Term
| Nazi- Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (date?) |
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Definition
August 1939
-Publicly, this agreement stated that the two countries -- Germany and the Soviet Union -- would not attack each other.
-In exchange for the Soviets agreeing to not join the possible future war, Germany was giving the Soviets the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). Poland was also to be divided between the two, along the Narew, Vistula, and San rivers. |
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Term
| Incorporated territories and General Government |
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Definition
| Hitler divides his half of Poland into two parts. The part closest to Germany becomes “incorporated territories” and the part further away becomes a colony ruled by Germany, called the “General government.” When the incorporated territories are added, Hitler decides that they must be ethnically cleansed and the people must be replaced with people of German blood. |
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Term
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Definition
| People of German blood intended to inhabit German conquered territories in Hitler's Lebensraum plan. These terms were used by Nazis to define people in terms of their ethnicity rather than citizenship and thus included Germans living beyond the borders of the Reich, as long as they were not of Jewish religion. |
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Term
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Definition
| First used by the Germans in World War Two and was a tactic based on speed and surprise and needed a military force to be based around light tank units supported by planes and infantry (foot soldiers). |
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Term
| Lublin Reservation (date?) |
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Definition
September 1939-April 1940
- Devised under the Nisko Plan after the invasion of Poland, and implemented between October 1939 and April 1940 by the Germans setting up the so-called Lublin reservation.
-All the Jews in Europe were supposed to be dumped there.
-The reservation idea was devised by Adolf Hitler with Nazi chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.
-Goering is against this mass depopulation for this reason. Hans Frank, the man in charge of the General Government, was also against this scheme of ethnic cleansing. He did not want his territory to become the dumping ground for unwanted people. Frank and Goering intervene to stop Himmler from carrying out this plan.
-In February 1940, they called the Lublin plan off. The first attempt at solving the Jewish question with “massive resettlement” had failed in the spring of 1940. |
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Term
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Definition
June 1940
-A proposal of the Nazi government of Germany to relocate the Jewish population of Europe to the island of Madagascar.
-Devised by Franz Rademacher under the direction of Adolf Eichmann.
-The Plan was postponed after the Germans failed to defeat the British in the Battle of Britain later in 1940 and was permanently shelved in 1942 with the commencement of the extermination of European Jewry. |
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Term
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Definition
| A new Jewish expert who proposed the Madagascar Plan. |
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Term
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Definition
(war of destruction or annihilation)
-January 1941: Hitler tells people that the war against the Soviet Union would not be conventional. It was supposed to be an ideological war. |
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Term
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Definition
June 1941
-This was an economic management scheme created by Nazi Germany during World War II that was put in place to ensure that Germans were given priority in food supplies at the expense of the inhabitants of the German-occupied Soviet territories.
-The fundamental premise behind the Hunger Plan was that Germany was not self-sufficient in food supplies during the war, and to sustain the war it needed to obtain the food from conquered lands at any cost. |
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Term
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Definition
-Mobile death squad within the SS
-It was their job to preemptively go into the Soviet Union and kill anyone who might have the potential to threaten the Nazis. They focused on communists and Jewish leaders. |
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Term
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Definition
March 1941
-It demanded that any Soviet political commissar identified among captured troops be summarily executed as an enforcer of the Communist ideology and the Soviet Communist Party line in military forces. |
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Term
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Definition
| Himmler outlines 30 to 40 million Slavic people living in the territories who would be starved, killed, or expulsion. These outposts would then be filled with Volksdeutschen. Eventually, there was too much land without Germans so they also resettled Western Europeans (Nordic blood). |
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Term
| Operation Barbarossa (date?) |
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Definition
June 1941-December 1941
-German code word for the Soviet invasion.
-Nazis failed to take Moscow in December. |
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Term
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Definition
September 29-30, 1941
-A ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kiev and a site of a series of massacres carried out by the Nazis during their campaign against the Soviet Union. The most notorious and the best documented of these massacres took place on September 29–30, 1941, wherein 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation. This was the largest execution in the Soviet Union. |
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Term
| Goering authorization (date?) |
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Definition
-Goering is the one that delegates jobs to Himmler and the SS. This is a three sentence document that comes up at Nurnberg after the war. It is a very small document typed up by Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s deputy, and handed to Goering for approval.
