Holocaust
The systematic persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators.
Shoah
Hebrew for catastrophe; the standard Hebrew name for the Holocaust.
Antisemitism
Prejudice, hatred, discrimination or violence directed at Jews as Jews.
SS
Nazi organization that controlled major police, intelligence, camp and killing institutions.
Gestapo
The Nazi secret state police.
Einsatzgruppen
Mobile Security Police and SD task forces central to mass shootings.
Concentration camp
Extrajudicial SS detention and terror institution, increasingly tied to forced labor.
Killing center
A site created primarily for mass murder, usually of deportees soon after arrival.
Ghetto
A coercively segregated urban district imposed on Jews.
Judenrat
Jewish council imposed by German authorities under coercive conditions.
Sonderkommando
At killing centers, commonly Jewish prisoners forced to work around gas chambers and crematoria.
Kapo
A prisoner functionary appointed within a camp hierarchy.
Aryanization
The coerced transfer or seizure of Jewish businesses and property.
Final Solution
Nazi euphemism for the systematic murder of European Jews.
Selection
Process separating deportees or prisoners, often between immediate murder and temporary forced labor.
Deportation
Forced removal under state or occupation authority.
Righteous Among the Nations
Yad Vashem title for qualifying non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.
Displaced person
A person uprooted by war or persecution and unable or unwilling to return home.
Nuremberg Laws
The 1935 laws that excluded Jews from citizenship and regulated relationships under Nazi racial ideology.
Zyklon B
A cyanide-based pesticide used for mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek.
Operation Reinhard
The program to murder Jews in the General Government, centered on Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka.
November Pogrom
The state-orchestrated anti-Jewish violence of November 9–10, 1938; often called Kristallnacht.
Anschluss
Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938.
Lebensraum
Nazi expansionist concept tied to conquest, displacement and racial rule.
Aktion T4
Postwar name for the centrally organized Nazi medical killing program targeting disabled people.