion Reinhardt): In late 1941 and spring 1942, the planners of the “Final Solution” founded the Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka killing centers, known collectively as the Operation Reinhard camps, to facilitate the murder of the Jews of the General Government. These killing centers claimed the lives of some 1.5 million Jews and thousands of Poles, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war. In November 1943, after prisoner revolts at Sobibór and Treblinka, SS and police units shot the Jewish labor forces still incarcerated at Trawniki, Poniatowa, and Majdanek during Operation Harvest Festival (Erntefest). Forty-two thousand prisoners were murdered through this shooting action on November 3 and 4, 1943, bringing Operation Reinhard to a close.

See Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

Operation T4: see “euthanasia” program.

Ostmark: This was the Nazi name for annexed Austria after the Anschluss; it derives from the medieval designation for what was then the Austrian March.

Palestine (or Palestinian Mandate): This was a territory under British mandate beginning in 1920. Zionists had advocated a return to the Jewish “ancestral homeland” for Jews since the late nineteenth century, and Jewish immigration to Palestine began in earnest in 1882. Increased Jewish immigration and native Arab resistance to its manifestation induced the British government to place a strict quota on Jews immigrating to Palestine; the British White Paper of 1939 tightened these restrictions, limiting the ability of Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution to find a safe haven there. After the war, the growing number of Holocaust survivors and refugees hoping to reach Palestine led to massive illegal immigration. The British government announced that it would vacate the Palestinian Mandate by August 1948; on May 14, 1948, the Jewish leadership under future prime minister David Ben-Gurion declared an independent state of Israel.

Partisan: In the context of this volume, “partisan” refers to a unit or detachment of irregular troops waging guerilla warfare and sabotage against German forces and those who collaborated with them. Some twenty to thirty thousand Jewish fighters joined partisan bands that operated extensively throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, often cooperating with the broad-based Soviet partisan movement.

Pimpf: This refers to a member of the Deutsches Jungvolk; see Hitler Youth.

Pogrom (from Russian: “destruction”): A localized violent assault on a group of individuals and their property, often instigated by state or local authorities. The term is usually ascribed to antisemitic violence. The events of Kristallnacht are often characterized as a pogrom.

Police Decree Concerning the Designation of Jews (Polizeiverordnung über die Kennzeichnung der Juden): This police decree of September 15, 1941, compelled German Jews to wear the Jewish badge, shortly before the first systematic deportations of Jews from the Reich began in October 1941. The measure required all Jews over the age of six to attach to the left side of their outermost garment a six-pointed yellow star, inscribed with the word Jude (Jew) in black lettering. The decree also applied to Jews in Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Ponary: The Ponary Woods, located eight miles from the city of Vilna (today Vilnius, Lithuania), served as the primary killing site for the Jewish population in the Vilna ghetto. From July 4, 1941, to July 1944, German Einsatzgruppen and Lithuanian auxiliary units systematically massacred around one hundred thousand Jews at Ponary.

Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia: During the Munich crisis of September 1938, Great Britain and France forced the Czechoslovak Republic to cede its German-speaking borderlands (e.g., the Sudetenland) to Nazi Germany. On March 15, 1939, the German army occupied the remainder of rump Czechoslovakia. German authorities annexed to the Reich the territory roughly encompassing the modern Czech Republic, creating the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. With its incorporation by Nazi Germany, the new Protectorate adopted the bulk of Nazi antisemitic legislation. On September 27, 1941, Reinhard Heydrich assumed the effective government of the territory until his death following an assassination attempt in June 1942.

Race and Settlement Main Office SS (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt, or RuSHA): The Race and Resettlement Office was originally established in 1931 to maintain the “racial purity” of the SS organization. Initially tasked with vetting the ancestry of SS recruits and their existing or intended spouses, RuSHA officials eventually helped to implement Nazi race and settlement policies in the eastern occupied and annexed territories during World War II. Their racial “experts” helped to determine Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) fit for assimilation in the German Reich and chose “racially suitable” children in Slavic lands for inclusion in the Lebensborn program.

See Isabel Heinemann, “Rasse, Siedlung, Deutsches Blut”: Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003).

