world war 2

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the key military tactics, campaigns, domestic mobilization, and Holocaust history of World War II based on course lectures.

Blitzkrieg

A German military tactic translating to 'lightning war' that relies on sudden, powerful shock attacks coordinating aircraft bombing, fast-moving tanks, motorized vehicles, and paratroopers to rapidly breach defenses and paralyze the enemy.

Panzers

Armored German tanks; in Blitzkrieg operations, fast-moving, lightly armored versions pushed ahead of heavy armor and infantry to penetrate deep into enemy territory.

Maginot Line

A massive concrete line of fortifications constructed by France along its border with Germany designed to stop an invasion, which ended at the Belgian border and was bypassed by German forces.

Phoney War

The period of World War II from September 1939 to April 1940 characterized by a lack of major military land operations between France and Britain against Germany, despite war having been declared.

Stuka

German dive-bombers equipped with sirens used in Blitzkrieg attacks against enemy headquarters, advancing troops, and civilians to destroy infrastructure and spread fear.

Dunkirk Evacuation (Operation Dynamo)

The rescue of approximately 330,000 British and 10,000 French troops from the beaches of northern France between 26 May and 4 June 1940 using a flotilla of military and civilian vessels.

Total War

A military conflict in which nations dedicate all human, economic, and industrial resources to achieve complete victory, conscripting civilians and turning the home front and civilian populations into combat targets.

The Battle of Britain

An aerial campaign fought over the English Channel and southern England from August to September 1940, in which the Royal Air Force defeated the Luftwaffe through the effective use of radar and superior aircraft.

The Blitz

A sustained campaign of nighttime aerial bombardment directed against London and other British cities by the Luftwaffe between September 1940 and May 1941, aiming to demolish industry and crush civilian morale.

To Coventrate (coventrieren)

A German term coined after the devastating raid on Coventry on 14–15 November 1940, in which 503 tons of high explosives and 30,000 incendiary bombs obliterated the medieval cathedral and destroyed over a third of the city's housing.

Morrison Shelter

A heavy indoor steel table-like cage shelter introduced in Britain that allowed families to sleep protected inside their homes from falling building debris during air raids.

Anderson Shelter

An air raid shelter made of curved corrugated steel panels assembled in a pit in private back gardens and covered with earth to protect occupants from bomb blast fragments.

Blitz Spirit

A concept popularized by Winston Churchill characterizing British public resilience, mutual solidarity, and determination to continue daily life despite heavy German air raids.

Homefront

The civilian population and domestic production activities of a nation at war that organize logistics, civil defense, rationing, and munitions to support active military operations.

Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939

British legislation passed in the summer of 1939 granting the government emergency powers to pass decrees and regulations for public safety without going through standard parliamentary procedures.

Conscription

Compulsory enlistment into the national armed forces or wartime auxiliary services; established in Britain in 1939 for young men and subsequently expanded to include men up to age 60 and unmarried women.

Conscientious Objector

An individual who refuses on religious, moral, or ethical grounds to serve in combat, required during WWII to defend their case before a tribunal and typically reassigned to farming, hospital, or ambulance work.

Women's Land Army (WLA)

A British civilian organization established to place female agricultural workers, nicknamed 'land girls,' onto farms to boost domestic food production and offset import shortages.

Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF)

A British military support branch for women founded to handle vital non-combat support roles for the RAF, including repairing parachutes, compiling reports, and maintaining aircraft.

Ministry of Information

The British government body responsible for wartime news censorship, press management, counter-espionage campaigns ('Careless Talk Costs Lives'), and national morale propaganda.

Dig for Victory

A British government campaign urging civilians to cultivate domestic gardens, public parks, and recreational lands into vegetable plots to counter German U-boat blockades on food imports.

Air Raid Precautions (ARP) Wardens

Civilian defense volunteers tasked with enforcing nocturnal blackout restrictions, operating warning sirens, guiding residents into shelters, and coordinating emergency services after raids.

Home Guard

A British volunteer secondary defense organization nicknamed 'Dad's Army,' formed in May 1940 and made up of 1.7 million men ineligible for front-line military service due to age or medical exemptions.

Operation Barbarossa

The massive invasion of the Soviet Union launched by Nazi Germany on 22 June 1941, constituting the largest military offensive in history with over 3 million Axis soldiers along a vast front.

Scorched Earth Policy

A defensive military tactic employed by the retreating Red Army in 1941 to burn crops, dismantle rail networks, and destroy buildings to deny invading German forces essential supplies and shelter.

Battle of Stalingrad

A prolonged clash on the Eastern Front between August 1942 and February 1943 resulting in the destruction and surrender of the German Sixth Army, turning the tide permanently against Germany.

Lend-Lease Program

An American policy that provided vast shipments of weaponry, raw materials, food, and industrial machinery to Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and other Allies to sustain the war effort.

Aryan Race

A pseudo-scientific concept used by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime asserting the biological supremacy of Germanic peoples to justify discrimination and extermination of non-Aryan groups.

Mischlinge

The Nazi legal classification under the Nuremberg Laws for individuals categorized as of 'mixed' blood, possessing one or two Jewish grandparents, and subject to civil and marital restrictions.

Nuremberg Laws

Two anti-Semitic statutes passed on 15 September 1935 (the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor) that deprived German Jews of citizenship, civil rights, and prohibited intermarriage.

Kristallnacht (The November Pogrom)

A state-sponsored wave of violence on 9–10 November 1938 across Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland that destroyed over 250 synagogues and 7,000 businesses, killed approximately 100 Jews, and sent 30,000 men to concentration camps.

Dachau

The first Nazi concentration camp, opened in March 1933 near Munich to detain political opponents, which later expanded to incarcerate Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other persecuted groups.

