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| Preferred name of the Gypsies “Rom people” Nazi associated them with criminality and degeneracy. The Gypsy groups towards which the Nazis most consistently followed a policy of annihilation that included murdering even babies and old people. Anti-Gypsyism was an old, familiar hatred in Europe, so with regard to the Gypsies too, Nazi Germany could draw on long-standing prejudices. They moved from India during the middle Ages. The Sinti are group of Gypsies primarily based in German-speaking Europe. It is hard to determine whether they are a racial, ethnic, or social group that is whether they are defined by family relationships with one another, language and tradition or lifestyle. Himmler was fascinated by them. They experienced much of what the Jews did during the Holocaust, they were targeted for murder. Black badges |
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| Making people into the perfect race through “Germanization.” Some of the people that were persecuted could be considered for “aryanization” if they were had the right qualifications and not pure blood of what they were before. |
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| They were labeled as a “sect” or a “cult.” Because they emphasized the Old Testament and believed Jews had to return to the Holy Land before the world would end, they were accused of being pro-Jewish and Zionist. Their door-to-door preaching made they easy to identify and were considered annoying and unpopular. Also disliked because they would refuse to serve in the military. They proved remarkably strong against assault. In all, 25 thousand JWs were killed in German camps and prisons btw 1933 and 1945. German authorities viewed them more as an annoyance then a major threat. Inside the camp they sometimes functioned as personal servants to the SS. |
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| In the summer of 1938, delegates from thirty-two countries met at the French resort of Evian. Roosevelt chose not to send a high-level official, such as the secretary of state, to Evian; instead, Myron C. Taylor, a businessman and close friend of Roosevelt's, represented the U.S. at the conference. During the nine-day meeting, delegate after delegate rose to express sympathy for the refugees. But most countries, including the United States and Britain, offered excuses for not letting in more refugees. Responding to Evian, the German government was able to state with great pleasure how "astounding" it was that foreign countries criticized Germany for their treatment of the Jews, but none of them wanted to open the doors to them when "the opportunity offer[ed]." The fact that the conference did not pass a resolution condemning the German treatment of Jews was widely used in Nazi propaganda.[2] The lack of action further emboldened Hitler in his assault on European Jewry. |
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| Reich Committee for Registration of Serious Hereditarily-and-Congenitally-Based Diseases |
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| Inspired by the Knauer case where children could be considered “unworthy of life,” Hitler authorized Brandt and Bouhler to recruit groups of doctors who formed this committee. By 1939 they required all midwives and doctors to report the existence of any child with deformities. It passed the forms on to three pediatricians. They would then mark each form with a plus or minus sign to indicate whether that child would die or be allowed to live. They were afraid some people would not support them but they still found people to participate. The response they perceived indicated that it was safe to go even further in attacks on people considered handicapped. This lead to the Euthanasia program and the T-4 program. |
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| Head of Hitler’s personal staff in the Nazi party. Hitler instructed him, along with Bouhler, to inform the doctors involved that they could kill the child from the Knauer Case. He was head of the Reich Committee as well as the children euthanasia program. |
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| Reich Security Head Office, was a subordinate organization of the SS. Created by Heinrich Himmler on September 22, 1939 through the merger of the SD or SA the Gestapo, Secret State Police and the Criminal Police. The organization's stated duty was to fight all "enemies of the Reich" within and outside the borders of Nazi Germany. Included within the rubric of "enemies" were Jews, Gypsies and other "racially undesirables" as well as Communists and other secret organization members such as Freemasons; thus the RSHA coordinated activities among a number of different agencies with wide-ranging responsibilities. The first director of the RSHA was Reinhard Heydrich, who led the organization until his assassination on June 4, 1942. Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner replaced him for the remainder of World War II. The director of the RSHA oversaw the Einsatzgruppen death squads that followed the invasion forces of the German army into the eastern territories. |