Racial hygiene: see eugenics.

Rassenschande (“race defilement”): This term describes real or purported sexual contact between “Aryans” and “non-Aryans” (especially Jews). The Nuremberg Laws provided the apparatus to make such relations punishable by law.

Ravensbrück: This, following the women’s camp at Auschwitz, was the largest concentration camp for women in the German Reich. German authorities began construction of the camp in November 1938 at a site in northern Germany some eighty kilometers (fifty miles) north of Berlin. In April 1941, SS officials established a small men’s camp adjacent to the main camp. Beginning in the summer of 1942, SS physicians subjected many prisoners at Ravensbrück to grisly medical experimentation. In January 1945, Ravensbrück and its subcamps held more than fifty thousand, mostly female, prisoners; among the inmates were political prisoners, “asocials,” Roma and Sinti, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and “race defilers” (see Rassenschande). Soviet troops liberated Ravensbrück in April 1945.

Razzia: This refers to a roundup, as for deportation to a concentration camp or killing center.

Realschule: This refers to a type of secondary school in German-speaking lands, generally catering to pupils between the ages of eleven and seventeen.

Reich Citizenship Law: see Nuremberg Laws.

Reichsmark (RM): This was the currency used in Germany from 1924 until June 20, 1948. The Reichsmark was subdivided into one hundred (Reichs)pfennigs.

Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, or Reich Security Main Office): This agency combined with the Security Police and the Security Service under the authority of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and was directed by Reinhard Heydrich; after Heydrich’s death, Ernst Kaltenbrunner eventually undertook leadership of the organization. The RSHA was the central mechanism for extrajudicial terror and repression in Germany and the occupied territories and a key agency in the implementation of the “Final Solution.”

Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of Jews in Germany): This successor organization to the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland was formally installed in July 1939. In the hands of the Gestapo, the Reichsvereinigung became a tool for the administration and control of Jews remaining in Germany. Having served the purpose set by the regime, it was dissolved in 1943 and its staff deported.

See Beate Meyer, “The Inevitable Dilemma: The Reich Association (Reichsvereinigung) of Jews in Germany, the Deportations, and the Jews Who Went Underground,” in On Germans and Jews under the Nazi Regime, ed. Moshe Zimmermann (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2006), 297–312.

Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden (Reich Representation of German Jews, or RV); also Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Representation of Jews in Germany): The Reichsvertretung was founded in September 1933 by a coalition of leading German Jewish functionaries, most prominently Leo Baeck, who subsequently served as the organization’s president. Intended as a coordinating umbrella organization for the many German Jewish organizations in the Third Reich, the Reichsvertretung cooperated closely with the Jewish agencies and associations inside and outside Germany. The Nuremberg Laws had an immediate effect on the organization’s ability to protect Jews in Germany from persecution and resulted in the organization’s extended efforts to encourage emigration; the organization also changed its name to Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland at this time. By the spring of 1939, the hitherto largely autonomous Reichsvertretung had transformed into the Gestapo-controlled Reichsvereinigung.

See Otto Dov Kulka and Esriel Hildesheimer, “The Central Organization of Jews in the Third Reich and Its Archives,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 34 (1989): 187–201.

Righteous Among the Nations: Yad Vashem bestows this title on non-Jewish individuals who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. In German-occupied eastern Europe, the punishment for sheltering or assisting Jews was often death. In 1962, Yad Vashem formed a thirty-five-member Commission for the Designation of the Righteous to award the title “Righteous Among the Nations.” As of January 2010, 23,226 people from forty-four countries have been recognized as “Righteous Gentiles.”
See Israel Gutman and Sara Bender, eds., The Encyclopedia of the Righteous among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, 5 vols. (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003).

Ringelblum, Emmanuel (1900–1944): A historian by training, Emmanuel Ringelblum established Oneg Shabbat, a clandestine archive that documented the history of the Warsaw ghetto and its inhabitants. Ringelblum himself contributed to the documentation effort, with writings such as the monograph Polish-Jewish Relations during the Second World War. During the first great deportation action from the Warsaw ghetto in the summer of 1942, Ringelblum ordered that the archive be buried in a series of milk cans and metal boxes in order to preserve the work of the organization. In March 1943, Ringelblum and his family succeeded in escaping to the “Aryan side” of Warsaw, where they were discovered in their hideout in March 1944 and murdered.

See Emmanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations during the Second World War, eds. Joseph Kermish and Shmuel Krakowski (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1974); Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emmanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

Roma and Sinti (Gypsies; also Romani): Among the groups the Nazi regime and its Axis partners singled out for persecution on racial grounds were the Roma and Sinti. Roma were affected in great numbers by several acts of Nazi legislation, including the Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, whose ancillary legislation was extended to Roma and other “racially inferior” minorities. In the mid-1930s, German authorities established Gypsy camps (Zigeunerlager) throughout the Reich. Roma were deported to concentration camps including Buchenwald, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, Chełmno, and Ravensbrück. In addition they were interned in the Lublin, Łódź, and Warsaw ghettos. Members of the Einsatzgruppen undertook killing actions that included Roma victims in the Soviet Union and Serbia. The Croatian Ustaša killed and interned thousands of Roma along with Serbs and Jews. In 1941, thousands of Romanian Roma and Jews were deported to Transnistria. Historians estimate that the Germans and their allies killed 25 percent of all European Roma, or some 220,000 Roma individuals.

See Michael Zimmermann, Verfolgt, Vertrieben, Vernichtet: Die nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik gegen Roma and Sinti (Essen: Klartext, 1989).

Rudashevski, Yitskhok (1927–1943): On September 6, 1941, Yitskhok Rudashevski and his family received orders to move into the Vilna ghetto. Shortly thereafter, the fourteen-year-old began to write a diary, which he filled with vivid descriptions of the ghetto and the individuals who inhabited it. Rudashevski was also active in forging an intellectual life for the youth of the Vilna ghetto. He and his family went into hiding when deportations from Vilna began, but SS officials discovered them in early October 1943 and murdered them at Ponary. A cousin who had escaped deportation located the family’s hiding place immediately after the war and found Rudashevski’s diary, which was first published in Yiddish in 1953.

See Isaac Rudashevski, The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, June 1941–April 1943 (Tel Aviv: Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1973).

Rumkowski, Mordechai Chaim (1887–1944): Russian-born Chaim Rumkowski served as the director of the Helenowek Jewish orphanage in Łódź until October 1939. Following the German invasion of Poland, German authorities established the Łódź ghetto and appointed a Judenrat with Rumkowski at its head. Directly accountable to German administrator Hans Biebow, Rumkowski wielded extraordinary authority over the internal management of the ghetto. He displayed enormous organizational skill in overseeing the ghetto’s workshops and social agencies, but he governed in an autocratic fashion and was viewed by contemporaries, as by scholars today, as a controversial and divisive figure. Rumkowski believed from the start that the ghetto’s best chance for survival lay in cooperating fully with the German officials. Thus, he acceded in December 1941 to German demands for deportations of ghetto residents to Treblinka. On September 4, 1942, faced with a further call for twenty thousand deportees, Rumkowski decided he would fill the required quota with the ghetto’s least productive members: the ailing, the aged, and children under ten. Rumkowski was deported with his family to Auschwitz during the liquidation of the Łódź ghetto and died there on August 28, 1944.

See Michal Unger, Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004).

Schirach, Baldur von (1907–1974): The son of Berlin theater director Rittmeister Carl Baily Norris von Schirach and his American wife, Baldur von Schirach was an early leader of the National Socialist German Students’ League. Acting as the first Reich Youth Leader (Reichsjugendführer), he headed the Hitler Youth from 1933 until 1940. At this time, he became Gauleiter of the Reichsgau Vienna until the war’s end; in this capacity he helped to oversee the deportation of Viennese Jews to the camps and ghettos in the East. Von Schirach was a defendant before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremburg, which found him guilty of crimes against humanity and gave him a twenty-year prison sentence.

