Transcript Holocaust and World War II Terms

Holocaust and
World War II Terms
1933-1945
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GREEN
Allied Powers
• Several countries who go
together to fight against the
Axis powers. These countries
were United States, Britain,
France, Soviet Unions,
Australia, Canada, and Greece
during WWII.
Anti-Semitism
• Discrimination or hostility
towards Jews or
Judaism.
Aryan
• Term perverted by the Nazis to
mean a so-called master race.
The idealized Aryan was blond,
blue-eyed, tall and muscular. The
original term refers to a people
speaking a Indo-European
dialect.
AXIS Powers
• These were the countries
who fought against the
Allied Powers during WWII.
They were Germany, Japan,
and Italy.
Crematorium
•A furnace where a
corpse can be
burned and reduced
to ashes.
Crematorium
Extermination Camps
• Also known as death camps because
prisoners were not expected to survive 24
hours beyond arrival.
• These camps were specially established
to systematically kill prisoners (genocide).
• Over six million Jews were killed in
extermination camps.
• The most famous extermination camps
were Aushcwitz, Treblinka, and Chelmno.
Extermination Camps
Final Solution
•The Nazi plan to
exterminate the
Jewish people.
Gas Chamber
• A gas chamber is an
apparatus for killing consisting
of a sealed chamber into
which a poisonous or
asphyxiant gas is introduced.
Gas Chambers
Genocide
•Deliberate, systematic
destruction of a racial,
cultural, or political
group.
Gestapo
• The German internal
security police as organized
under the Nazi regime,
known for its terrorist
methods directed against
those suspected.
Ghettos
• The ghettos were transition areas,
used as collection points for
deportation to concentration and
extermination camps.
• Many people died in the ghettos
because of disease, adequate
warmth, and lack of food.
Ghettos
Adolf Hitler
• Appointed Chancellor of Germany on
January 30, 1933.
• He reorganized the German worker’s party
into the National Socialist Party or Nazi
Party.
• He murdered jews, gypsies, handicapped,
and all others who opposed him.
• He committed suicide in a bunker on Apr.
30, 1945.
Benito Mussolini
• Fascist (glorifies the state and nation and
assigns to the state control over national life)
government by leader who ruled Italy from 19221945.
• He joined Germany as one of the Axis Powers
during WWII.
• At the end of WWII, he was captured, tried, court
marshaled, and shot. Later his body was
brought to Milan, hanged in a public square, and
later buried in an unmarked grave.
Liberation
• Soviet, British, and American troops
overran the camps and forced the Nazis to
surrender. Afterward, the troops set up
medical tents and provided food, water
and clothing for those imprisoned.
Kristallnacht
• Also known as The Night of the Broken
Glass. On this night, November 9, 1938,
almost 200 synagogues were destroyed,
over 8,000 Jewish shops were sacked and
looted, and tens of thousands of Jews
were removed to concentration camps.
Musselman
• slang word in the concentration camps for
a prisoner who had given up fighting for
life.
Jewish (Judiasm)
Another name for the Children of Israel.
It is a reference to the Jews as a
nation, meaning a group of people with
a shared history, religion, and a sense
of a group identity rather than a
territorial and political entity.
Harry s. Truman
U.S. president at the end of
WWII who ordered the bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
Japan, causing Japan to
surrender.
Kapo
A prisoner in a Nazi
concentration camp who was
assigned by the SS guards to
supervise forced labor of other
prisoners or carry out
administrative tasks.
Joseph Stalin
The Communist dictator of the Soviet Union
from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953.
He ruled by terror and manipulation, and
many Soviets were killed and tortured under
his rule. Although allies with the US during
WWII, the Soviets and Americans did not
hold a good political relationship with each
other.
Selection
Euphemism for the process of
choosing victims for the gas
chambers in the Nazi camps by
separating them from those
considered fit to work. Those
too weak or too old to work
were sent straight to the gas
chambers.
V-J Day
The official day on which Japan
surrendered in WWII, in effect
ending the war.
Josef Mengele
physician at Auschwitz camp,
notorious for his horrifying medical
experiments on prisoners. He also
"selected" new arrivals by simply
pointing to the right or the left, thus
separating those considered able
to work from those who were not.
Nuremberg Laws
• The first law deprived of German citizenship
anyone of Jewish faith or any citizen with two
Jewish grandparents.
• The second made marriage or illegal between
Germans and Jews.
• The established the swastika flag as the official
flag of Germany and the national colours as
black, white, and red.
• Additional laws banned non-Jewish domestic
staff in Jewish households, introduced ‘J’ stamps
in Jewish passports, and forced Jews to take
surnames identifiable as Jewish.
Propaganda
• Information, ideas, or
rumors deliberately spread
widely to help or harm a
person, group, movement,
institution, nation, etc.
Ration Coupon
• A coupon book which allowed
the holder to purchase a
certain amount of goods.
