Hitler YouthThe Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend ˈhɪtlɐˌjuːɡn̩t, often abbreviated as HJ, haːˈjɔt) was the youth organisation of the Nazi Party in Germany. Its origins date back to 1922 and it received the name Hitler-Jugend, Bund deutscher Arbeiterjugend ("Hitler Youth, League of German Worker Youth") in July 1926. From 1936 until 1945, it was the sole official boys' youth organisation in Germany and it was partially a paramilitary organisation.
CiechanówCiechanów AUDPl-Ciechanów.ogg t͡ɕeˈxanuf is a city in north-central Poland. From 1975 to 1998, it was the capital of the Ciechanów Voivodeship. Since 1999, it has been situated in the Masovian Voivodeship. As of December 2021, it has a population of 43,495. The settlement is first mentioned in a 1065 document by Bolesław II the Bold handing the land over to the church. The medieval gord in Ciechanów numbered approximately 3,000 armed men, and together with the region of Mazovia, it became part of the emerging Polish state in the late 10th century.
KriminalpolizeiKriminalpolizei (ˌkrɪmiˈnaːlpoliˌt͡saɪ̯, "criminal police") is the standard term for the criminal investigation agency within the police forces of Germany, Austria, and the German-speaking cantons of Switzerland. In Nazi Germany, the Kripo was the criminal police department for the entire Reich. Today, in the Federal Republic of Germany, the state police (Landespolizei) perform the majority of investigations. Its Criminal Investigation Department is known as the Kriminalpolizei or more colloquially, the Kripo.
Erwin RommelJohannes Erwin Eugen Rommel (ˈɛʁviːn ˈʁɔməl; 15 November 1891 – 14 October 1944) was a German field marshal during World War II. Popularly known as the Desert Fox (Wüstenfuchs, ˈvyːstn̩ˌfʊks), he served in the Wehrmacht (armed forces) of Nazi Germany, as well as serving in the Reichswehr of the Weimar Republic, and the army of Imperial Germany. Rommel was injured multiple times in both world wars. Rommel was a highly decorated officer in World War I and was awarded the Pour le Mérite for his actions on the Italian Front.
EinsatzkommandoDuring World War II, the Nazi German Einsatzkommandos were a sub-group of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) – up to 3,000 men total – usually composed of 500–1,000 functionaries of the SS and Gestapo, whose mission was to exterminate Jews, Polish intellectuals, Romani, and communists in the captured territories often far behind the advancing German front. Einsatzkommandos, along with Sonderkommandos, were responsible for the systematic murder of Jews during the aftermath of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Jewish questionThe Jewish question, also referred to as the Jewish problem, was a wide-ranging debate in 19th- and 20th-century Europe that pertained to the appropriate status and treatment of Jews. The debate, which was similar to other "national questions", dealt with the civil, legal, national, and political status of Jews as a minority within society, particularly in Europe during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. The debate began with Jewish emancipation in western and central European societies during the Age of Enlightenment and after the French Revolution.
Extermination through labourExtermination through labour (or "extermination through work", Vernichtung durch Arbeit) is a term that was adopted to describe forced labor in Nazi concentration camps in light of the high mortality rate and poor conditions; in some camps a majority of prisoners died within a few months. In the 21st century, research has questioned whether there was a general policy of extermination through labor in the Nazi concentration camp system because of widely varying conditions between camps.
Allgemeine SSThe Allgemeine SS (ˌalɡəˈmaɪ̯nə ˈɛs ˈɛs; "General SS") was a major branch of the Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces of Nazi Germany; it was managed by the SS Main Office (SS-Hauptamt). The Allgemeine SS was officially established in the autumn of 1934 to distinguish its members from the SS-Verfügungstruppe (SS Dispositional Troops or SS-VT), which later became the Waffen-SS, and the SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS Death's Head Units or SS-TV), which were in charge of the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps.
Rumbula massacreThe Rumbula massacre is a collective term for incidents on November 30 and December 8, 1941, in which about 25,000 Jews were murdered in or on the way to Rumbula forest near Riga, Latvia, during World War II. Except for the Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine, this was the biggest two-day Holocaust atrocity until the operation of the death camps. About 24,000 of the victims were Latvian Jews from the Riga Ghetto and approximately 1,000 were German Jews transported to the forest by train.
JudenfreiJudenfrei (ˈjuːdn̩ˌfʁaɪ, "free of Jews") and judenrein (ˈjuːdn̩ˌʁaɪn, "clean of Jews") are terms of Nazi origin to designate an area that has been "cleansed" of Jews during The Holocaust. While judenfrei refers merely to "freeing" an area of all of its Jewish inhabitants, the term judenrein (literally "clean of Jews") has the even stronger connotation that any trace of Jewish blood had been removed as an alleged impurity in the minds of the criminal perpetrators.