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Germany lost about ten percent of their territory, much of it fairly recently acquired like Alsace and Lorraine. Contrary to what is often said, the treaty did not blame Germany for the war itself. Article 231, often referred to as the “war guilt clause,” was in fact not a moral judgment but a general statement stipulating that Germany was responsible for paying for damages in the places outside Germany where most of the fighting had occurred. Germany only paid a very small amount of the bill that it was originally given. They also had to limit their military and they had to demilitarize the area bordering france known as the Rhine Lands Signed on June 28th, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was the peace agreement that occurred at the end of World War I. The terms of the treaty were decided upon by the leaders of France, Italy, United Kingdom, and the United States. Under the terms of the Treaty, Germany was to claim full responsibility for the war by paying very unreasonable war reparations, Germany had to demilitarize its territory along the Rhine River, was required to diminish its military power, and was forbidden to unite with Austria. Having not been included in deciding the terms of the Treaty, Germany strongly protested it. In a way France was kind of getting back at Germany for a Treaty Germany forced them to sign. The Treaty of Versailles, however, was much more unreasonable for Germany. The restriction of German military power under the Treaty eventually led to the Agricultural Tractor Program instituted under Hitler’s Regime, which was a cover for building tanks. |
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| Head of the Jewish Council in Lodz, was even more blatant than the other members of the council that would give themselves more power than they should have. He had money and stamps printed bearing his image, he encouraged a kind of cult of personality around himself. Still he tried to save Jews in “their ghetto” not merely to expand their own power. In December 1941 German authorities demanded he hand over 20 thousand members of his community for “special treatment.” Aware that selection most likely meant death, he and his committee tried to fill their list with outsiders and people considered asocial. Among those early victims was the remainder of five thousand Gypsies who had been sent to Lodz from the Reich. They would be sent to Chelmno. |
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| Code name for the 22nd of June 1941 invasion of Soviet Union by German troops. This step crossed the line to what Hitler called “war of annihilation”. An estimated 27 million Soviet citizens were killed, the majority of them civilians. On the third anniversary of this, the Soviets launched an offensive attack against the German Army Group Center. |
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| 1941“Special action groups,” mobile killing units. Includes between five hundred and one thousand men each, many of them well educated, lawyers and others. They worked together with more numerous German units as the Order Police. They had orders from Heydrich to kill Jews, prominent Communists, and anyone suspected of sabotage. Officially their goal was to combat Bolshevism and prevent guerilla warfare. Their killing pattern was usually rounding up the Jews in a given area using various ruses to deceive hem and relying on local collaborators for denunciations. The Germans ordered large pits dug in some convenient area. Often they forced the prisoners themselves to dig what would be their own graves. At gunpoint, made them undress then shot them directly into the pit. They killed about a million people even before construction of killing centers for gassing had begun. |
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| Biggest slaughter carried out by the Einsatzgruppen. In just two days in September 1941, German mobile killing unit and local collaborators shot more than thirty thousand Jews and an unknown number of people at Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of the Ukrainian city at Kiev. After, this area was used for a killing field throughout the occupation of Ukraine. Estimated killing as high as one hundred thousand people. |
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| Drafted in 1941 by several people of whom included historian Theodore Scheider, General Plan East was a call for Germans and ethnic Germans to settle vast areas of Eastern Europe, where they would produce food and babies for the “Aryan master race.” To make such settlements possible, the plan demanded expulsion of those currently living there. Those tens of millions of people, most of them Slavs, were to be forced into less desirable areas, allowed to die of starvation and disease, or turned into slaves for the German empire. According to this plan, Jews were to disappear altogether. This plan envisioned “Germanization” of an enormous territory that stretched from the old German Reich all the way to the Ural Mountains. |
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| Became a member of the SS in 1933. n November 9, 1939, Globocnik was appointed SS and Police Leader in the Lublin district of the General Government. Globocnik was responsible for: Liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto, which contained about 500,000 Jews, the largest Jewish community in Europe and the second largest in the world after New York, liquidating the Bialystok Ghetto, which stood out for its strong resistance to German occupation, resettling a large quantity of Poles under the premise of ethnic cleansing, the network of Arbeitslager labor camps, both small and large in the Lublin district. He was also in charge of over 45,000 Jewish laborers. In 1941 Globocnik received a verbal order from Himmler to start immediate construction work on Belzec, the first extermination camp in the General Government. The construction of three more extermination camps, Sobibór and Maidanek in the Lublin district, and Treblinka at Małkinia Górna, followed in 1942. All in all, Globocnik was responsible for killing more than 1.5 million people throughout Europe. |
