Holocaust Ch 5, 6

Star of David

All defined Jews inside Nazi Germany in 1941 were required to wear this which made them open targets

Charles de Gaulle

French General who refused to accept defeat; denounced new French government for armistice with Germany; emerged as leader of the Free French Forces who escaped to London

ghettoization

broke up established communities and forced into close contact people who often had little in common;

Kindertransport

rescue mission organized by private citizents that took place prior to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Great Britain took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. The children were placed in British foster homes, hostels, schools and farms. Often they were the only members of their families who survived the Holocaust

Wermacht

regular German military-were most fierce in Yugoslavia during WWII

Home Army

"AK" or Polish Nationalist Army; underground army whose leaders were prewar Polish officers; well organized and equipped but not particularly sympathetic to the sufferings of the Jews.

Einsatzgruppen

"special action groups," Mobile killing units" had explicit instruction from Heydrich to kill Jews, prominent Communists, and anyone suspected of sabotage or anti-Ger man activity. Systematic mass-killings - shot into huge graves sometimes dug by Jews themselves; about a million killed this way before gassing centers started

Untermenschen

"subhumans"

Blitzkrieg

A war at lightning speed

Wannsee Conference

was a meeting of senior officials of Nazi Germany, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The purpose of the conference, called by director of the SS Reinhard Heydrich, was to ensure the cooperation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of the final solution to the Jewish question, whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be deported to Poland and murdered. Conference attendees included representatives from several government ministries, including state secretaries from the Foreign Office, the justice, interior, and state ministries, and representatives from the Schutzstaffel (SS). In the course of the meeting, Heydrich outlined how European Jews would be rounded up from west to east and sent to extermination camps in the General Government (the occupied part of Poland), where they would be killed.

Winston Churchill

British prime minister who rallied the British population against Nazi Germany; his rousing words helped strengthen and inspire British determination for the "Battle of Britain"

Bishop of Munster

Cardinal August Count von Galen; took a stand against the euthanasia program by preaching a sermon that called it a "crime against humanity." The sermon was duplicated and circulated all ocross Germany and abroad by christian churches. Though Nazi leaders were furious, Galen was too popular and well-know to risk alienating Germans, so he kept his post.

Rotterdam

Dutch city in which Germany bombed civilians in May of 1940 in an attempt to terrorize the Dutch into surrender. They destroyed the center of the city and killed hundreds of civillians. For the allies, the bombing provided an early manifestation of German brutality and introduced an new kind of warfare; unlimited war from the air

Battle of Britain

Late summer-early fall 1940, In July Luftwaffe began massive air attacks on British air and naval installations. For next 2 moths, hundreds of planes fought over Britain, but Germans couldn't gain mastery as expected. In September, Hitler postponed invasion two days after Royal Airforce shot down 60 of his aircraft. The plan was to defeat Soviet Union, then come back to a weakened Britain and easily take victory

Three Power Pact

Pact entered by Germany with Italy and Japan in 1940, cooordination minimal but for time being the countries committed to aid one another against allies. In 1941, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Finland, Bulgaria, and Croatia joined "enemies of my enemies are my friends"- disastrously false

Reprisals

Roused hatred of the Germans in Yugoslavia as Germany used them as an excuse to massacre hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs reguardless of age or sex. The idea was that for every one German whom Yugoslav partisans attacked or killed, German authorities ordered a certain number of Yugoslavs shot. The ratio varied from 1 to 50 to 1 to 200. Based on fear or suspicion of partisan action

Neutral countries

Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden, and Turkey- These countries played different roles in the war- some provided escape routes for Jews, some turned refugees away(Switzerland), while some took them in (Sweden). Some profited greatly from war. Swiss banks grew rich on stolen gold and deposits from Jews desperate to save money from german predators. Turkey offered refuge to jews in exchange for taxes and provided and escape route for Nazi criminals after the war. No nation UNTOUCHED

Babi Yar

biggest massacre carried out by Einsatzgruppen. In just 2 day in Sept, 1941, German mobile killing units and local collaborators shot more than 30,000 Jews and an unknown # of other people there; a ravine on the outskirts of Ukrainian city of Kiev. It destroyed the thriving Jewish community in Kiev and its surrounding area. Germans continued to use the area for killing throughout Ukraine occupation, estimates of killed there as high as 1o0,000. The massacre became emblamatic of German brutality in Soviet Union, and a monument for victims was erected. However, the monument does ***not mention that most killed were Jews.