Schutzstaffel (SS, or Protective Squadron): Established in 1925 as a protective service for prominent Nazi Party functionaries, the SS grew under the stewardship of Heinrich Himmler into one of the most important tools for maintaining the regime’s grip on political power through suppression and terror directed against real or imagined internal “enemies of the Reich.” Many of these enemies were incarcerated in concentration camps run by the SS. Through its party branch, the SS increasingly overlapped with state agencies such as the Gestapo and other parts of the police subordinated to Himmler. In 1940 it added a military wing, the Waffen-SS. Himmler’s apparatus, which by the war’s end comprised more than 1 million men in a range of different agencies, played a key role in planning and implementing the genocide of European Jewry.

See Heinz Höhne, The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS (New York: Coward-McCann, 1970).

Scout Movement: Founded in England in 1907 by Robert Baden Powell, scouting is an international youth movement that offers youngsters practical training in outdoor activities, sports, and crafts. A German scouting movement began in 1910 and attracted thousands of members. The group was banned by the Nazis in the 1933 and 1934 in order to facilitate the integration of German youth into the Hitler Youth and its auxiliary organizations.

Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei, or Sipo): This branch of the German police comprised the Gestapo (Secret State Police), the Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo), and the Border Police (Grenzpolizei). As chief of the Security Police as well as the Security Service, Reinhard Heydrich merged the two organizations by establishing the Reich Security Main Office in September 1939. The Security Police helped to supply the forces of the Einsatzgruppen, which served as both security police and mobile killing units in German-occupied territories.

Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD): This intelligence and surveillance organization was established in 1931 under Reinhard Heydrich. Among its major tasks were monitoring real or imagined enemies of national socialism and reporting on the state of opinion among the German public. As chief of the Security Service as well as of the Security Police, Reinhard Heydrich merged the two organizations, establishing the Reich Security Main Office in September 1939.

Selection: New arrivals to Auschwitz II–Birkenau underwent the process of “selection.” Amid the chaos of disembarkation, Auschwitz prisoner-workers and SS guards separated the deportees by gender and ordered them to form short ranks. SS medical staff performed selections of Jewish prisoners, determining who would be retained for work and who would perish immediately in the gas chambers. Young and able-bodied Jews were often chosen for labor and registered as prisoners at the camp. Along with the sick, weak, and aged, children were generally murdered upon arrival. Selections took place on a regular basis at many other camps in the Nazi concentration camp system to cull children and ailing prisoners for gassing.

Sobibór: Located in a wooded and thinly populated region, the village of Sobibór was chosen as a site for the second of three extermination camps operating under the auspices of the Operation Reinhard. Sobibór’s first commandant was Franz Stangl; in August 1942, Stangl was transferred to Treblinka and succeeded by his deputy, Franz Reichleitner. German SS and police officials conducted gassing operations at Sobibór from May 1942 until autumn 1943, when Jewish prisoner revolts there and at Treblinka spurred the liquidation of both killing centers. In all, at least 167,000 individuals perished at the Sobibór extermination camp.

See Jules Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp, trans. Karin Dixon (Oxford: Berg Publishers in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2007); Miriam Novitch, ed., Sobibór, Martyrdom and Revolt: Documents and Testimonies (New York: Holocaust Library, 1980).

Sonderkommando (literally, “special detail or detachment”): The word Sonderkommando had two meanings in the context of the Holocaust. First, it applied to certain SS units, such as special units of the Einsatzgruppen and to unit commands like that of Sonderkommando Lange, which ran the Chełmno killing center. Second, it applied to details of Jewish prisoners compelled to dispose of victims’ bodies and belongings in National Socialist killing centers.

Sterilization: see Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases.

Streicher, Julius (1885–1946): One of the Nazi Party’s earliest members, Streicher established his virulently antisemitic newspaper, Der Stürmer (The Storm Trooper), in 1923; in the same year, he took part in the abortive Beer Hall Putsch. Following Adolf Hitler’s release from prison, the Nazi leader named Streicher Gauleiter of Middle Franconia (later Franconia). In the first months of the Nazi regime, Streicher helped to organize the Boycott of April 1, 1933, of Jewish-owned businesses. In 1938, Streicher’s Stürmer reached its highpoint in terms of circulation; his successful publishing house of the same name produced, among other works, a host of antisemitic children’s literature, including the infamous Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom). Despite his strong personal association with Hitler, Streicher was viewed as mercurial by leading officials and, in 1939, stripped of his party posts. Streicher was convicted of crimes against humanity in a trial of major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal. He was hanged in Nuremberg, his former stronghold, on October 16, 1946.

