THE HOLOCAUST – A GLOSSARY

AKTION (plural: AKTIONEN)

Nazi term for an operation in which members of a Jewish community were forcibly assembled
and then either deported to an extermination camp or shot locally.

AKTION REINHARD
Code name for the largest killing operation of the Holocaust in which at least 1.7 million Jews
(mainly from Poland) were murdered in the General Government between March 1942 and
November 1943. Most victims were murdered in Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka extermination
camps but at least 300,000 were shot.

ANIELEWICZ, MORDECHAI (1919-1943)

Commander of the Jewish Combat Organisation (ŻOB) during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Died, along with his girlfriend and many other ŻOB fighters, in a bunker during the fighting.

ANSCHLUSS
German annexation of Austria on 13th March 1938.

ANTISEMITISM
Hostility to or prejudice towards Jews.

‘ARYAN’
Term originally applied to speakers of Indo-European languages. The Nazis and other racists
used it to describe people of white European origin, especially northern Europeans.

AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU
Concentration and extermination camp in the Polish town of Oświęcim. Created as a
concentration camp for Polish political prisoners in 1940, it became an extermination camp in
early 1942. Eventually, it consisted of three main sections: Auschwitz I, the concentration camp;
Auschwitz II (Birkenau), an extermination and slave labour camp; Auschwitz III (Monowitz), a
slave labour camp. Auschwitz also had numerous sub-camps. More than 1.1 million people lost
 their lives in Auschwitz-Birkenau, including approximately 1 million Jews, 75,000 Poles, 21,000
Sinti and Roma, and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war.

BABI YAR
Ravine on the edge of Kiev in which 33,771 Jews were murdered on 29 th-30th September 1941.

BEŁŻEC
Extermination camp in the General Government region of Poland which operated between
March and December 1942. According to German figures, 434,508 Jews were deported to
Bełżec; two survived.

BERGEN-BELSEN
Concentration camp in north-western Germany, originally established in 1940 for prisoners of
war. From 1943 so-called ‘privileged’ Jews, such as holders of non-European passports, were
sent to Belsen. Tens of thousands of Jewish prisoners were evacuated from Auschwitz and
other camps to Belsen in 1944-45, leading to catastrophic overcrowding, starvation and a
typhus epidemic. An estimated 50,000 lost their lives, mainly in the very last months of the war.

BERLIN
Capital of Germany and, as such, the site of many of the key decisions which led to the
Holocaust. Berlin was also home to the largest Jewish population in Germany, numbering
around 160,000 people when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Most emigrated before the war
but around 60,000 were deported to ghettos and camps in the East from October 1941
onwards.

BIELSKI BROTHERS
Four Jewish brothers (led by the eldest, Tuvia) who formed a partisan group in forests near
Nowogródek in Poland (now Belarus) in early 1942. The Bielski partisans sheltered more than
1,200 Jews who had escaped from ghettos in a so-called ‘family camp’ until liberation.

CHEŁMNO
Extermination camp in the Warthegau region of Poland which initially operated between
December 1941 and March 1943. Reactivated in June 1944 for the liquidation of the Łódź
Ghetto. Victims were killed in gas vans. At least 152,000 Jews, along with around 5,000 Roma
from Austria, were murdered in Chełmno; six people survived.

CONCENTRATION CAMP
Prison camp in which inmates were forced to undertake hard labour. The first Nazi
concentration camps, with the exception of Dachau (created March 1933), were generally small
and temporary. From 1936 onwards larger camps such as Sachsenhausen (1936), Buchenwald
(1937) and Mauthausen (1938) were established, usually linked to economic enterprises run by
the SS. Most inmates were political opponents of the Nazis or so-called ‘asocials’ (such as gay
men, beggars and habitual criminals). Although more than 30,000 Jews were held in camps
after Kristallnacht in 1938, the concentration camps in Germany and Austria (unlike those in
Poland) had a limited role in the Holocaust until late 1944 when they began to receive tens of

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 thousands of prisoners evacuated from the camps in the East. This led to catastrophic
conditions in which huge numbers of Jews and others died.

