HIS 121 Final

judenfrei

"Jew-free" or "free of Jews" were first in the 19th Century used later in the time of National Socialism spread anti-Jewish terms that referred to an area without Jewish inhabitants. In the language of National Socialism, the term was used mostly as a euphemism: Organizations, occupations, economic sectors, regions and towns were declared free of Jews after the local Jews had been deported or expelled. Occasionally, the term was also used to denote areas of life as free of Jewish influence.

Einsatzgruppen

(German for "task forces", "deployment groups"; singular Einsatzgruppe; official full name Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD) were Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany that were responsible for mass killings, primarily by shooting, during World War II. The Einsatzgruppen had a leading role in the implementation of the Final Solution of the Jewish question in territories conquered by Nazi Germany. Almost all of the people they killed were civilians, beginning with the Polish intelligentsia and swiftly progressing to Soviet political commissars, Jews, and Gypsies throughout Eastern Europe.

The Blitz

(shortened from German 'Blitzkrieg', "lightning war") was the period of sustained strategic bombing of the United Kingdom by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Between 7 September 1940 and 21 May 1941 there were major aerial raids (attacks in which more than 100 tonnes of high explosives were dropped) on 16 British cities. Over a period of 267 days (almost 37 weeks), London was attacked 71 times, Birmingham, Liverpool and Plymouth eight times, Bristol six, Glasgow five, Southampton four, Portsmouth and Hull three, and there was also at least one large raid on another eight cities. The bombing did not achieve its intended goals of demoralising the British into surrender or significantly damaging their war economy. The eight months of bombing never seriously hampered British production, and the war industries continued to operate and expand. The Blitz did not facilitate Operation Sea Lion, the planned German invasion of Britain.

the "Great Calamity"

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"proper place"

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pogrom

A pogrom is a violent riot aimed at massacre or persecution of an ethnic or religious group, particularly one aimed at Jews. The term originally entered the English language to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire (mostly within the Pale of Settlement in present-day Ukraine and Belarus). Similar attacks against Jews at other times and places also became retrospectively known as pogroms. The word is now also sometimes used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish ethnic or religious groups.

Arthur "Bomber" Harris

Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief (AOC-in-C) RAF Bomber Command during the latter half of the Second World War. In 1942, the British Cabinet agreed to the "area bombing" of German cities. Harris was tasked with implementing Churchill's policy and supported the development of tactics and technology to perform the task more effectively. Harris assisted British Chief of the Air Staff Marshal of the Royal Air Force Charles Portal in carrying out the United Kingdom's most devastating attacks against the German infrastructure and population, including the Bombing of Dresden. Harris's continued preference for area bombing over precision targeting in the last year of the war remains controversial, partly because by this time many senior Allied air commanders thought it less effective and partly for the large number of civilian casualties and destruction this strategy caused in Continental Europe.

comfort women

Comfort women were women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army before and during World War II. The name "comfort women" is a translation of the Japanese euphemism ianfu and the similar Korean term wianbu. Ianfu is a euphemism for shōfu whose meaning is "prostitute(s)". Estimates vary as to how many women were involved, with numbers ranging from as low as 20,000 to as high as 360,000 to 410,000, in Chinese sources but the exact numbers are still being researched and debated. Many of the women were from occupied countries, including Korea, China, and the Philippines, although women from Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan (then a Japanese dependency), Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies), East Timor (then Portuguese Timor), and other Japanese-occupied territories were used for military "comfort stations". Stations were located in Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, then Malaya, Thailand, Burma, New Guinea, Hong Kong, Macau, and French Indochina. A smaller number of women of European origin from the Netherlands and Australia were also involved. According to testimony, young women from countries in Imperial Japanese custody were abducted from their homes. In many cases, women were also lured with promises of work in factories or restaurants; once recruited, the women were incarcerated in comfort stations in foreign lands.

