German History Final Exam

Blood Libel

This was a myth in Europe during the Middle Ages that Jews used the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes.

Protocols of the Elders of Zion

This was a notorious anti-Semitic tract published first in Russia in 1905. It was written in the form of a dialogue, and it suggested a Jewish plot to take over the world.

Shtetl

This was a traditional Jewish village in the Pale and other parts of East Europe. It made the integration and assimilation of East European Jews less likely than in West Europe.

Nuremberg Laws

These laws were passed in 1935 and denied German Jews of their basic civil rights. They were stripped of their German citizenship, were denied employment in government or the military, and had to be segregated in public places.

Kristallnacht

This was a series of anti-Jewish riots in Germany in 1938 in which Jewish businesses and synagogues were destroyed. Many Jews were assaulted and lost their lives, and afterward many fled Germany.

Pan-German Nationalists

These were nationalists who wanted to see all German-speaking lands united into a single nation state. They especially wanted to see Austria included in a greater Germany.

Lebensraum

This is a German term that translates as “living space,” and it was the word that Adolf Hitler used to describe his foreign policy. In particular, he wanted to conquer much of East Europe and create a huge German empire in Europe.

Anschluss

This word is German for “annexation” and it refers to the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938.

Czechoslovakian Crisis

This was a diplomatic crisis in 1938 that was caused by Germany’s insistence upon annexing the Sudetenland. The crisis was averted by letting Germany annex the Sudetenland.

Danzig Corridor

This was a strip of land that extended south from the city of Danzig and that was taken from Germany after World War I and given to Poland. There was a significant German minority population in this strip of land, and Adolf Hitler used this as a pretext to invade Poland in 1939.

Sudetenland

This was a horseshoe-shaped piece of land in Czechoslovakia that had a German population of about three million. Hitler received this land as part of the Munich Pact in 1938.

Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact

This was a pact signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in August 1939. By this pact, the two countries agreed not to make war against the other, and they also divided Poland and other parts of East Europe with secret protocols within the pact.

Blitzkrieg

This is a German term that means “lightning war,” and it refers to a set of tactics that depend of the speed, mobility, and firepower of the tank and airplane to rapidly defeat an enemy.

Battle of Britain

This is the name given to the air war fought over Great Britain during late 1940 and early 1941 between Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe and the Britain’s Royal Air Force.

Operation Barbarossa

This was the code name for Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

Einsatzgruppen

These were mobile SS killing squads that, during the first phase of the Holocaust, went into East European villages, rounded up Jews, shot them, and buried them in mass graves.

Joseph Stalin

This man was the dictator of the Soviet Union from 1927 until 1953, and he single-handedly revised Germany’s borders and established East Germany after World War II.

Tehran Conference

This was a conference held between Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin in November 1943 in the Iranian city of Tehran. It was decided at this conference that the United States and Britain would conduct a cross-channel invasion of France in 1944.

Potsdam Conference

This was the last of the coordinating conferences between the Big Three—the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union—in July 1945. Its purpose was to develop a final set of policies for the occupation of Germany, which included deciding reparations for the Soviet Union.

Berlin Airlift

This was an operation initiated by the United States in 1948 when the Soviet Union cut off all ground corridors into West Berlin in the hope of forcing out the British, French, and American troops there. The operation successfully kept West Berlin supplied with food, fuel, and consumer goods, and in 1949 the Soviet Union finally relented and allowed the allied powers ground access to West Berlin.

Walter Ulbricht

This man was a Moscow-trained German communist who returned to Germany in 1945 and became the first leader of East Germany.

Socialist Unity Party

This party, whose initials were SED, was created in the Soviet Occupation Zone in autumn of 1946 in forced union between the German Communist Party (KPD) and the German Socialist Party (SPD). By 1948, however, the communists dominated this new party.

Nuremberg Trials

These were trials in 1946 that convicted the principal Nazi leaders, many of whom executed by hanging.

Marshall Plan

This was a plan initiated by the United States in 1947 that pumped billions of dollars into West European countries in order to help them rebuild from the damage caused by World War II and to prevent the rise of communist party movements in West European countries.

Truman Doctrine

This was a doctrine annunciated by President Harry S Truman that stated the United States would do whatever was necessary to contain communism to those areas where it already existed.

Economic Miracle

This is the name given to West Germany’s dramatic economic growth of the 1950s under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

European Coal and Steel Community

This was a common market created for coal and steel in 1951 and included six West European nations: Belgium, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.

NATO

This stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It was a collective security arrangement created in 1949 that included the United States and most West European countries, and its purpose was to prevent Soviet expansion. West Germany joined in 1955.

Warsaw Pact

This was a military alliance created in 1955 as a counterweight to NATO and included the Soviet Union and all of its East European satellite countries, including East Germany.

Berlin Ultimatum

This was an ultimatum delivered by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1958 to the Western Powers—the United States, Britain, and France— that they must leave West Berlin permanently or forced out militarily. Ultimately, this ultimatum failed, and Berlin remained divided.

Basic Treaty

This was a treaty between East and West Germany in 1972 whereby both countries granted diplomatic recognition to the other. This paved the way for both countries to enter the United Nations the next year.

Five Percent Rule

This was a rule in the West German Bundestag that only allowed political parties that received five percent of the vote or more from receiving proportional representation. This prevents extremist parties from gaining a platform (as the Nazis did) and prevented a proliferation smaller parties (which bedeviled the Weimar governments).

Stasi

This was an abbreviation meaning the State Security Police, which served as the secret police in East Germany. It carried on surveillance of potential internal enemies, and its power and scope grew exponentially in East Germany.

Central Planning

This was the communist principle upon which East German industry was based. All production was forecast and controlled by central planning committees, but it was very inefficient since it could not accurately forecast demand and thus saleability.

COMECON

This was the Soviet Union’s version of the European Economic Community. It was a forced integration of the Soviet Union’s satellite countries into a single economic bloc. It generally did East Germany little good since it had the healthiest communist economy and it was forced to integrate into less-developed communist economies such as that of Romania.

Two-Plus-Four Talks

These were the talks held in 1990 between the victorious powers of World War II (Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union) and East and West Germany. By these talks, the final peace treaty ending World War II was signed, and Germany was reunited.

Ossi

A term (sometimes used disparagingly) to describe a person who lived in the former East Germany.

Wessi

A term (sometimes used disparagingly) to describe a person who lived in the former West Germany.