DEATH MARCH
Name given to the forcible movement of prisoners (especially Jews) from the concentration and
labour camps in the East to camps in Germany from the autumn of 1944 onwards. Thousands
died on these marches from cold, hunger and shootings by the guards.

DISPLACED PERSONS (DP) CAMP

Camp established by the Allies after the Second World War, mainly for survivors of Nazi
persecution and refugees from eastern Europe whilst they awaited repatriation to their home
countries or resettlement in a new destination. Most DP camps were in Germany.

EICHMANN, ADOLF (1906-1962)

SS and SD official who was instrumental in perpetrating the Holocaust by organising the
deportation of Jews from across Europe to the extermination camps. Escaped to Argentina after
the war but was captured by the Israeli secret service in 1960. Tried and convicted in Jerusalem
in 1961; executed in 1962.

EINSATZGRUPPEN
Mobile SS killing squads made up of members of the Gestapo, criminal police and SD. During
the invasion of Poland, Einsatzgruppen shot thousands of members of the Polish elites and, in
some cases, Jews. Larger units were formed for Operation Barbarossa and shot hundreds of
thousands of Soviet Jews in the course of 1941. Similar massacres were also perpetrated by
police battalions, other German units and local collaborators.

ERNTEFEST
Literally ‘Harvest Festival’ (German). Code name for the largest single massacre of the
Holocaust in which approximately 42,000 Jewish prisoners were shot in Majdanek and other
labour camps in the Lublin region of the General Government on 3rd-4th November 1943.

‘EUTHANASIA’
Term normally used to describe a painless, voluntary death for the terminally ill. The Nazis used
the term for the programme of state-sponsored murder of around 200,000 people with mental
and physical disabilities in Germany and Austria: 70,000 were victims of the gas chambers of
the T4 programme; others (including disabled children) were killed through deliberate starvation
or lethal injection. The Nazis also murdered an unknown number of disabled people in Poland
during the war.

ÉVIAN CONFERENCE
Meeting of 32 countries in France in July 1938 to discuss the question of German Jewish
refugees. Accomplished little as most countries were reluctant to accept large numbers.

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 EXTERMINATION CAMP
Nazi camp for the mass murder of Jews, primarily by poison gas. Four camps were created in
Poland in 1941-42 which existed solely for the murder of Jews: Bełżec, Chełmno, Sobibór and
Treblinka. Almost every person brought to these camps was murdered immediately: only a
small number of Jews from each transport were selected to work in the camp (e.g. sorting the
property of victims, disposing of the bodies) and most of them were soon murdered. In addition,
the already existing Auschwitz-Birkenau camp became an extermination camp in spring 1942.
Because Birkenau was also a slave labour camp, larger numbers of Jews were selected to
work, giving them a slightly higher chance of survival. A number of other camps, notably
Majdanek and Maly Trostenets, have sometimes also been described as extermination camps.

‘FINAL SOLUTION’ (German: ‘ENDLÖSUNG’)

Nazi euphemism for the plan to murder all European Jews.

FORCED LABOUR CAMP

Nazi camp, usually for Jews, in which inmates were used as slave labour. The first forced labour
camps for Jews were established in occupied Poland in 1940. As Nazi policy evolved to
systematic mass murder in late 1941 and early 1942, new forced labour camps were created in
Poland and the Soviet Union which held Jews who had been selected for work rather than
transport to killing sites. It was instead intended that these Jews would be worked to death.
Most forced labour camps were liquidated in 1943 although a small number survived into 1944.

FRANK, ANNE (1929-1945)

Daughter of a middle class German-Jewish businessman. The Franks moved from Frankfurt to
Amsterdam when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Once deportations from the Netherlands
began in 1942, the family went in to hiding, helped by the employees of Anne’s father Otto.
They were betrayed in August 1944 and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau where Anne’s mother
Edith died. Anne and her elder sister Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen in October 1944
where both died of typhus in the spring of 1945. The diary that Anne kept whilst in hiding was
published by Otto, who had survived Auschwitz, in the 1950s.