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| Led by Heydrich, there were representatives from all of the offices and agencies at the German government, military, and Nazi Party who had a direct hand in the killing process. High officials from the Foreign were on hand as were representatives of the SS, Einsatzgruppen, and Han Frank from the General Government from Poland. Adolph Eichmann produced the official report. They focused on Jews as the top priority of Nazi destruction. Eichmann’s report makes it clear that all 11 millions Jews in Europe were targeted for murder. This conference marked another step in the killing process. Mass murder was already under way when the conference met, but at Wannsee the SS asserted its leadership in the annihilation of the Jews. Heydrich needed the cooperation of the other agencies and offices represented, but he made it clear who called the shots. Participate at the conference also discussed methods of killing. The centers with gas chambers emerged as their means of choice. Instead of bringing the killers to their victims, it was decided that the victims should be transported to their killers. Accordingly, construction of new killing centers began within months. This was more of a process report, rather than a blue print. |
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| This operation was the construction of three killing centers, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka in honor of Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s right hand man who conducted the Wannsee Conference. |
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| Member of the Polish Underground joined army in ’39 then taken prisoner by the Soviets. Escaped and became a member of the underground. In fall 1942 he was charged with a mission to London. He was to carry a report to the Polish government-in-exile that described the situation in German-occupied Poland. Two Jewish leaders asked him to carry a report for them as well. They took him to a satellite killing center and saw the whole fate of the Jews in Poland. He delivered the message and met personally with Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt in the US and sought journalists. People just did not comprehend the information. |
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| was one of very few Sonderkommandos to have survived Auschwitz, the largest Nazi German extermination camp. Sent to the camp in 1942. Assigned to work in the construction of crematoriums and installation of gas chambers, Müller witnessed "the families, the townships and the cities of Jewish people come", and was ordered burn the dead bodies in crematories. His extraordinary situation of cremating corpses was the only reason the Nazis kept him alive. Müller and other workers had no choice but to do what they were told, as there was no choice since the Nazis would never let them free to reveal the secrets of their mass gassings and cremations. His role after the mass gassings was to enter the chambers with other workers and strip bodies of their clothes. These clothes were then disinfected and any valuables found in them were given to SS officials. He did try to commit suicide by going into a gas chamber but a woman talked him out of it. |
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Building contractor in Lodz. Served in the Polish army for eighteen months in 1932-1933. Deported to Treblinka in October of 1942. He was assigned as a slave worker while his wife and mother-in-law were immediately sent to the gas chambers. half of term missing |
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| Was a French bishop and ordained in 1920 as a priest. He wrote letters condemning the Nazi deportation of Jews in summer 1942. Pierre continued to oppose the Nazi policies culminating in a fiery sermon in his cathedral in which he condemned the "Cruel and inhuman treatment of one of our fellow men in 1944. He was arrested the night after the sermon by the Gestapo. He was sent to a concentration camp where he spent ten weeks and then was released and returned to his parish. After war he went back to being a bishop and retired in 1970, dying seven years later. |
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| The gentile wives of those German Jewish men gathered in the Rosenstrasse to protest the arrest of their husbands and demand their release. Sympathizers joined them until there were several thousand people milled about. Hitler and Goebbels were furious. But there did not dare order police to open fire on a crowd of Germans. Instead the allowed the men to be released. Many of the internees of the Rosenstrasse survived the war. The account was written in the book Resistance of the Heart. |