See Dennis Showalter, Little Man, What Now? Der Stürmer in the Weimar Republic (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1982).

Sturmabteilung (Storm Division, or SA; also Storm Troopers): As the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, the SA, formed in 1921, initially comprised mainly German World War I veterans, militia members, and others opposed to both the democratic Weimar Republic and to the Communist Party. Its terror tactics against opponents increased the public visibility of the Nazi movement, both before and after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Once the Nazi regime was established, it began to perceive the disruptive tactics of the SA as a threat. Hitler agreed to the murder of the SA’s top leadership in the Röhm Purge,” or “The Night of the Long Knives,” in June 1934, carried out primarily by the SS. The SS, previously a part of the SA, relegated that organization to a Nazi Party agency of secondary importance.

See Richard Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism: The Stormtroopers in Eastern Germany, 1925–1934 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984).

Sudetenland: Adolf Hitler demanded this borderland of western Czechoslovakia because of its majority ethnic German population; it was annexed to the German Reich at the conclusion of the Munich Conference in September 1938. Like their coreligionists in Germany proper, Jews in the Sudetenland experienced Kristallnacht on November 9 to 10, 1938.

Theresienstadt (Terezin): In autumn 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, governor general of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, suggested that the former imperial fortress of Theresienstadt near Prague act as the holding station for Jews in the Czech lands on their way to the camps and ghettos in the East. Following the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, Theresienstadt also became a “settlement area” for German Jews over the age of sixty-five and for Jewish war veterans who had been decorated or disabled in combat, those categories of German Jews initially exempted from deportation. Nazi propagandists portrayed Theresienstadt as a kind of model ghetto community for Jews, employing the “Jewish city” to deceive foreign governments and agencies, as when the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) visited a highly sanitized Theresienstadt in June 1944. In reality, Theresienstadt amalgamated Nazi concentration camp and ghetto. Of the more than 140,000 Jews transferred to Terezin, 33,500 died there, victims of starvation, disease, and ill treatment. More significantly, Theresienstadt functioned as a way station for deported Czech Jews and eventually for Jews deported from the Reich to the Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka extermination camps. Between December 1941 and the end of the war in the spring of 1945, eighty-eight thousand individuals passed through Theresienstadt on the way to almost certain death in the East.

See H. G. Adler, Theresienstadt, 1941–1945: Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft (Tübingen: Mohr, 1960); Vojtěch Blodig, Terezin in the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” 1941–1945, trans. Jan Valěska and Lewis Paines (Prague: Památník Terezín/Oswald, 2003).

Theresienstadt Family Camp (Auschwitz II–Birkenau): In September 1943, five thousand Jews, among them over one thousand children, arrived at Auschwitz from Theresienstadt. Spared the customary selection, they were brought directly to a separate barracks network in Birkenau, designated the Theresienstadt Family Camp. A second transport from Theresienstadt joined their ranks in December 1943. Its inmates were processed as special prisoners; their hair was not shorn, and they were allowed to retain their civilian clothing. Men and women were housed in separate blocks, but prisoners could move freely within the small camp, and children could remain with their parents. Historians believe that the family camp was allowed its short, privileged existence in order to deceive representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, who had visited Theresienstadt and planned to make a similar visit to Auschwitz. In early July 1944, survivors of the camp’s December 1943 transports were put to a selection. The majority of these prisoners were gassed, while the camp itself was liquidated.

See Nili Keren, “The Family Camp,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994), 428–40.