GAS VAN
Vehicle whose exhaust was redirected to its rear compartment. Originally developed to kill
psychiatric patients in Poland in 1940, from 1941 gas vans were used for the murder of Jews at
Chełmno as well as in Belgrade and several locations in the Soviet Union.

GENERAL GOVERNMENT
Political unit, essentially a German colony, created in 1939 by the Nazis from those areas of
Poland which were not directly incorporated into Germany or the Soviet Union. Included many
of Poland’s major Jewish communities such as Warsaw, Kraków and Lublin.

GENOCIDE
Term first coined in the Second World War by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin to describe the
deliberate and systematic destruction of a religious, racial, national or cultural group.

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 GESTAPO
Nazi secret police force created in 1933. Controlled by Himmler from 1934.

GHETTO
Section of a town or city where Jews were forced to live. Ghettos had existed in many parts of
Europe in the Medieval and the Early Modern periods. They were revived by the Germans
following the invasion of Poland: the first Nazi ghetto was created in Piotrków Trybunalski in
October 1939. More ghettos were established in 1940 although widespread ghettoisation only
began in 1941. Ghettos were also created in the Soviet Union from late 1941 onwards, usually
for Jews of working age who had survived the Einsatzgruppen massacres. Many, though not all,
ghettos were ‘closed’: i.e., surrounded by walls with exit forbidden. Ghettos were characterised
by overcrowding, hunger, disease and exploitation for slave labour. All, except the unique
ghetto of Terezín, were eventually liquidated with the Jews deported to extermination camps or
shot.

GLOBOCNIK, ODILO (1904-1945)

SS and Police Leader in the Lublin district of the General Government. A fanatical racist,
Globocnik was devoted to Himmler, who had saved his career after an earlier corruption
scandal. Working closely with Himmler, Globocnik initiated and implemented Aktion Reinhard.
Committed suicide in 1945 after capture by the British.

GOEBBELS, JOSEPH (1897-1945)

Nazi Minister of Propaganda and leader of the Nazi Party in Berlin. Organised the Kristallnacht
pogrom in 1938 and was instrumental in persuading Hitler to begin the deportation of German
Jews to the East in September 1941. Committed suicide in Berlin in 1945.

GÖRING, HERMANN (1893-1946)

Second most important man in the Nazi Party in the 1930s and the early stages of the Second
World War although his influence later waned. Held many offices including, from 1936,
Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan, making him virtual dictator of Germany’s economy. As
such he was heavily involved in economic measures against German Jews. In 1941, acting on
Hitler’s behalf, he instructed Heydrich to prepare a ‘total solution to the Jewish question’.
Captured at the end of the war and sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials; committed
suicide the night before he was due to be hanged.

‘GYPSIES’
Commonly used term, often considered pejorative, to describe the Romani people, an ethnic
group who trace their origins to northern India. Although Romani are stereotypically seen as
nomadic, many ‘Gypsies’ lived in settled communities. The principal Romani groups were Roma
and Sinti. The Nazis regarded ‘Gypsies’ as racially inferior and a danger to ‘Aryan’ society.
Although policy varied from country to country, around 220,000 Roma and Sinti were murdered
by the Nazis. Some Roma use the Romani term Porajmos (‘devouring’) to describe this
genocide.

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 HEYDRICH, REINHARD (1904-1942)
Head of the SD and later of the Gestapo and criminal police. As Himmler’s deputy, and also
under orders from Hitler and Göring, Heydrich oversaw the development of the ‘Final Solution’
in the key 1941-42 period and chaired the Wannsee Conference. In 1941 he was also
appointed Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. On 27th May 1942 he was shot in Prague by
members of the Czech resistance and died on 4th June; Aktion Reinhard was named in his
honour.