-• This so-called Goering mandate, or Goering authorization, authorizes Heydrich to draw up a plan for a total solution to the Jewish question in the German sphere of Europe. The second sentence says that he should deal with all those other agencies whose jurisdiction is affected, and the third sentence is he should come back and submit this plan for a 'Final Solution' to the Jewish question to Goering, and so we know that thereafter Heydrich is involved in planning. |
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Term
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Definition
| As the war approaches, Hitler allows people to go beyond sterilization and commit “mercy killers” for the disabled. This applies to people who terminate their own lives. This was simply state murder but they called it “mercy killing.” |
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Term
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Definition
| This became the headquarters to kill the mentally and physically disabled. Nazis go to the crime lab in Berlin and ask the chemist what the easiest way to do it would be. They purchase pure canisters of carbon monoxide and kill them in gas chambers. The people doing this are suddenly unemployed in the summer of 1941 because the people in Germany become uncomfortable with it. T4 employees move to Poland to create the gas chambers elsewhere. |
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Term
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Definition
| The first of the Nazi extermination camps. It was situated in the General Government of Poland and operated from March to December 1942. |
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Term
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Definition
| Built to exterminate Jews of the Lodz Ghetto and local Polish inhabitants. |
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Term
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Definition
| This was an operation for just a little over a year in Poland. At Treblinka, there were 30 Germans. There were 120 guards and 800 Jewish slaves. They were able to kill 920,000 Jews in just a few weeks. |
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Term
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Definition
| The SS builds sealed containers, creating a mobile gas chamber. Heydrich immediately orders the construction of 30 of these. |
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Term
| Wannsee Conference (date?) |
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Definition
January 20, 1942
-At the conference it is announced that Jews of German-occupied Europe would be deported to Poland and exterminated.
-It was not a decision making process, it was a dissemination process. Everyone was on board and enthusiastic. |
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Term
| authoritarian personality |
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Definition
-(formulated by Theodor Adorno)
-There are some people that have sleeper traits. In normal times, these people act normal. But in an abnormal situation, their more violent traits are awakened. After this abberrational situation, they go back to normal. This was a comforting explanation because it assures that these killers were not like you and me. |
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Term
| Eliminationist anti-Semitism |
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Definition
-(formulated by Daniel Goldhagen)
-This notion stresses that Germany had a special type of anti-Semitism. Ideological killers extend from the top to the very bottom of Germany. “Germany was pregnant with genocide” and Hitler was simply an enabling force. This requires a very selective reading of German history, particularly given the fact that many Jews were experiencing the least amount of anti-Semitism in Europe during the Weimar Republic. |
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Term
| Asch conformity experiment |
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Definition
| In Asch's experiments, students were told that they were participating in a 'vision test.' Unbeknownst to the subject, the other participants in the experiment were all confederates, or assistants of the experimenter. At first, the confederates answered the questions correctly, but eventually began providing incorrect answers. Nearly 75 percent of the participants in the conformity experiments went along with the rest of the group at least one time. |
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Term
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Definition
| (Experiments in deference to authority) Subjects were told to shock a man in another room when they got questions wrong. When Milgram posed this question to a group of Yale University students, it was predicted that no more than 3 out of 100 participants would deliver the maximum shock. In reality, 65% of the participants in Milgram’s study delivered the maximum shocks. In a dynamic where you contract to a certain role, you will defer to the person in authority. You feel more obligation to the scientist that is telling them what to do than the person in the chair. |
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Term
| Stanford prison experiment |
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Definition
| (Zimbardo) He asked for male college student volunteers. Out of this pool, he weeded out anyone who registered abnormal by psychological standards. Then he had a random draw and half drew prisoner and half drew guard. The guards were always outnumbered by the prisoners. The test was supposed to go for week but had to be called off after one week. Among the guards, they reacted in somewhat different ways. A small group of guards were the most inventive. The middle group of guards went by the book. Two guards, when no one else was looking, would do small acts of kindness and mitigation for the prisoners. |
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Term
| Crimes of Obedience by Hamilton and Keller |
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Definition
| The book explained the actions of American soldiers during Vietnam. They talked about the category of the true believer; the people who believed that fighting Communism in Vietnam was necessary to save the world from the Communist threat. A second group was the role adapters. They didn’t see it as an ideological crusade but they wanted to be the best American soldier they could be. They felt obligated to perform well and carry out orders without insubordination. The third group was the nominal compliers. They carried out orders only to avoid conflict with their superiors. |
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Term
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Definition
| People are raised with certain moral beliefs but then they come to a job where they are told to do something they know to be wrong. Living in that state of cognitive dissonance is too difficult. People will change to conform to one identity or the other. People in the army can’t just pick up and quit so they will conform to the situation they are stuck with. Sometimes beliefs beget actions, but, in this case, actions can beget beliefs. This explains the genocidal momentum. On the first days of the massacres, there were a lot of people resistant to what was happening. After just a few months, people had found a way to justify their actions. |
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Term
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Definition
| A situation in which a majority of group members privately reject a norm, but incorrectly assume that most others accept it, and therefore go along with it. |