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| By 1943, 80% of the Warsaw ghetto was already gone, most of them murdered at Treblinka in the summer of 1942. The Jewish Fighting organization had fewer than five hundred fighters. Armed only with gasoline bombs, hand grenades, pistols, one or two submachine guns, and about ten rifles, they must have seemed unlikely to accomplish anything other than rapid mass suicide. In January 1943 German SS planned to liquidate what was left of the Warsaw ghetto. To their surprise they met with organized resistance from ghetto Jews. Unwilling to risk casualties they gave up the attempt a few days later. Fur months later on April 19, 1943, the Germans returned much better prepared. More than two thousand men came with armored vehicles, artillery, flamethrowers, heavy-caliber guns, and even aircraft. For their part Warsaw Jews had prepared and elaborate system of bunkers and underground passages. Determined to make a stand they held off the Germans for four weeks. The SS burned down the buildings, dynamited, and smoked out the Jews bunkers until they won the upper hand. |
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| Operation Harest Festival |
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| Fall 1943m the Germans launched a new offensive against the remaining Jews of Poland. This was its code name. Within just a few days in November Germans and their accomplices massacred forty-two thousand Jews in the Lublin area. The Harvest Festival relied heavily on mass shootings. In special “Jew Hunting,” the German Order Police and Einsatzgruppen worked with local collaborators to locate and kill many Jews as they could. By the end of 1943, only a few thousand Jews remained alive in Germany occupied Eastern Europe. Many of those Jews were in hiding or fighting in partisan units. German officials kept some alive in the Lodz ghetto for economic reasons, and a few survived in work camps. |
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| In the winter of 1942 a handful of Catholic students at eh University of Munich formed this organization. The key figures were a brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl. Under this name, the Scholls and their associates and printed a series of leaflets decrying the crimes of Nazism. The last issue, in February ’43, was called “The spirit Lives!” In it they protested the moral destruction of German youth. Nazism, they wrote, had turned Germany young people into godless, shameless, unscrupulous murders. Police caught Hans and Sophie along with three of their friends and a professor. They were interrogated and trued for spreading malicious rumors against the state. The siblings were executed in Feb. 1943. Their university said nothing. |
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| was one of the thirty-eight divisions fielded by the Waffen-SS during World War II. It is one of the most well known and researched of all the SS divisions. 'Das Reich' was composed of some of the most trained and battle-hardened troops in the world at the time. It served from the invasion of France and took part in several major battles on the Eastern Front (particularly in the battle of Prokhorovka against The 5th Guards Tank Army at the titanic battle of Kursk), before it was pulled back to France and took part in the fighting in Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge and the last, desperate fighting in Hungary and Austria. But, perhaps, the division is most infamous for the massacre of 642 French civilians in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, on 10 June 1944.The symbol for the Das Reich division was the wolf's hook or Wolfsangel rune. |
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| A Swedish businessman and diplomat who rescued as many as one hundred thousand Hungarian Jews from deportation. Using money raised largely from the Jewish community in the United States. He set up safe houses under the jurisdiction of the Swedish embassy, issued Swedish passports, bribed German and Hungarian officials, and even rescued some Jews from transports slated to Auschwitz. At the end of the war he wound up in Soviet hands. His fate is unknown but it seems likely that he was sent to Siberia as a suspected spy and perished there. |
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| Another Hungarian survivor, who recorded her experiences in Seeds of Sarah. She landed in Auschwitz with her mother and young aunt. Somehow the three women managed to stay together. Once Judith faced down an SS man who trued to send her to one side of a selection, her mother to another. He let her go with her mother. Camp functionaries offered her a position as kapo, but refused. Judith, her mother and her aunt were among the Hungarian Jews taken out of Auschwitz and sent as slave laborers to Germany. Beaten half-starved and terrified of rape, she lived through the final stages of the war. Later she married and American soldier and moved to Maine, where she taught mathematics and served as dean of students at Bates College until she retired. |
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| Nuremberg War Crimes Trial |
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| The International Military Tribunal with the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, a joint effort of all the Allies, served this purpose. Contrary to what detractors claimed, the trails of twenty-one major war criminals and a handful of central Nazi German organizations at Nuremberg was not a sham “victors’ justice” or a reflection of some Allied notion of German “collective guilt.” Although the trials were not perfect, and Allied cooperation was severely strained at times, they were real legal proceeding, with witnesses, massive amounts of documentation, and counsels for the defense-and without torture. Some individuals and organizations were acquired, and those convicted received varying sentences including death sentences in about half of the cases. The most famous defended, Hitler’s favorite, Herman Goring, committed suicide in his cell before the order for his execution could be carried out. These trials were just step one. |