HIMMLER, HEINRICH (1900-1945)

Leader of the SS and, from 1936, chief of all police forces in Germany. Himmler used his
positions to control racial policy, especially once war broke out. As a result, he worked closely
with Hitler to take the decisions which led to the Holocaust, and the SS and police became the
principal, though not only, organisers of the murders. Committed suicide in 1945 after capture
by the British.

HITLER, ADOLF (1889-1945)

Leader of the Nazi Party and, from 30th January 1933, of Germany. Although Hitler’s laziness
and dislike of routine meant that he largely avoided day-to-day government business, he was
responsible for key decisions with regard to Jewish and foreign policy. Committed suicide in
Berlin in 1945.

HOESS, RUDOLF (1900-1947)

Career SS officer who was appointed as first commandant of Auschwitz in May 1940. Hoess
oversaw the camp’s expansion and its development into an extermination camp. Transferred in
late 1943, he returned to Auschwitz in spring 1944 to oversee the murder of the Jews of
Hungary. Sentenced to death by a Polish court in 1947 and subsequently hanged at Auschwitz.

HOLOCAUST
Literally ‘completely burnt sacrifice’ (Greek). Term most commonly used to describe the mass
murder of approximately 6 million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators. Although certain
other groups were victims of Nazi persecution and genocide, only Jews were targeted for
complete destruction. Thus, when used by historians, the term refers specifically to the murder
of Europe’s Jews rather than to Nazi persecution in general.

HOMOSEXUALS
The Nazis regarded homosexuality as a threat to the survival of the supposed ‘master race’
because it meant that there were men who were not fathering children. Consequently,
approximately 50,000 gay men in Germany were sent to prison or concentration camps.

JANOWSKA
Forced labour camp in the Polish city of Lwów (now L’viv in Ukraine). Created in late 1941, it
became a killing site during Aktion Reinhard. Around 70,000 Jews were murdered in Janowska.
Most were shot; others died from the appalling living and working conditions.

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 JASENOVAC
Concentration camp, nicknamed ‘the Auschwitz of the Balkans’, created and run by the Ustaše
regime in Croatia between 1941 and 1945. At least 70,000 people, most of them Serbs but also
including Jews and Roma, were murdered in Jasenovac and its sub-camps.

JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES
Religious group which originated in the USA. Witnesses refuse to salute the flag, serve in the
army or participate in politics. As a result, they were persecuted by the Nazis and several
thousand, mostly from Germany, were sent to prison or concentration camps.

‘JEWISH BADGE’
A distinctive sign, usually a Star of David, which Jews were forced to wear in most countries
under Nazi control, beginning with Poland in 1939. Depending on the country, it took the form of
an armband or a badge.

JEWISH COMBAT ORGANISATION (ŻOB)

Name of the principal resistance group in the Warsaw Ghetto. Created in 1942, the ŻOB played
the leading role in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Similar resistance groups in a number of other
ghettos, such as Kraków, took the same name.

JUDENRAT (plural: JUDENRÄTE)

Jewish council established by the Nazis to carry out their instructions. Most Judenräte tried to
balance this role with caring for the welfare of their communities.

KAPO
A prisoner chosen by the SS to oversee a group of prisoners in a concentration camp.

KARSKI, JAN (1914-2000)

Polish resistance activist. On behalf of the Polish underground, Karski visited the Warsaw
Ghetto and the Izbica transit ghetto in 1942. He then travelled to the UK and the USA where he
brought news of the Holocaust in Poland to political leaders such as President Roosevelt.

KAUNAS
City in Lithuania which served as the country’s capital between the wars. More than 15,000 local
Jews were shot in Kaunas in 1941, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The
remainder were held in a ghetto; most of its inmates were shot in 1943 or 1944, when the ghetto
was finally liquidated. The mass shootings in Kaunas mostly took place in a series of forts
around the city, notably the Ninth Fort. The victims of the Ninth Fort also included German and
French Jews who were deported there and shot on arrival.