Ghetto

An enclosed, heavily guarded, and overcrowded quarter of an occupied city where the Nazi regime forcibly confined Jewish populations under starvation conditions prior to liquidation or deportation.

Judenrat

A Jewish council established by Nazi command within occupied ghettos, mandated to maintain municipal services and enforce German orders, including selecting quotas for deportations.

Warsaw Ghetto

The largest Nazi ghetto in occupied Poland, cramming up to 490,000 Jews into 2.4% of Warsaw's land area, resulting in over 100,000 deaths from starvation and epidemics before liquidation.

Operation Reinhard

The Nazi operational plan begun in 1942 to systematically murder approximately two million Jews living in the General Government of occupied Poland at dedicated death camps.

Einsatzgruppen

Special paramilitary mobile killing squads of the SS and Security Police that moved directly behind the German army in Eastern Europe, executing more than two million civilians, primarily Jews, by mass shooting.

Babi Yar Massacre

The mass shooting perpetrated by Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C on 29–30 September 1941 in a ravine outside Kyiv, murdering 33,771 Jewish men, women, and children.

Final Solution

The Nazi code name for the systematic state-sponsored genocide across Europe aimed at the total extermination of the estimated 11 million European Jews.

Arthur Greiser

The Nazi Reichsstatthalter (governor) of the Reichsgau Wartheland who sought to make his district free of Jews by establishing the first death camp at Chełmno using mobile gas vans.

Chełmno

The first operational Nazi death camp, opened in December 1941 in occupied Poland, designed exclusively to murder Jews and Roma using hermetically sealed gas vans emitting carbon monoxide exhaust.

Wannsee Conference

A meeting held on 20 January 1942 at a lakeside villa outside Berlin where fifteen senior Nazi and state officials coordinated administrative logistics for implementing the Final Solution across Europe.

Heinrich Himmler

Reichsführer of the SS, chief of German police, and principal overseer of the concentration camp system and the administrative execution of the Holocaust.

Extermination Camp

A Nazi facility constructed for industrialized mass murder through poisonous gases or engine exhaust, such as Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

D-Day (Operation Overlord)

The Allied cross-Channel amphibious invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944, landing over 150,000 troops along five beach sectors to liberate Western Europe from Nazi control.

Atlantic Wall

A 1,670-mile line of concrete bunkers, naval artillery, minefields, and anti-landing beach obstacles constructed by Germany from Norway to the Franco-Spanish border to deter an Allied cross-Channel assault.

Mulberry Harbours

Two temporary, pre-fabricated floating harbors designed and towed across the English Channel to Normandy to offload thousands of tons of vehicles, troops, and supplies daily without capturing a French port.

Pas de Calais

The narrowest geographical crossing point between England and France, heavily fortified by the Germans due to their false assumption that the main Allied invasion would land there.

Area Bombing

An aerial warfare strategy of indiscriminately bombarding an entire urban area using incendiary and high-explosive bombs to destroy civilian housing, disrupt manufacturing, and undermine popular will.

Bombing of Dresden

A massive Allied aerial operation on 13–15 February 1945 that dropped thousands of tons of incendiary bombs on an unfortified German city, triggering a firestorm that killed roughly 25,000 civilians.

V-1 Flying Bomb

An uncrewed pulsejet cruise missile nicknamed 'doodlebug,' named after 'Vergeltung' (vengeance), launched by Germany against London and southeast England starting in June 1944.

Anti-Comintern Pact

An agreement concluded between Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan in November 1936 pledging mutual opposition to the Communist International, forming the diplomatic core of the Axis Powers.

Rape of Nanking (Nanjing Massacre)

A six-week atrocity beginning in December 1937 following the Japanese capture of China's capital, marked by the systematic murder of 40,000 to 300,000 civilians and widespread sexual assault.

Aircraft Carrier

A capital warship configured with a full-length flight deck to deploy naval air power; vital US carriers spared at Pearl Harbor became the primary offensive weapon throughout the Pacific War.

Battle of the Coral Sea

A naval battle fought in May 1942 between Allied and Japanese carrier forces, notable as the first fleet engagement where neither side's surface ships sighted or directly fired on one another.

Battle of Midway

A decisive carrier clash in June 1942 where the US Navy, having cracked Japanese naval codes, sank four Imperial Japanese aircraft carriers, halting Japan's offensive eastward advance in the Pacific.

Island Hopping

The Allied Pacific military campaign strategy of bypassing and isolating heavily fortified Japanese island garrisons to assault strategic, lightly defended positions with airfields closer to Japan.

Thai-Burma Railway ('Death Railway')

A 415-kilometer strategic railway built under brutal forced labor by Allied prisoners of war and Asian laborers under Japanese military command, during which tens of thousands perished from starvation, exhaustion, and disease.

Potsdam Conference

A July–August 1945 summit of Allied leaders that finalized the partition of Germany and Austria, arranged reparations, and issued an ultimatum demanding Japan's unconditional surrender.

Enola Gay

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets that dropped the world's first combat atomic weapon on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.

V-E Day

Victory in Europe Day, observed on 8 May 1945, which marked the formal acceptance of Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender by the Allied powers.

Genocide

Acts committed with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group; codified under international law by the United Nations in 1948.

Raphael Lemkin

A Polish-Jewish legal scholar who coined the term 'genocide' in his 1944 publication 'Axis Rule in Occupied Europe' and campaigned for the UN Convention on Genocide.

Death Marches

Forced evacuations of concentration camp prisoners westward into Germany in late 1944 and early 1945 in sub-zero winter conditions without food, during which tens of thousands died or were shot.

Nuremberg International Military Tribunal

A series of military tribunals opened in November 1945 in Nuremberg, Germany, to prosecute high-ranking Nazi officials for aggressive war, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.