so-called Jewish Question; expression used to indicate that the Jews were a problem to be dealt with in Germany.

post-war trials against Nazi war criminals

a Catholic Church court to examine purity of faith

Withdrawing oneself to private life in hard societal circumstances

Persecuted Protestants especially in France from 1500 on. The Protestant Christians rescuing Jews in the village of Le-Chambon-Sur-Lignon were descendants of persecuted Huguenots.

As German troops entered in the Soviet territory in 1941, Jews were massacred in mass shootings hence the name. For instance, in a place called Babi Yar in Ukraine, about 30 000 Jews were mass murdered by shooting in three days in September 1941. The acts of murder were witnessed by locals, who sometimes watched the murder, as a sporting event and for instance by German army soldiers thus widening the circle of bystanders, and witnesses.

Denying, belittling, or distorting the Holocaust for anti-Semitic or political gain

Nazi youth organization

Christians refer to this as the Old Testament. Tanakh in Hebrew means the Torah, the Prophets (Nevi’im) and the Writings (Ketuvi’im).

a traditional term, sometimes perceived as pejorative, for Roma, View this term in the glossary a nomadic people whose ancestors migrated to Europe from India. Nazi Germany and its Axis partners persecuted and killed large numbers of Roma during the era of the Holocaust.

a separate and isolated area where the Jews lived in crowded conditions. The first ghetto was established in Venice, Italy in 1516.

Political Police in Nazi Germany

geno, Greek for people and cide, Latin for murder. Used to describe mass murders of ethnic, national, racial or religious groups around the world. The UN adopted its Convention on Genocide in 1948.

that part of German-occupied Poland not directly annexed to Germany, attached to German East Prussia, or incorporated into the German-occupied Soviet Union.

Nazi Policy and Plan to solve the ‘Jewish Question’ and murder the Jews of Europe

a political movement that exalts the collective nation, and often race, above the individual and that advocates: a centralized totalitarian state headed by a charismatic leader; expansion of the nation, preferably by military force; forcible suppression and sometimes physical annihilation of opponents both real and perceived.

Nazi camps designed exclusively for the speedy arrival and murder of the Jews. These are also known as ‘death camps’ and ‘killing centers’.

Charles Darwin’s (1809-1882) theory about the survival of the fittest by natural selection

“Euthanasia” (literally, “good death”) usually refers to the inducement of a painless death for a chronically or terminally ill individual. In Nazi usage, however, “euthanasia” was a euphemistic term for a clandestine program which targeted for systematic killing institutionalized mentally and physically disabled patients, without the consent of themselves or their families.

Hebrew for Land of Israel

A philosophical movement for individual freedoms 1680-1780

German for Final Solution, a Nazi policy and plan to murder the European Jews

“Stab in the Back” Myth according to which Germany lost WWI due to betrayal.

a WWII postwar refugee displaced by the war. Sometimes this term is used interchangeably with the word refugee.