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 KINDERTRANSPORT
Literally ‘children’s transport’ (German). Programme whereby the British government allowed
the admission of almost 10,000 mostly Jewish child refugees from central Europe following
Kristallnacht until the outbreak of war curtailed the operation. Because of immigration
restrictions, most of the children were unaccompanied and they had to be sponsored by welfare
agencies.

KORCZAK, JANUSZ (1878?-1942)

Pseudonym of Henryk Goldszmit, a Polish-Jewish educator, paediatrician and children’s author.
Korczak established an orphanage for Jewish children in Warsaw in 1911. The orphanage was
relocated with the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto in November 1940. Korczak, his co-workers
and the children were deported to their deaths at Treblinka in August 1942.

KOSSAK-SZCZUCKA, ZOFIA (1889-1968)

Polish Catholic nationalist writer who was widely regarded as an antisemite. Despite this,
Kossak-Szczuka authored the leaflet Protest, during the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto
to Treblinka in summer 1942, in which she called on Poles to save Jews. She subsequently
inspired the creation of Żegota, the largest rescue organisation of the Holocaust.

KRAKÓW
Polish city which was a major centre of European Jewish culture. Kraków was chosen by the
Nazis as the capital of the General Government, which contributed to the decision in 1940 to
expel most of the city’s almost 60,000 Jews. The remainder – around 15,000 – were forced into
a ghetto in March 1941; most were murdered at Bełżec in 1942. The ghetto was liquidated in
March 1943 when inhabitants were either shot or sent to Płaszów forced labour camp on the
edge of the city.

KRISTALLNACHT
‘Night of Broken Glass’ (German). Nationwide pogrom, organised by the Nazis, on the night of
9th-10th November 1938 in which Jewish businesses and homes were attacked and looted,
synagogues burned, and 91 people killed. More than 30,000 Jews were held in concentration
camps until they agreed to leave Germany. The pretext for the pogrom was the assassination of
a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jewish man whose parents had been deported by the
Nazis; in reality, a violent action against Jews had been planned for months.

LEVI, PRIMO (1919-1987)

Italian Jewish chemist who was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. His scientific background meant
that he was eventually selected to work in the IG Farben chemical factory attached to Auschwitz
III. His memoir If This is a Man (also published as Survival in Auschwitz) was one of the earliest
and best-known survivor accounts. Committed suicide in 1987.

ŁÓDŹ
Polish city which was home to Europe’s second largest pre-war Jewish population. A ghetto was
created in April 1940, containing 164,000 people. From October 1941 transports of German,
Austrian and Czech Jews were brought to the ghetto. Most inhabitants were murdered at

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 Chełmno in 1942. The ghetto was finally liquidated in the summer of 1944 with deportations to
Chełmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

LUBLIN
Polish city which was both a major Jewish cultural centre and the headquarters of Aktion
Reinhard. More than 30,000 Jews were forced into a ghetto in March 1941; almost all were
murdered a year later, through deportation to Bełżec or shooting locally, when the city became
the first target of Aktion Reinhard. The few thousand survivors were transferred to a new ghetto
which was liquidated in November 1942. Lublin was also the site of Majdanek concentration
camp and a network of forced labour camps for Jews.

MADAGASCAR PLAN
Nazi plan, developed in the summer of 1940, to deport all Jews from German-occupied Europe
to the French colony of Madagascar. Abandoned because Germany’s failure to defeat Britain
meant that it lacked the naval resources and security to carry out transports.

MAJDANEK
Concentration camp, created in the Polish city of Lublin in 1941, which predominantly held Jews
and Poles. Jewish prisoners were those selected for labour rather than deportation to Bełżec,
Sobibór or Treblinka. However, Majdanek itself became a killing site in late 1942. Approximately
78,000 prisoners died, 59,000 of them Jewish. Although Majdanek had gas chambers, many
victims were shot, including 18,000 Jews on one day (3rd November 1943) during the Erntefest.