Treblinka: Planners of the “Final Solution” chose the site for this third Operation Reinhard killing center in an isolated area some eighty kilometers (fifty miles) northeast of Warsaw. The most fully developed and deadly of the Reinhard camps, Treblinka began killing operations in late July 1942. Commandants of the Treblinka killing center were Dr. Irmfried Eberl (July–August 1942), Franz Stangl (August 1942–August 1943), and Kurt Franz (August 1943–November 1943). Deportations to Treblinka came mainly from the Warsaw ghetto and from smaller ghettos in the Warsaw and Radom districts of the General Government. Jews from Germany, Austria, France, Slovakia, Thrace, and Macedonia were also murdered there, as were thousands of Roma and Poles. On August 2, 1943, Treblinka inmates organized a prisoner revolt at the camp, spurring liquidation of the site in the autumn of 1943. From July 1942 through November 1943, camp authorities killed 870,000 to 925,000 Jews at the killing center.

Typhus: This acute, contagious disease is caused by rickettsial microorganisms and usually transmitted by an animal vector, such as fleas or lice. It should not be confused with typhoid, an unrelated disease. Typhus epidemics claimed thousands of lives in ghettos and concentration camps in German-occupied Europe.

Umschlagplatz (transfer point): Located on the corner of Zamenhof and Niska streets, the Umschlagplatz was an area separating the Warsaw ghetto from the Polish, or “Aryan,” side of the city. Originally the official transit point through which manufactured goods from the outside were transported into the ghetto, the site, with its adjacent railroad siding, became the assembly point for the thousands of Jews deported from the Warsaw ghetto, predominantly to the Treblinka killing center, between July 1942 and May 1943.

United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA): The UNRRA agency was established in November 1943 in response to the unfolding displaced persons crisis in Europe. Subject to the authority of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) in Europe, UNRRA facilitated repatriation of non-German refugees under Allied control, administering hundreds of displaced persons camps in Germany, Italy, and Austria. Twenty-three volunteer relief agencies worked through the UNRRA, including the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, ORT, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). The International Refugee Organization succeeded UNRRA in 1947 in caring for some 650,000 remaining displaced persons.

Ustaša/Ustaše (also anglicized: Ustasha): This Croatian fascist party controlled the Independent State of Croatia, as a puppet state of Nazi Germany, from 1941 to 1945 and helped to implement the Holocaust in Croatia. Under leader Ante Pavelić, the Croatian state persecuted its Serb, Jewish, and Roma populations. Thirty thousand Jews and 325,000 to 333,000 Serbs were murdered in the territory of the Independent State of Croatia under the Ustaša government.

Versailles Treaty: Drafted by the victors in World War I and signed by Reich officials amid widespread German protests in June 1919, the Versailles Treaty laid out the conditions of the German defeat. The treaty imposed harsh financial sanctions, territorial demands, and military limitations on Germany, undermining the troubled democratic Weimar Republic. Many blamed the treaty’s provisions for having provided the essential precondition for the Nazi Party’s success, but other domestic factors also proved critical in contributing to the demise of Germany’s Weimar democracy.

See Conan Fisher and Alan Sharp, After the Versailles Treaty: Enforcement, Compliance, Contested Identities (London: Routledge, 2008).

Vichy France: Following the German defeat of France in May 1940, French and German officials signed an armistice on June 22 of that year. Under its terms, northern France came under direct German occupation. Southern France remained unoccupied and was governed by a French administration, headquartered in the city of Vichy. In July the French National Assembly voted to suspend the constitution of the Third Republic and placed the new “Vichy regime” under the leadership of the aging Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain. Officially neutral, Vichy France collaborated closely with Germany. In the autumn of 1940, Vichy administrators began to promulgate antisemitic legislation closely patterned on that of German anti-Jewish decrees and ordinances in place in the German-occupied zone. In March 1941, a central agency, the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs (Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives), was established to coordinate anti-Jewish legislation and policy. Thousands of Jews were interned under deplorable conditions in French-administered detention camps, where at least three thousand individuals died during the war years. As deportation of Jews from western Europe began, German officials, aided by French police, conducted roundups of Jews in both occupied and unoccupied zones of France throughout the summer of 1942. In November 1942, German troops occupied Vichy’s formerly “free” zone.

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).

Volk: Acquiring currency from romantic writers in the nineteenth century, the German word Volk, meaning “folk” or “people,” became a catchword used by National Socialists to define a nation or people united by culture, language, and ethnicity. For Nazi ideologues, it suggested a “community of the blood” in racial terms.

Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans): This National Socialist term included people of German ethnic origin who lived outside the borders of the German Reich and were not Reich citizens. Large communities of ethnic Germans lived in the Baltic countries and in southeastern and eastern Europe. Nazi ideologues were particularly eager to integrate these individuals into the Volksgemeinschaft. Following the invasion of Poland, German authorities established a central registration bureau, the German People’s List (Deutsche Volksliste, or DVL), to register ethnic Germans. The Ethnic Germans’ Central Agency (Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, or VoMi) organized the spoliation of property from Jews and Poles and its redistribution to ethnic Germans. In line with Reich policy of Germanization, thousands of ethnic Germans were resettled in German-annexed territories of the Reich, either voluntarily or under compulsion.

See Doris Bergen, “The Nazi Concept of ‘Volksdeutsche’ and the Exacerbation of Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, 1939–45,” Journal of Contemporary History 29, no. 4 (October 1994): 569–82.

Volksgemeinschaft: This was the Nazi term for the German ethnic and racial community, as defined by National Socialist ideology.

Volksschule: This is a primary school in German-speaking lands.

Waffen-SS: The Waffen-SS represented the military wing of the SS, itself a Nazi Party organ. In accordance with Adolf Hitler’s wishes, the Waffen-SS was never incorporated into the regular German army. Its thirty-eight divisions fought beside the regular army (Wehrmacht). It was also a multiethnic force, as nearly 60 percent of its troops were foreign recruits and volunteers by war’s end. Waffen-SS divisions were implicated in numerous war crimes, including the Malmedy, Ardeatine, and Oradour-sur-Glane massacres.

Wannsee Conference: On January 20, 1942, fifteen high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials met at a villa in the Wannsee suburb of Berlin to discuss and coordinate the implementation of the “Final Solution.” Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, convened the Wannsee Conference to secure support from government ministries and other interested agencies. The participants did not deliberate whether such a plan should be undertaken but instead discussed the implementation of a policy decision already made at the highest level of the Nazi regime.

See Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002).

Warsaw ghetto: On October 12, 1940, the Germans decreed the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto. Containing over four hundred thousand inhabitants, the ghetto was sealed off from the rest of the city in November 1940. Food allotments rationed to the ghetto by the German civilian authorities were not sufficient to sustain life; between 1940 and mid-1942, eighty-three thousand Jews died of starvation and disease. From July 22 until September 12, 1942, German SS and police units carried out mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto, sending 265,000 Jews to the Treblinka killing center. On April 19, 1943, German authorities commenced finally to liquidate the ghetto. Led by the Jewish Fighting Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa), ghetto fighters and residents resisted for nearly a month, mounting the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. German troops overcame the insurgency on May 16, 1943, deporting forty-two thousand Warsaw Jews to forced labor camps and killing centers. Perhaps as many as several thousand Warsaw Jews continued to live in hiding on the “Aryan side” of Warsaw after the liquidation of the ghetto.

See Barbara Engelking and Lacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

Wartheland/Warthegau: The Reichsgau of Wartheland (Reichsgau of Posen until 1940) was one of four incorporated territories of the Reich that were part of prewar Poland but annexed by the Nazi state following the Polish defeat in 1939. German authorities marked the Warthegau for Germanization. The native Polish and Jewish populations were forcibly resettled in the non-incorporated territory of the Reich known as the General Government, while ethnic Germans were resettled in the Warthegau territory in order to restructure the region ethnically.

Wasser, Hersh and Bluma (1912–1980 and 1912–1990): Hersh Wasser played an important leadership role in the Warsaw ghetto and was active as secretary of the Oneg Shabbat archive. After the war, Wasser helped to recover much of the archive’s materials, which had been buried in milk cans and other containers within the Warsaw ghetto. Along with his wife, Bluma, a teacher and contributor to the archive, Wasser emigrated to Israel, where he served as director of the J. L. Peretz Publishing House
See Hersh Wasser, “Daily Entries of Hersh Wasser,” ed. and trans. Joseph Kermish, in Yad Vashem Studies 15 (1983): 201–82.