Operation Barbarossa

code name for the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany on June 22, 1941-the final line to what Hitler called a "war of annihilation"was drawn. Extremely bloody, 27 million Soviet citizens killed, majority civilians.** It was a war whose goal was total destruction of the Soviet Union, seizure of its land, colonization, enslavement, and murder of its people, in short, establishment of the Nazi new order in Europe

genocide

deliberate effort at total annihilation of identifiable groups of people

phony war

early phase of British/French war on Germany declared 9-3-39,because of British and French agreement to Poland but remained fairly inactive until mid 1940; in contrast to Blitzkrieg

Dunkirk

ended "phony war" when a battle between allies and Germany took place at this French seaport between May 26 and June 4 1940.

Anne Frank

eyewitness to German conquest of Netherlands; young girl who lived in Amsterdam at time of conquest, but whose family wer German Jews who had left Frakfurt for Holland after Hitler gained power. It wasn't far enough and since they couldn't get out of Europe in 1940, they tried to disappear in Amsterdam using her father's contacts to prepare a hiding place for the family; her diary was written from this "secret annex" between July 1942 and August 1944. She eventually died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945 anyway

Balkans

first place Germans went when they again turned east in 1941; they needed to bail out Mussolini who had gotten in over his head when he sent Italian forces in to conquer Greece in 1940- also linked to preparation for attack of Soviet Union because Hitler & generals believed it was necessary to control these states in order to secure their southeastern flank and safeguard access to Romanian oil.

Reinard Heydrick

head of German Reich Security Main Office; issued an order to police and SS to destroy leadership class in Poland and expel all Jews from areas in German hands; "the nobility, clergy, and Jews must be killed." His views were in line with those of his bosses-Hitler and Himmler

Chaim Rumkowski

head of Jewish council at Lodz: one of the most controversial figures in the history of the Holocaust. Known mockingly as "King Chaim," he was granted unprecedented powers by the Nazi government, which authorized him to "take all necessary measures" to maintain order in the ghetto. Its rumored that in the end, he was killed by Jews.

Marshal Henri Philippe Petain

head of the Vichy State of France, old man and hero of WWI; he and his prime minister, Pierre Laval, would become symbols of French collaboration with Nazi Germany

Czerniakow

head of the Warsaw Ghetto Judenrat. He committed suicide in the Warsaw Ghetto on 23 July 1942 by swallowing a cyanide pill, a day after the commencement of mass extermination of Jews known as the Grossaktion Warsaw.

judenrat

jewish council; could not escape German goals and priorities; controversy

Josef Stalin

leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917, Stalin was appointed general secretary of the party's Central Committee in 1922 until the post was abolished in 1952, concurrently serving as the Premier of the Soviet Union from 1941 onward. In August 1939, Stalin entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that divided their influence and territory within Eastern Europe, resulting in their invasion of Poland in September of that year, but Germany later violated the agreement and launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Despite heavy human and territorial losses, Soviet forces managed to halt the Nazi incursion after the decisive Battles of Moscow and Stalingrad. After defeating the Axis powers on the Eastern Front, the Red Army captured Berlin in May 1945, effectively ending the war in Europe for the Allies. The Soviet Union subsequently emerged as one of two recognized world superpowers, the other being the United States.