MALY TROSTENETS
Camp originally created to hold Soviet POWs on a former collective farm outside Minsk in the
summer of 1941. Maly Trostenets became an extermination camp for Jews in the summer of
1942. Victims included both Belarusian Jews and German Jews deported to Minsk. Some were
murdered in gas vans; others were shot. It is estimated that around 60,000 were murdered.

MENGELE, JOSEF (1907-1979)

SS officer and doctor who served in Auschwitz-Birkenau where he conducted pseudo-medical
experiments on prisoners and was amongst the doctors who performed selections for the gas
chambers when new transports of Jews arrived. Escaped to South America after the war.

NAZI
Abbreviation, originally coined by political opponents, for the National Socialist German
Workers’ Party (NSDAP) and its members. Founded as the German Workers’ Party by Anton
Drexler in 1919, it took its more familiar name in 1920 and was led by Hitler from 1921 onwards.
The party’s core beliefs included antisemitism, racist nationalism, and hostility to democracy,
liberalism and socialism.

NAZI-SOVIET PACT
Treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed on 23 August 1939. Officially a non-
aggression agreement, the pact and the subsequent German-Soviet Friendship Treaty (28
September 1939) contained secret clauses which provided for the division of Poland and much

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 of the rest of eastern Europe between the two countries. When Hitler broke the pact by invading
the USSR in June 1941, all of the territory in Poland, the Baltic States and Romania which had
been occupied by the Soviets came under the control of Germany or its allies.

NUREMBERG LAWS
Two anti-Jewish laws enacted in September 1935 during the Nazi Party conference in
Nuremberg which provided the basis for removing Jews from all spheres of German life. The
Reich Citizenship Law effectively deprived Jews of German citizenship and associated rights.
The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour outlawed marriage and sexual
relations between Jews and non-Jews as well as prohibiting Jews from employing non-Jewish
female servants of childbearing age and displaying the German flag. Supplementary laws
defined who was a Jew, with a range of categories created for Germans of mixed ancestry.

NUREMBERG TRIALS
Name given to the trial of major Nazi war criminals before the International Military Tribunal
(representing Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the USA) between November 1945 and
October 1946 and to subsequent trials of senior Nazis, industrialists, generals and doctors
before US judges between 1946 and 1949.

ONEG SHABBAT
Code name, literally ‘joy of the Sabbath’ (Hebrew), of a project coordinated by the Jewish
historian Emanuel Ringelblum which collected materials on Jewish life in Warsaw between 1939
and 1943. The archive was buried in metal boxes and milk churns in three caches during the
destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 and 1943. Two of the caches were discovered after
the war.

OPERATION BARBAROSSA
Code name for the German invasion of the Soviet Union which began on 22 nd June 1941.

PARTISANS
Irregular soldiers involved in guerrilla warfare. Many Jewish partisan groups were formed in
Poland and the USSR during the war.

POGROM
Violent attack on a Jewish community, usually condoned or sponsored by the state.

POLICE BATTALION
Armed unit of German regular policemen. Along with the Einsatzgruppen, the police battalions
played a leading role in mass executions of Jews in eastern Europe.

PONARY (Polish), PONAR (Yiddish)

Forest outside Vilna where around 70,000 Jews from modern Lithuania and Belarus were shot
between the summer of 1941 and September 1943. Several thousand Poles were also shot.

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 PROTECTORATE OF BOHEMIA AND MORAVIA
Name given to the Czech territory occupied by Germany in March 1939.

RIGHTEOUS AMONG THE NATIONS

Title awarded by Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial museum and remembrance
authority, to non-Jews who rescued Jews from Nazi persecution and the Holocaust.

RINGELBLUM, EMANUEL (1900-1944)

Polish-Jewish historian and teacher who organised the Oneg Shabbat archives which attempted
to record life in the Warsaw Ghetto. Following the liquidation of the ghetto, Ringelblum went into
hiding. However, he was discovered and executed in 1944 along with 40 other Jews who had
shared his hiding place and two members of the Polish family who had been hiding them.

ROMA
Members of a ‘Gypsy’ ethnic group, concentrated mainly in central and eastern Europe.

