Night Terms to Know - English II Honors

The Holocaust

The Holocaust

-Mass murder of almost one-third of the world’s Jews

-Greek for complete destruction by fire

-The ultimate act of antisemitism

The Gestapo

-German abbreviation for secret state police

-Nazi Germany’s main tool of oppression and destruction

-Placed above the law in Germany in 1939

SS men/officers

-Initially Hitler’s personal bodyguards

-Later became one of the most powerful and feared

-organizations in all of Nazi Germany

Nuremberg Laws

-Anti Jewish statues enacted on September 15, 1935

Deprived Jews of German Citizenship

-Prohibited non-Jewish Germans from Marrying jews

-Outlawed sexual relations between Jews and Germans

-Other restrictions that eliminated any mixing/association between the “superior race” and the Jews

Yellow Star

-Jews were forced to wear this badge as a form of identification

-Enforced beginning in 1941

Ghettos

Enclosed districts that isolated Jews from the non-Jewish population and other Jewish communities

The Final Solution

The Nazi regime’s end goal: to exterminate the Jewish population through mass killings

Auschwitz

The largest of the German Nazi concentration camps and extermination centers

Dr. Josef Mengele

-“The angel of death”

-SS doctor at Auschwitz and other camps

-He conducted inhumane experiments on prisoners

Anti-semitism

Hostility or prejudice against Jewish people