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| German annexation of Austria on March 1938. Most austrians didn't oppose the invasion. In fact, most showed strong sings of antisemitism. |
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| Jew girl in vienna. Her mother made her go to the movies even though she didn't want to go. She saw nazi girls at the theatre and they shamed her. |
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| Ethnic German minority in czechoslovakia told by nazis to complain of mistreatment by czechs so hitler had excuse to invade czechoslovakia. |
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| boy who shot nazi offical at embassy in paris cuz his parents were mistreated on the night of broken glass and dumped at the German-Poland border. This gave the nazis an excuse to crack down on jews and made the jews look bad. |
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| German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact |
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| August 1939. Declared public protestations of friendship and non aggression between them. The two countries agreed on dividing the invasion of poland in half. Hitler intended to break this pact. It was just to buy him time to wipe out the other smaller countries first. |
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| in 1939, cuba agreed to allow some jews in from europe. When they arrived on ship to cuba, the cuban government refused to let them dock. The st. louis sailed all along the florida coast and no one would let them dock. The ship returned to europe and most of the jews on the ship didn't survive the war. |
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| man wrote to hitler that he wanted his deformed child killed. This gave hitler the idea that eventually led to the T-4 program |
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| Leader of the General Government |
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| Key site of nazi brutality. Mass killings of jews after 1941 |
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| Head of german Reich Security Main Office. Ordered ss and police to kill all jews in german-occupied poland on september 7, 1939. Assasinated on June 4, 1942. |
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| Organized transports of jews to general government from vienna, gilesia, and czech. Motivated by career rather than by antisemetism |
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| Issued statement denouncing killing innocent people because of mental or physical defects. |
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| General who wrote letter to hitler dissapproving of german soldiers' behavior towards jews such as raping, and stealing from them. He warned that their behavior was counter productive. Hitler made fun of him. |
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| Forced jews in polish territories into ghettos to be concentrated and isolated. Typhus, tiberculosis and other diseases spread. little room to live. |
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| Set up by german officials in ghettos to administer aspects of daily lives of the ghettos. Assigned certain jews to execute orders to the ghetto on behalf of the Germans. Those on the board were caught in the middle between their fellow jews and the German government. |
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| A town that had been under soviet occupation. Half of the town killed the other half, which was made up of 15000 jews. Polish accused jews of collaborating with the soviets. |
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| Polish Nationalist Army, mostly antisemetic but helped jews occasionally. Passed out guns to jewish underground in warsaw. |
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| Polish rescue organization. They provided aid, food and medication to jews in poland. Forged many documents. Saved 40-50,000 jews |
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| A jewish underground fighting organization for women, young, elderly, and unarmed. In western belorussia, led by Tuvia Bielski |
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| A jewish underground fighting organization for women, young, elderly, and unarmed. In western belorussia, led by Tuvia Bielski |
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| Headed by Dr. Leonardo Conti. Experimented on institutionalized adults with mental illnesses and disabilities. Used injections, poison and gassing. 275,000 handicapped were murdered by 1945 |
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| Cardinal August von Galen |
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| Catholic bishop of Munster. Preached a sermon of disproval of handicapped killings. Nazi's were angry but didn't kill him because he was too well respected |
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