Wehrmacht: The Wehrmacht (defense force) included the combined German armed forces from 1935 until 1945. It comprised the Heer (army), the Kriegsmarine (navy), and the Luftwaffe (air force).

Weimar Republic: This German democracy formed at the end of World War I was named after the city in which its national constitution was adopted in February 1919. Following a phase of relative internal stability, the Weimar Republic underwent a massive crisis, triggered by the worldwide economic downturn in 1929. Elite manipulation of the republic’s constitution, combined with the economic crisis, produced the rapid erosion of political support for democratic parties. Against this backdrop, conservative elites negotiated Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January 30, 1933.

See Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993).

Westerbork: The Dutch government established Westerbork in the Dutch province of Drenthe in October 1939 to intern Jewish refugees who had entered the Netherlands illegally. The camp continued to function after the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940. In 1941, it had a population of eleven hundred Jewish refugees, mainly from Germany. From 1942 to 1944, Westerbork served as a transit camp for Dutch Jews before their deportation to concentration camps and killing centers in German-occupied Poland. Westerbork was liberated on April 12, 1945, by Canadian forces.

Yad Vashem: Located on the Mount of Remembrance (Har Hazikaron) in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem is Israel’s official remembrance authority to commemorate, document, research, and educate concerning the Holocaust. In 1953, the Israeli Knesset enacted the Law of the Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority proposed by Education Minister Ben-Zion Dinur. Among its activities, the institution is responsible for awarding the title “Righteous Among the Nations” to non-Jewish individuals who, at personal risk to themselves, aided Jews during the Holocaust.

See Bella Gutterman and Avner Shalev, To Bear Witness: Holocaust Remembrance at Yad Vashem (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005); James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

YIVO (Yiddisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, or Jewish Scientific Institute): The YIVO Institute was founded in Vilna, Poland (today Vilnius, Lithuania), in 1925 to document and research the language, literature, history, and culture of eastern European Jewry. In 1940, YIVO moved its headquarters to New York City. Today its library holds over 385,000 books and periodicals in twelve major languages.

Żegota (Council for the Aid to Jews; Rada Pomocy Żydom, or RPŻ): This secret organization was created in the fall of 1942 by the Bureau for Jewish Affairs of the Polish government in exile to assist Jews in hiding in occupied Poland with financial support, housing, employment, medical care, forged documentation, and child welfare. The organization predominantly comprised non-Jewish social and political activists. At least four thousand Jews received direct assistance from Żegota, and tens of thousands more benefited under its auspices.

See Irene Tomaszewski and Tecia Werbowski, Żegota: The Council for Aid to Jews in Occupied Poland, 1942–1945 (Montreal: Price-Patterson Ltd., 1994) and David Engel, Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1943–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

Zelkowicz, Josef (1897–1944): Born in Konstantynow, near Łódź, Josef Zelkowicz began to write for Yiddish newspapers and publications in the 1920s. In 1929 he became a member of the board and staff of the YIVO Institute branch in Łódź. Incarcerated in the Łódź ghetto, he became a teacher of Yiddish and a leading writer and archivist of The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto. Zelkowicz also kept a personal diary, twenty-seven notebooks of which are now reposited in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. In August 1944, Zelkowicz was deported to Auschwitz during the liquidation of the Łódź ghetto and was murdered there.

See Josef Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days: Writings from the Lodz Ghetto, ed. Michal Unger, trans. Naftali Greenwood (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002).

Złoty: This unit of Polish currency comprises one hundred groszy. During the German occupation of Poland in World War II, the złoty was the official currency of the General Government and was pegged at a fixed exchange rate to the German Reichsmark.

Zyklon B: The Nazi authorities used this lethal hydrogen cyanide (prussic acid) gas as a method of mass killing in the Nazi concentration camp system. First used on September 3, 1941, in a test gassing of 650 Soviet prisoners of war and 200 ailing prisoners at Auschwitz, Zyklon B, in pellet form, was procured from private chemical firms that employed the acid as a pesticide for fumigation. Nazi authorities had previously used carbon monoxide gas as a means of gas killing and continued to do so at the camps of Operation Reinhard. Zyklon B was utilized to kill predominantly Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz II–Birkenau and Majdanek.