holocaust

Anti-Semitism

Hostility, prejudice, or discrimination against Jews.

Nuremberg Laws

1935 Nazi racial laws stripping Jews of citizenship and forbidding intermarriage.

Untermenschen ("subhumans")

Nazi racial term for groups they deemed inferior (including Jews, Slavs, Roma).

Genocide

Intentional destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

Jewish Law

Religious legal system of Judaism (Halakha); in Nazi context often refers to discriminatory restrictions imposed on Jews by the state.

Herschel Grynszpan

Jewish teenager whose assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath was used by Nazis as pretext for Kristallnacht.

Ernst vom Rath

German diplomat whose death triggered Kristallnacht.

Hans Frank

Governor-General of occupied Poland; convicted at Nuremberg.

Reinhard Heydrich

High-ranking Nazi; architect of the Final Solution; chair of Wannsee Conference.

Hermann Göring

Nazi leader; founded the Gestapo; major figure in the regime.

Heinrich Himmler

Head of the SS; oversaw concentration and extermination camps.

Adolf Eichmann

Organized logistics of the Final Solution; later captured and tried in Israel.

Joseph Goebbels

Nazi Minister of Propaganda.

Raoul Wallenberg

Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews.

Oskar Schindler

Saved over 1,000 Jews by employing them in his factories.

Simon Wiesenthal

Holocaust survivor who became a leading Nazi hunter.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

German theologian executed for resisting Nazism.

Mordecai Anielewicz

Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Henry Kissinger

Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany; later U.S. Secretary of State.

Albert Einstein

Jewish physicist who fled Nazi Germany and warned the U.S. about nuclear threats.

Kristallnacht

1938 "Night of Broken Glass"; nationwide pogrom against Jews in Nazi Germany.

Wannsee Conference

1942 meeting where top Nazis coordinated the Final Solution.

Death Marches

Forced evacuations of prisoners late in the war, causing mass death.

Concentration camp

Detention camps used for forced labor, imprisonment, and mass murder.

Death camp (Extermination camp)

Camps designed specifically for mass killing (e.g., Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau).

Ghetto

Segregated urban districts where Jews were forced to live under extreme conditions.

Einsatzgruppen

Mobile killing units responsible for mass shootings, especially in Eastern Europe.

Sonderkommandos

Jewish prisoners forced to work in extermination camp gas chambers and crematoria.

Judenrat (plural: Judenräte

Jewish councils set up by Nazis to administer ghettos.

Gestapo

Nazi secret police.

Schutzstaffel (SS)

Elite Nazi organization; ran camps and carried out key atrocities.

Heer

The regular German army (as distinct from SS units).

Zegota

Polish underground organization dedicated to rescuing Jews during the Holocaust.

Partisans

Resistance fighters in occupied Europe.

Huguenots

French Protestants (not directly tied to the Holocaust, but often studied as a persecuted minority).

Denmark

Known for rescuing most of its Jewish population by ferrying them to Sweden.

Croatia

Site of atrocities by the Ustaše, a fascist puppet regime allied with Nazi Germany.

Zyklon B

Poison gas used in extermination camps.

Holocaust

Systematic, state-sponsored murder of six million Jews and millions of other victims by Nazi Germany.