Nacht und Nebel

Nacht und Nebel (German: ˈnaxt ʔʊnt ˈneːbl̩), meaning Night and Fog, also known as the Night and Fog Decree, was a directive issued by Adolf Hitler on 7 December 1941 targeting political activists and resistance "helpers" in the territories occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II, who were to be imprisoned, murdered, or made to disappear, while the family and the population remained uncertain as to the fate or whereabouts of the alleged offender against the Nazi occupation power. Victims who disappeared in these clandestine actions were often never heard from again. The alliterative hendiadys Nacht und Nebel (German for "Night and Fog") is documented in German since the beginning of the 17th century. It was used by Wagner in Das Rheingold (1869) and has since been adopted into everyday German (e.g. it appears in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain). It is not clear whether the term Nacht-und-Nebel-Erlass ("Night and Fog directive") had been in wide circulation or used publicly before 1945. The designation "NN" was sometimes used, however, to refer to prisoners and deportees ("NN-Gefangener", "NN-Häftling", "NN-Sache") at the time. The abbreviation "NN" was otherwise well known in German to mean "nullus nomen" ("without name" for security reasons), similar to the English NN for nomen nescio. Even before the Holocaust gained momentum 1941, the Nazis had begun rounding up political prisoners - both within Germany and in occupied Europe. Most of the early prisoners were of two sorts: they were either political prisoners of personal conviction or belief whom the Nazis deemed in need of "re-education" to Nazi ideals, or resistance leaders in occupied western Europe. Up until the issuing of the Nacht und Nebel decree in December 1941, prisoners from Western Europe were handled by German soldiers in approximately the same way as by other countries: according to international agreements and procedures such as the Geneva Convention.