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Term
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Definition
| He compared the psycho-social characteristics of the Interhamwe Militia with Nazi SS-policemen. He asked perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide to explain their actives. He sought out every question he could think of that could explain every kind of motivation. Almost all of the questions showed that motivations were uncorrelated, except for two that were highly correlated among the group. The first was that their victims had been dehumanized. They did not see their crimes on par with killing a human being. The second was their key situational factor. They were deeply driven by a concern about how they were viewed by others. They wanted to be viewed as manly and hardworking by their peers. It is the two interactions of these motivations that culminated in a genocidal situation. |
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Term
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Definition
-major historian of the Holocaust and wrote Destruction of the European Jews
-In his analysis, talking about German policy, he asserted that you cannot understand what happened if you do not understand how the Nazis exploited and used the victims themselves. |
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Term
| (resistance, alleviation, evasion, paralysis, compliance) |
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Definition
| In times of distress, Jews have adopted one of five responses (resistance, alleviation, evasion, paralysis, compliance). Hilberg believed the two most popular responses were alleviation and compliance. Jews had learned long ago that you survived better if you simply kept your head down. Resistance was generally counter productive. There was a window of extreme vulnerability in which the Nazis were set on a mission of extermination while the Jews were still engaged in alleviation and compliance. Hilberg made the harsh conclusion that when the Jews did turn to armed resistance, it had practically no effect at all on the Nazis. If anything, it accelerated their ambition to kill more Jews. |
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Term
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Definition
-a Czechoslovak-born Israeli historian and scholar of the Holocaust
-He embarked to change this definition as any behavior aimed at preventing the Germans from achieving their goals. Ultimately, Bauer narrowed this definition as behavior that asserted some Jewish courage. |
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Term
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Definition
-She published the Origins of Totalitarianism and then went off to witness the Eichmann trials in the 1960s. She then published a book on the trial, criticizing the way the trial had been run. She argued that the trial had exaggerated Eichmann’s role in an attempt to lump most of the responsibility onto one man. She was basically claiming that it was a showcase trial, not trying to bring justice or establish a historical record.
-She also critiqued the fact that the Jews had caused their own destruction (Browning says that she crossed the line here). To Hannah Arendt, Jews were not simply unable to grasp what was going on around them. Jewish leadership were morally corrupt and had led their communities to their deaths. She makes the serious accusation that if there had been no Jewish leadership then half the Jews would have been saved. |
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Term
| Jewish councils (Judenraete) |
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Definition
-These Jewish municipal administrations were required to ensure that Nazi orders and regulations were implemented. Jewish council members also sought to provide basic community services for ghettoized Jewish populations.
-This saved German manpower and misdirected much of the blame and dissatisfaction of the Jews. |
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Term
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Definition
-he published a book, Judenraete, which became the basic book of our understanding of Jewish councils
-He was a survivor of the ghetto and had studied ghettos. He concluded that you cannot generalize about the Jewish councils (as perpetrators or victims or victors) |
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Term
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Definition
-Warsaw Ghetto
-The chairman of the council, he was the least disposed to one-man rule. He allowed various groups to coexist. He understood his impossible situation and was not seduced by power. When the Germans demand children, Czerniakow commits suicide rather than hand them over. The Germans appointed someone more compliant. |
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Term
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Definition
-Bialystok
-He operated on a kind of two-trap policies. He offered the Germans what they demanded as long as it wasn’t a total liquidation of the ghetto. He said that the Jewish population must make themselves extremely important to the German war economy. He also tried to work with the resistance, keeping them restrained until there is no point to buying time anymore. |
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Term
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Definition
-Vilna
-He worked with resistance in the ghetto and the Germans. He was rather unpopular amongst the Jewish populations. |
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Term
| Chaim Rumkowski and Moshe Merin |
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Definition
-Lodz and East Upper Silesia
-Both of these men became power hungry rulers within the ghetto and used their power quite ruthlessly. They were absolutely convinced that they and they alone could save the Jews. They were brutal towards those that opposed them. |
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Term
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Definition
-formulated by Philip Friedman
-Merin proclaims himself as the triumphant victor. Rumkowski was not quite as delusional. Many of the ghetto inhabitants hated him but some credited him with keeping the ghetto together. He turned it into the most productive ghetto, which did make it in a sense indispensible. |
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Term
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Definition
-formulated by Lawrence Langer
-Langer captured the inner-conflict of the ghettos. The asymmetry of power was such that all choices given to the Jewish council were terrible. If the Jews did not comply, retribution was swifter and more terrible. It was not within their power to change the situation they were in. It was in the ghettos, that Jewish life was sustained. Without the Jewish leadership, the situation would have been extraordinarily more lethal. Jews placed themselves in a position in which they were essential to the war effort. What kind of information should the Jewish leadership shared with the Germans. If you are playing for time, you must make life and death decisions for other people. This required sharing in a conspiracy of silence. The Jews had to aid in cover-up in order to keep everyone calm. |
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Term
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Definition
-formulated by Henri Michel
-Historically, a collaboration regime is one that is aiding the enemy against one’s country. Initially, this term was used to describe the Jewish councils. |
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