Quisling

local Norwegian fascist leader who would become known by is people as a "german puppet" after Norwegian govt fled to London, he took power, but his name became synonymous with "cowardly collaborator" when he worked with the enemy. His own people would execute him as a traitor in 1945

Hans Frank

longtime associate of Hitler who lead the General Government in Poland into a key site of Nazi brutality

Communist underground Army

more open to Polish Jews, but weak and ill-organized

divide and conquer

nazi tactic of stirring up hatred among those over whom they ruled in order to advance their own cause

strength through joy

organized bus tours to the ghettos so that members of the supposed master race could see the degeneracy of their alleged inferiors

Zyklon B

pesticide also known as hydrogen cyanide that Rudolph Hoess and assistants first experimented when dealing with Soviet POWs at Auschwitz in early September 1941. 600 Soviet prisoners were gassed to avoid cumbersome task of shooting so many.

KGB

political police that were known as the "people's commissariat for State Security" after 1941; part of Stalinest system of terror along with NKVD (People's comissariat for Internal Affairs);

T-4 Program

program of forced euthanasia in wartime Nazi Germany. Under the program, physicians were directed to judge patients "incurably sick, by critical medical examination," and then administer to these patients a "mercy death" In October 1939 Hitler signed a "euthanasia decree" backdated to 1 September 1939 that authorized Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, and Karl Brandt, to carry out the program of euthanasia

general government

ruled the remaining part of Poland since the west was led by German 3rd Reich; it included Warsaw, krakow, and Lublin as its major cities and was lead by Governor General Dr. Hans Frank; it became a key site of nazi brutality as much of the mass killing of jews after 1941 would be done there; plans to reduce Poles to slaves of Germany also found early implementation there

Pope Pius XII

stayed quiet though people begged him to take action in the fall of 1939 when Germans slaughtered Polics priests and Catholic leaders, but spoke up in Dec. 1940 when he denounced "killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects." because Nazi killing of the disabled had become knowns

banality of evil

term first used by Hannah Arendt in her book "Eichmann in Jerusalem." The role that "greed" played in the Holocaust. Her thesis is that Eichmann was not a fanatic or sociopath, but an extremely average person who relied on cliché rather than thinking for himself and was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology. Banality, in this sense, is not that Eichmann's actions were ordinary, or that there is a potential Eichmann in all of us, but that his actions were motivated by a sort of stupidity which was wholly unexceptional. She never denied that Eichmann was an anti-semite, nor that he was fully responsible for his actions, but argued that these characteristics were secondary to his stupidity.

Lodz Ghetto

the second-largest ghetto (after the Warsaw Ghetto) established for Jews and Romani in German-occupied Poland. Situated in the city of Łódź and originally intended as a temporary gathering point for Jews, the ghetto was transformed into a major industrial centre, manufacturing much needed supplies for Nazi Germany and especially for the German Army. Led by Chaim Rumkowski

Adolf Eichmann

took Nazi initiatives in his own hands by being an ambitious bureacrat in Heydrich's Reich Security Main Office. He began to transport Jews to General government and played a central role in organizing forced immigration of Austrian Jews in 1938 and Czech Jews a year later. In 1942 and 43 he was intstrumental in arranging transportation of Jews all over Europe to killing centers; claimed he wasn't antisemitic at trial but career motivated

Bielski Partisans

underground organization in western Belorussia that accepted the old, women, and children. They were a forest community that combined fighting and rescue activities lead by the dynamic Tuvia Bielski; there were more than 1200 Jews in it by 1944

Zegota

underground organization that is an example of Polish rescue efforts; codename for "Counsel to Aid Jews"; it provided aid, food, and medication to Jews all over Poland. The scores of forged documents produced by it is credited with saving the lives of 40-50,000 Jews

Vichy France

unoccupied zone of France after France and Germany signed armistice agreement in June 1940. The terms broke France into two zones; one Germany occupied and this area was not; it was named after the small, southern city that was its capital