RUMKOWSKI, CHAIM (1877-1944)

Controversial head of the Council of Elders (Jewish Council) in the Łódź Ghetto who hoped to
save part of the Jewish population by creating a ‘productive’ ghetto whose inhabitants worked in
essential industries. However, this meant complying with German orders for the deportation of
residents not capable of work. Some have seen Rumkowski as a traitor to the Jewish people;
others have argued that his strategy almost worked since Łódź survived far longer than any
other ghetto. When the ghetto was liquidated in the summer of 1944, Rumkowski was deported
to Auschwitz and murdered there.

SA
Paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, popularly referred to as ‘Brownshirts’ or ‘stormtroopers’.
Hitler murdered the SA’s leadership in 1934 because he saw them as a threat, and the
organisation’s influenced declined. Nonetheless, SA members continued to play a prominent
role in anti-Jewish violence, notably on Kristallnacht.

SCHINDLER, OSKAR (1908-1974)

German from the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia where he spied for Germany in the 1930s.
One of many German businessmen who saw the invasion of Poland as an opportunity to get
rich, Schindler took over an enamelware factory in Kraków where he employed Jewish forced
labourers. As the factory was deemed essential to the war effort, these workers had some
protection from deportation. When the SS decided to close it in 1944, Schindler secured the
removal of 1,200 of his workers to a new factory in Czechoslovakia, thereby saving their lives.

SD
SS intelligence agency, led by Heydrich.

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 ‘SELECTION’
Euphemism for the process of choosing victims for death in camps and ghettos by separating
them from those considered fit for work.

SHOAH
Literally ‘catastrophe’ (Hebrew). A term for the Holocaust preferred by many Jews.

SINTI
Members of a ‘Gypsy’ ethnic group who lived mainly in Germany.

SOBIBÓR
Extermination camp in the General Government region of Poland which operated between May
1942 and October 1943. At least 170,000 Jews were murdered in Sobibór. On 14 th October
1943 the inmates revolted and some 300 escaped; around 50 survived the war.

SONDERKOMMANDO
Jewish prisoners in the extermination camps who were forced to work in and around the gas
chambers.

SOVIET PRISONERS OF WAR

During the course of Operation Barbarossa, 5.7 million Red Army soldiers were taken prisoner
by Germany. The Nazis regarded them as both ideological and racial enemies. Around 3.3
million died in Nazi captivity, most from autumn 1941 to spring 1942 when they were held in
‘camps’ which were usually fenced off fields with no food or accommodation.

SS
Nazi Party organisation which was originally created as Hitler’s bodyguard. Under the
leadership of Himmler, the SS grew to become a ‘state within a state’ which controlled the
concentration camps and racial policy, ran its own businesses and had its own armed forces.

TEREZÍN (Czech), THERESIENSTADT (German)

Garrison town in northern Czechoslovakia which was transformed into a Jewish ghetto in late
1941. Terezín served both as a transit camp for deportations of Czech Jews to Auschwitz-
Birkenau and as a ‘model ghetto’ to which certain groups of German and Austrian Jews were
sent such as war veterans, partners in mixed marriages and prominent community leaders. In
this way, Terezín was intended to deceive public opinion and the international community,
notably the International Red Cross who inspected the ghetto in June 1944. In reality, 35,000
Jews died in Terezín and more than 80,000 were deported to extermination camps.

T4
Code name for the operation (approved by Hitler in October 1939) in which 70,000 German and
Austrian adults with disabilities were murdered in gas chambers at six killing centres, mostly

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 former hospitals, between 1939 and 1941. Officially ended in August 1941, partly because of
public protests, although killings of disabled people continued by other means to the end of the
war. Many T4 staff were transferred to Poland to run the Aktion Reinhard extermination camps.

THIRD REICH (German: DRITTES REICH)

Term used by the Nazis and by many historians to describe Germany under the Nazi regime
from 1933. ‘Reich’ means ‘empire’ or ‘realm’.

