Holocaust Terms

1. Auschwitz-the largest Nazi concentration, extermination, and labor camp located in Poland

2. The Final Solution - the Nazi plan to exterminate all the Jewish people in Europe

3. Concentration Camps - a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution.

4. Anti-Semitism-opposition and discrimination against the Jewish…the burning of a synagogue

5. Aryan - a person of pure German blood

6. The Fuhrer - Hitler’s title in Nazi Germany

7. Gas Chambers - airtight chambers where people were executed by the poison gas Zyklon B or carbon monoxide or…

8. Genocide - The Nazi Holocaust It began with a simple boycott of Jewish shops and ended in the gas chambers at Auschwitz as Adolf Hitler and his Nazi followers attempted to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe.

9. Gestapo - The Geheime Staatspolizei (German for Secret State Police, abbreviated “Gestapo”) was the secret police of Nazi Germany, and its main tool of oppression and destruction, which persecuted Germans, opponents of the regime, and Jews.

10. The Nazis revived the medieval ghetto in creating their compulsory "Jewish Quarter" (Wohnbezirk). The ghetto was a section of a city where all Jews from the surrounding areas were forced to reside.

11. The Holocaust is the planned systematic extermination of about 6 million Jewish people and millions of others by the Nazis from

12. Kristallnaght is known as the Night of Broken Glass. On November 9, 1938, nearly 200 synagogues were destroyed, over 8000 Jewish shops were destroyed, and tens of thousand of Jewish people were removed from Germany to concentration camps.

13. Dr. Josef Mengele (SS) officer and physician in Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. He was notorious for the selection of victims to be killed in the gas chambers and for performing unscientific and often deadly human experiments on prisoners.

14. Pogrom - an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular that of Jews in Russia or eastern Europe. Kristallnaght is a Pogrom.

15. The Nazi Party …The National Socialist German Workers' Party which practiced Nazism basing its platform on military, racial, antisemitic, and national policies. (1933)

16. Nuremberg Laws - the Nazis began the formation of a national community based on race, and racial cleansing by suppressing the Jewish, who would be stripped of their citizenship and civil rights and removed from German society

17. The Star of David was a sad symbol of the Holocaust when the Nazis forced Jews to wear an identifying yellow star. Actually, Jews were forced to wear special badges during the Middle Ages, both by Muslim and Christian authorities, and even in Israel under the Ottoman Empire.

18. The Selection - At the Auschwitz complex of camps, some newly arrived Jews were selected for work - and the rest were usually gassed as soon as possible. At all the extermination camps a small number of new arrivals were sometimes selected to help with the extermination process, for example by digging graves, and some had to help the SS sort the victims belongings. A medical officer like Dr. Mengele said to go left or right. One line was if your healthy and you would go work. The others were gassed as soon as possible.

19. The Hitler Youth programs - The NAZIs within only months of seizing power in 1933, organized, all German youth groups and clubs for boys and girls between the ages of The NAZI youth program began for children at 10 years of age. The Hitler Youth program was for all German youth, boys and girls. The program, however, was not coeducational. There were separate groups for boys and girls. The activities of the two programs were very different. Both stressed health and outdoor activities, but the girl's program stressed the home and family and the duty to bear children. The boy's program stressed building a healthy body and skills that would serve a future German soldier.

20. The Third Reich - The name given by the Nazis to their government in Germany; Reich is German for “empire.” Adolf Hitler, their leader, believed that he was creating a third German empire, a successor to the Holy Roman Empire and the German empire formed by Chancellor Bismarck in the nineteenth century.