Dachau

Dachau concentration camp was the first of the Nazi concentration camps opened in Germany, intended to hold political prisoners. It is located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory southeast of the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km (10 mi) northwest of Munich in the state of Bavaria, in southern Germany. Opened in 1933 by Heinrich Himmler, its purpose was enlarged to include forced labor, and eventually, the imprisonment of Jews, ordinary German and Austrian criminals, and eventually foreign nationals from countries that Germany occupied or invaded. The Dachau camp system grew to include nearly 100 sub-camps, which were mostly work camps or "Arbeits Kommandos," and were located throughout southern Germany and Austria. The camps were liberated by U.S. forces in the spring of 1945. Prisoners lived in constant fear of brutal treatment and terror detention including standing cells, floggings, the so-called tree or pole hanging, and standing at attention for extremely long periods. There were 32,000 documented deaths at the camp, and thousands that are undocumented.

Genocide vs. Mass Murder

Genocide is the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation. Mass murder is the act of murdering many people, typically simultaneously or over a relatively short period of time.

"precision" bombing vs. "area" bombing

Precision bombing refers to the attempted aerial bombing of a target with some degree of accuracy, with the aim of limiting collateral damage. An example would be destroying a single building in a built up area causing minimal damage to the surroundings. In military aviation, area bombardment (or area bombing) is a type of aerial bombardment that targeted indiscriminately at a large area, such as a city block or an entire city. The term "area bombing" came into prominence during World War II.

B-29

The B-29 Superfortress is a four-engine propeller-driven heavy bomber designed by Boeing that was flown primarily by the United States toward the end of World War II and during the Korean War. It was one of the largest aircraft to have seen service during World War II and a very advanced bomber for its time, with features such as a pressurized cabin, an electronic fire-control system, and remote-controlled machine-gun turrets. The name "Superfortress" was derived from that of its well-known predecessor, the B-17 Flying Fortress. Although designed as a high-altitude strategic bomber, and initially used in this role against the Empire of Japan, these attacks proved to be disappointing; as a result the B-29 became the primary aircraft used in the American firebombing campaign, and was used extensively in low-altitude night-time incendiary bombing missions. One of the B-29's final roles during World War II was carrying out the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Bataan

The Battle of Bataan represented the most intense phase of Imperial Japan's invasion of the Philippines during World War II. In January 1942, forces of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy invaded Luzon along with several islands in the Philippine archipelago after the bombing of the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. Despite almost complete lack of supplies and materiel, Filipino-American forces managed to fight the Japanese to a bloody 3-month standstill, engaging them initially in a fighting retreat southward and finally in a last stand, eventually costing the latter a valuable time to immediately conquer the rest of the Pacific from the Allies. The surrender after the fall of Bataan was the largest surrender in American and Filipino military history, and was the largest United States surrender since the Civil War's Battle of Harper's Ferry. Soon afterwards, Filipino and American prisoners of war were forced into the Bataan Death March.

Stalingrad

The Battle of Stalingrad (23 August 1942 - 2 February 1943) was a major battle of World War II in which Nazi Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad in the south-western Soviet Union. Marked by constant close quarters combat and direct assaults on civilians by air raids, it is the single largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. The heavy losses inflicted on the Wehrmacht make it arguably the most strategically decisive battle of the whole war. It was a turning point in the European theatre of World War II-the German forces never regained the initiative in the East and withdrew a vast military force from the West to replace their losses.

Dresden Firestorm (Feb. 1945)

The Bombing of Dresden was an attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, that took place in the final months of the Second World War in the European Theater. In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city. The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed over 1,600 acres (6.5 km2) of the city center. An estimated 22,700 to 25,000 people were killed. Three more USAAF air raids followed, two occurring on 2 March and 17 April aimed at the city's railroad marshaling yard and one small raid on 17 April aimed at industrial areas. Post-war discussion of whether or not the attacks were justified has led to the bombing becoming one of the moral causes célèbres of the war.