• Some rationed goods were
food (especially sugar), gas,
and clothing.
Star of David
• A six pointed star
consisting of two crossed
equilateral triangles, which
has come to represent
Jewry.
Swastika
• A figure used as a symbol or an
ornament in the Old World and in
America since prehistoric times,
consisting of a cross with arms of
equal length, each arm having a
continuation at right angles.
• This figure as the official emblem of
the Nazi party and the Third Reich.
Winston Churchill
• British Prime Minister, 1940-1945 at the
height of Hitler’s conquest of Western
Europe. Churchill was one of the very few
Western politicians who recognized the
threat that Hitler posed to Europe. He is
remembered for rallying Great Britain to
fight on during the darkest of times.
Synagogue
• A building or place of
meeting for worship and
religious instruction in the
Jewish faith.
Third Reich
•Germany state during
the Nazi dictatorship
under Hitler from
1933-1945.
Charles DeGaulle
Leader of France until the Nazis took
control, then was exiled to England.
Scapegoat
•A person or group
made to bear the
blame for others or to
suffer in their place.
Battle of the Bulge
• The last major German offensive
campaign of World War II. The surprise
attack caught the Allied forces completely
off guard. American forces bore the brunt
of the attack and incurred their highest
casualties of any operation during the war.
The battle also severely depleted
Germany's armored forces on the Western
Front, and they were largely unable to
replace them.
Terezin
• Established in early 1942 outside Prague
as a "model" ghetto. Terezin was not a
sealed section of town, but rather an
eighteenth-century Austrian garrison. It
became a Jewish town, governed and
guarded by the Nazis. The Nazis used
Terezin to deceive public opinion about the
treatment of Jews.
Mein Kampf
• Mein Kampf (My Struggle)is an
autobiography written by Adolf Hitler while
he was in jail. Hitler outlines his political
ideology and future plans for Germany.
Throughout his writings he blames Jews
for Germany’s economic issues and
claims the Aryans as the perfect race.
SS St. Louis
• The steamship St. Louis was a refugee
ship that left Hamburg in the spring of
1939, bound for Cuba. When the ship
arrived, only 22 of the 1128 refugees were
allowed to disembark. Initially no country,
including the United States, was willing to
accept the others. The ship finally returned
to Europe where most of the refugees
were finally granted entry into England,
Holland, France and Belgium.
Treaty of Versailles
• The treaty was signed by Germany and
the Allied Powers in 1919 and ended
World War I.
• Germany was very dissatisfied with the
treaty because they had to pay reparations
to the destroyed countries, they lost
territories, was forced to reduce the
German military to 100,000.
Zionism
• A Jewish movement that arose
in the late 19th century in
response to growing antiSemitism and sought to
reestablish a Jewish homeland
in Palestine and develop
Israel.
Nazi
• A member of the National Socialist German
Workers' party of Germany, which in 1933, under
Adolf Hitler, seized political control of the
country, suppressing all opposition and
establishing a dictatorship over all cultural,
economic, and political activities of the people,
and promulgated belief in the supremacy of
Hitler as Führer, aggressive anti-Semitism, the
natural supremacy of the German people, and
the establishment of Germany by superior force
as a dominant world power. The party was
officially abolished in 1945 at the conclusion of
World War II.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
• President of the United States during most
of WWII. He tried to keep the country as
neutral as possible until Japan attacked
Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Pearl Harbor
• Just before 8 a.m. on December 7, 1941,
hundreds of Japanese fighter planes attacked
the American naval base at Pearl Harbor near
Honolulu, Hawaii. The Japanese managed to
destroy nearly 20 American ships, including
eight battleships, and more than 300 airplanes.
More than 2,000 Americans soldiers and sailors
died in the attack, and another 1,000 were
wounded. The day after the assault, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to
declare war on Japan
Emperor Hirohito
• Hirohito was the Emperor of Japan. He played a
significant role in Japan's attacks on not only
other Asian countries during World War II, but
against the United States as well. The most
notable of these attacks was the Pearl Harbor
attack on Dec. 7, 1941
• Hirohito refused to surrender until the atomic
bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in Aug. 15, 1945. Days later Hirohito
admitted defeat.
U-boat
• U-boats were Nazi submarines. Its main
weapon was the torpedo, though mines
and deck guns (while surfaced) were also
used. By the end of the war, almost 3,000
Allied ships (175 warships; 2,825
merchant ships) were sunk by U-boat
torpedoes.
Concentration Camp
• A detention site created for
military or political purposes.
• Many of these camps were used
to exploit prisoners for slave labor
or experimentation.
• A large portion of prisoners died
of mistreatment, malnutrition, and
disease.
Concentration Camp
HOLOCAUST
• The systematic mass
slaughter (especially by fire)
of European Jews in Nazi
concentration and
extermination camps during
World War II.