TRANSIT CAMP
Camp in which Jews were held prior to deportation to extermination camps. Examples included
Drancy (France), Mechelen (Belgium) and Westerbork (the Netherlands).

TRANSNISTRIA
Name given to a region of southern Ukraine occupied by Romania following Operation
Barbarossa in 1941. From the autumn of 1941 onwards, more than 150,000 Jews from modern
Moldova and southern Ukraine were deported by the Romanian government to makeshift
ghettos and camps in Transnistria. Tens of thousands lost their lives as a result of mass
shootings as well as starvation and disease.

TREBLINKA
Extermination camp in the General Government region of Poland which operated between July
1942 and August 1943. At least 780,000 Jews were murdered in Treblinka. On 2 nd August 1943
the inmates revolted and several hundred escaped; around 60 survived the war.

USTAŠE
Croatian Fascist movement, led by Ante Pavelić, which took control of the newly-created
Independent State of Croatia in April 1941, following the German dismemberment of
Yugoslavia. Without prompting from the Nazis, the Ustaše launched its own campaign of
genocide in the summer of 1941 which targeted Serbs, Jews and Roma. At least 300,000
people were murdered, most of them Serbs.

VILNA
Common anglicisation of the Polish city of Wilno (now Vilnius, capital of Lithuania), which was
one of the major centres of Jewish culture in Europe. The majority of the city’s almost 60,000
Jews were shot at Ponary in the summer and autumn of 1941 following the German invasion of
the Soviet Union. The remainder were forced into a small ghetto which was finally liquidated in
September 1943 when its inhabitants were either shot at Ponary or deported to labour camps in
Latvia and Estonia, where most subsequently died.

WALLENBERG, RAOUL (1912-??)

Swedish diplomat who, along with diplomats of other neutral countries, saved the lives of tens of
thousands of Hungarian Jews in 1944 by issuing passports which exempted them from
deportation. After the liberation of Budapest in 1945, he was arrested by the Soviet secret police
and later died in Soviet captivity.

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 WANNSEE CONFERENCE
Meeting of senior Nazi leaders and officials, chaired by Heydrich, on 20 th January 1942 at a villa
outside Berlin to discuss the ‘Final Solution’. The conference had two main purposes: to
coordinate all institutions involved in the Holocaust and to assert the control of the SS over the
process.

WARSAW
Capital of Poland and home to Europe’s largest pre-war Jewish population. A ghetto was
created in November 1940 which, at its peak in spring 1941, contained more than 430,000
Jews. More than 70,000 died as a result of starvation and disease. Between 22 nd July and 12th
September 1942 the Nazis carried out the ‘Great Aktion’ in which at least 235,000 Warsaw Jews
were deported to their deaths in Treblinka. When deportations resumed in 1943 they were met
with resistance, culminating in the ghetto uprising of 19th April to 16th May, the first significant
civilian rebellion anywhere in occupied Europe. Survivors of the uprising were sent to their
deaths in Treblinka or to labour camps in the Lublin region where most were later murdered in
the Erntefest.

WARTHEGAU
Region of western Poland, including Łódź, incorporated into Germany in 1939.

WEIMAR REPUBLIC
Popularly used term applied to the democratic republic which was established in Germany in
1919 and effectively abolished by the Nazis in 1933. The term derived from the city of Weimar,
where Germany’s new constitution was adopted in 1919.

WIESEL, ELIE (1928-2016)

Auschwitz survivor who was deported to the camp from Sighet in Hungary (now Sighetu
Marmaţiei in Romania). His memoir Night, which was first published in French in 1958, is one of
the best known Holocaust testimonies. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

ŻEGOTA
Code name of the Council to Aid Jews, established by the Polish underground in December
1942. Provided money and hiding places for Jews who had escaped from the ghettos. Only
organisation of its kind in occupied Europe.

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 BCM Box 7892, London WC1N 3XX
T. 020 7222 6822 F. 020 7233 0161
E. info@het.org.uk
www.het.org.uk

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