General Plan East

The Generalplan Ost (Master Plan East, GPO) was a secret Nazi German plan for the colonization of Central and Eastern Europe. Implementation would have necessitated genocide and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale to be undertaken in territories occupied by Germany during World War II. The plan entailed the enslavement, expulsion, and/or extermination of most Slavic peoples in Europe who the Nazis viewed as subhumans and non-Aryan. The programme operational guidelines, prepared in the years 1939-1942, were based on the policy of Lebensraum designed by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement, as well as being a fulfillment of the Drang nach Osten (English: Drive towards the East) ideology of German expansion to the east. As such, it was intended to be a part of the New Order in Europe.

Guernica

The German bombers appeared in the skies over Guernica in the late afternoon of April 26, 1937 and immediately transformed the sleepy Spanish market town into an everlasting symbol of the atrocity of war. Unbeknownst to the residents of Guernica, they had been slated by their attackers to become guinea pigs in an experiment designed to determine just what it would take to bomb a city into oblivion.

Nanking

The Nanking Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, was an episode of mass murder and mass rape committed by Japanese troops against the residents of Nanking during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The massacre occurred during a six-week period starting from December 13, 1937, the day that the Japanese captured Nanking, which was then the Chinese capital. During this period, between 40,000 to over 300,000 Chinese civilians and disarmed combatants were murdered by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army. Widespread rape and looting also occurred. Several of the key perpetrators of the atrocities, at the time labelled as war crimes, were later tried and found guilty at the International Military Tribunal of the Far East and the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal, and were executed.

Nuremberg Laws

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were antisemitic laws in Nazi Germany introduced at the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. After the takeover of power in 1933 by Hitler, Nazism became an official ideology incorporating antisemitism as a form of scientific racism. The Nuremberg Laws classified people with four German grandparents as "German or kindred blood", while people were classified as Jews if they descended from three or four Jewish grandparents. A person with one or two Jewish grandparents was a Mischling, a crossbreed, of "mixed blood". The Nuremberg Laws classified people with "German or related blood" as "racially acceptable". These laws deprived Jews and other non-Aryans of German citizenship and prohibited racially mixed sexual relations and marriages between Germans and Jews. On 26 November 1935, the laws were extended to "Gypsies, Negroes or their bastard offspring". These laws were both an attempt to return the Jews of 20th-century Germany to the position that Jews had held before their emancipation in the 19th century; although in the 19th century Jews could have evaded restrictions by converting, this was no longer possible. The laws were a legal embodiment of an already existing Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses.

Red Army

The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, was the army and the air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, which after 1922 was called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The army was established immediately after the 1917 October Revolution (Red October or Bolshevik Revolution); in which the Bolsheviks raised an army to oppose the military confederations (especially the combined groups summarized under the preamble White Army) of their adversaries, during the Russian Civil War. Beginning in February 1946, the Red Army, along with the Soviet Navy, embodied the main component of the Soviet Armed Forces; taking the official name "The Soviet Army", until its dissolution in December 1991. The Red Army is credited as being the decisive land force in the Allied victory in the European theatre of World War II. During operations on the Eastern Front, it defeated 75%-80% of the German land forces deployed in the war.

Zeppelin raids

The best-known German strategic bombing campaign during World War I was the campaign against England, although strategic bombing raids were carried out or attempted on other fronts. The main campaign against England started in January 1915 using airships. From then until the end of World War I the German Navy and Army Air Services mounted over 50 bombing raids on the United Kingdom. Although the direct military effect of the raids was small, they caused widespread alarm, leading to the diversion of substantial resources from the Western Front and some disruption to industrial production.

Enola Gay

a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named for Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, who selected the aircraft while it was still on the assembly line. On 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb. The bomb, code-named "Little Boy", was targeted at the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and caused unprecedented destruction.

"the drowned and the saved"

a book of essays on life in the Nazi Vernichtungslager (extermination camps) by Italian-Jewish author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, drawing on his personal experience as an inmate of Auschwitz.

Ostdeutsche

a native or inhabitant of the former republic of East Germany

"Global policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus"

a secret Japanese government report created by the Ministry of Health and Welfare's Population Problems Research Center, and completed on July 1, 1943. The document, comprising six volumes totaling 3,127 pages, deals with race theory in general, and the rationale behind policies adopted by wartime Japan towards other races, while also providing a vision of Asia under Japanese control

Kristallnacht

also referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, was a pogrom (a series of coordinated attacks) against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and Austria on 9-10 November 1938, carried out by SA paramilitary forces and non-Jewish civilians. German authorities looked on without intervening. The name Kristallnacht comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues had their windows smashed. 30,000 were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools were ransacked, as the attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Over 1,000 synagogues were burned (95 in Vienna alone) and over 7,000 Jewish businesses destroyed or damaged. Kristallnacht was followed by additional economic and political persecution of Jews, and is viewed by historians as part of Nazi Germany's broader racial policy, and the beginning of the Final Solution and The Holocaust.

forced labor

any work or services which people are forced to do against their will under the threat of some form punishment. Almost all slavery practices, including trafficking in people and bonded labor, contain some element of forced labor.

summary executions (SS/NKVD)

both sides execute own soldiers to maintain discipline-SS German, NKVD Russian secret police

Curtis LeMay

general in the United States Air Force and the vice presidential running mate of American Independent Party presidential candidate George Wallace in 1968. Curtis LeMay is credited with designing and implementing an effective, but also controversial, systematic strategic bombing campaign in the Pacific theater of World War II. During the war, he was known for planning and executing a massive bombing campaign against cities in Japan and a crippling minelaying campaign in Japan's internal waterways. After the war, he initiated the Berlin airlift, then reorganized the Strategic Air Command (SAC) into an effective instrument of nuclear war. He served as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force from 1961 until his retirement in 1965.

Untermenschen

is a term that became infamous when the Nazis used it to describe "inferior people" often referred to as "the masses from the East," that is Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs (including Poles, Serbs, Belarusians, Russians, and Rusyns). The term was also applied to black people. Jewish people were to be exterminated in the Holocaust, just as Slavs in Generalplan Ost, who were destined to be removed from European territory under German control through murder and ethnic cleansing. While the Nazis were inconsistent in the implementation of their policy, its genocidal death toll was in tens of millions of victims.

Bushido

literally "the way of the warrior", is a Japanese word for the way of the samurai life, loosely analogous to the concept of chivalry. Bushido, a modern term rather than a historical one, originates from the samurai moral values, most commonly stressing some combination of frugality, loyalty, martial arts mastery, and honor unto death.

Firebombing of Tokyo (March 9, 1945)

often referred to as a series of firebombing raids, was conducted as part of the air raids on Japan by the United States Army Air Forces during the Pacific campaigns of World War II. The US first mounted a small-scale raid on Tokyo in April 1942. Strategic bombing and urban area bombing began in 1944 after the long-range B-29 Superfortress bomber entered service, first deployed from China and thereafter the Mariana Islands. B-29 raids from those islands began on 17 November 1944 and lasted until 15 August 1945, the day Japan capitulated.Damage to Tokyo's heavy industry was slight until firebombing destroyed much of the light industry that was used as an integral source for small machine parts and time-intensive processes. Firebombing also killed or made homeless many workers who had been taking part in war industry. Over 50% of Tokyo's industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city's output in half. The destruction and damage was especially severe in the eastern areas of the city.

Zyklon B

the trade name of a cyanide-based pesticide invented in Germany in the early 1920s. It consisted of hydrogen cyanide (prussic acid), a warning eye irritant, and one of several adsorbents such as diatomaceous earth. The product is infamous for its use by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust to murder a million people in gas chambers installed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, and other extermination camps.

"scientific" racism

the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to support or justify the belief in racism, racial inferiority, or racial superiority, or alternatively the practice of classifying individuals of different phenotypes into discrete races.

"Three Alls" Policy

was a Japanese scorched earth policy adopted in China during World War II, the three "alls" being "kill all, burn all, loot all"[. This policy was designed as retaliation against the Chinese for the Communist-led Hundred Regiments Offensive in December 1940. Contemporary Japanese documents referred to the policy as "The Burn to Ash Strategy". Chinese soldiers would destroy the homes and fields of their own civilians in order to wipe out any possible supplies or shelter that could be utilised by the over-extended Japanese troops. Almost all historians agree that Imperial Japanese troops widely and indiscriminately committed war crimes against the Chinese people, citing a vast literature of evidence and documentation.

Kursk

was a World War II engagement between German and Soviet forces on the Eastern Front near Kursk in the Soviet Union during July and August 1943. The German offensive was code-named Operation Citadel and led to one of the largest armored clashes in history, the Battle of Prokhorovka. The German offensive was countered by two Soviet counter-offensives, Operation Polkovodets Rumyantsev and Operation Kutuzov. For the Germans, the battle represented the final strategic offensive they were able to mount in the east. For the Soviets, the decisive victory gave the Red Army the strategic initiative for the rest of the war.

Unit 731

was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japanese personnel. Unit 731 was based at the Pingfang district of Harbin, the largest city in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (now Northeast China). Between 3,000 and 12,000 men, women, and children—from which around 600 every year were provided by the Kempeitai—died during the human experimentation conducted by Unit 731 at the camp based in Pingfang alone, which does not include victims from other medical experimentation sites. Many of the researchers involved in Unit 731 went on to prominent careers in post-war politics, academia, business, and medicine. Some were arrested by Soviet forces and tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in 1949; most remained under American Forces occupation. These researchers were not tried for war crimes by the Americans so that the information and experience gained in bio-weapons could be co-opted into the U.S. biological warfare program.

Treblinka

was an extermination camp built by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was located near the village of Treblinka in the modern-day Masovian Voivodeship north-east of Warsaw. The camp operated officially between 23 July 1942 and 19 October 1943 as part of Operation Reinhard, the most deadly phase of the Final Solution. During this time, it is estimated that somewhere between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were killed in its gas chambers, along with 2,000 Romani people. More Jews were killed at Treblinka than at any other Nazi extermination camp apart from Auschwitz. Managed by the German SS and the Eastern European Trawnikis, the camp consisted of two separate units: Treblinka I and the Treblinka II extermination camp. The first was a forced-labor camp whose prisoners worked in the gravel pit or irrigation area and in the forest, where they cut wood to fuel the crematoria. Between 1941 and 1944, more than half of its 20,000 inmates died from summary executions, hunger, disease and mistreatment. The second camp, Treblinka II, was designed purely for extermination. A small number of men who were not killed immediately upon arrival became its Jewish slave-labor units, forced to bury the victims' bodies in mass graves. These bodies were exhumed in 1943 and then cremated on massive open-air pyres along with the bodies of new victims. Gassing operations at Treblinka II ended in October 1943 following a revolt by the Sonderkommandos in early August. Several ethnic German SS guards were killed and some 200 prisoners managed to cross to the other side of the fence, although fewer than a hundred survived the subsequent chase. The camp was dismantled ahead of the Soviet advance. A farmhouse for a watchman was built on the site in an attempt to hide the evidence of genocide.

Dunkirk

was an important battle that took place near Dunkirk, France, during the Second World War between the Allies and Germany. As part of the Battle of France on the Western Front, the Battle of Dunkirk was the defense and evacuation of British and allied forces in Europe from 26 May-4 June 1940.

the General Government

was an occupied area of the Second Republic of Poland that was under colonial administration of Nazi Germany during World War II, from 1939 to early 1945. The Nazi government designated the territory as a separate administrative region of the Third Reich. As of 1941 it included much of central and southern Poland and of modern-day western Ukraine. It included the major cities of Warsaw, Kraków and Lviv. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, the region of Eastern Galicia, formerly Polish territory which was invaded and annexed by the Soviet Union subsequent to the Nazi-Soviet pact, was incorporated into the General Government. The area was a colony rather than a puppet state; its rulers had no goal of cooperating with Poles or Ukrainians throughout the war, regardless of their political orientation. The authorities rarely even mentioned the name "Poland" in government correspondence. The only exception to this were the General Government's banknotes and coins (called zloty and grosz) minted in 1940. The government and administration of the General Government was composed entirely of Germans, with the intent that the area was to be colonised by German settlers who would reduce the Poles to the level of serfs.