Nazism
National Socialism, more known as Nazism, is the ideology and practices associated with the Nazi Party – the National Socialist German Workers' Party – in Nazi Germany, of other far-right groups with similar aims. Nazism is a form of fascism and showed that ideology's disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system, but incorporated fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, scientific racism, eugenics into its creed, its extreme nationalism came from Pan-Germanism and the Völkisch movement prominent in the German nationalism of the time, it was influenced by the Freikorps paramilitary groups that emerged after Germany's defeat in World War I, from which came the party's "cult of violence", "at the heart of the movement."Nazism subscribed to theories of racial hierarchy and Social Darwinism, identifying the Germans as a part of what the Nazis regarded as an Aryan or Nordic master race. It aimed to overcome social divisions and create a German homogeneous society based on racial purity which represented a people's community.
The Nazis aimed to unite all Germans living in German territory, as well as gain additional lands for German expansion under the doctrine of Lebensraum and exclude those who they deemed either community aliens or "inferior" races. The term "National Socialism" arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of "socialism", as an alternative to both Marxist international socialism and free market capitalism. Nazism rejected the Marxist concepts of class conflict and universal equality, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism, sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the "common good", accepting political interests as the main priority of economic organization; the Nazi Party's precursor, the Pan-German nationalist and antisemitic German Workers' Party, was founded on 5 January 1919. By the early 1920s the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party – to attract workers away from left-wing parties such as the Social Democrats and the Communists – and Adolf Hitler assumed control of the organization.
The National Socialist Program or "25 Points" was adopted in 1920 and called for a united Greater Germany that would deny citizenship to Jews or those of Jewish descent, while supporting land reform and the nationalization of some industries. In Mein Kampf, Hitler outlined the anti-Semitism and anti-Communism at the heart of his political philosophy, as well as his disdain for representative democracy and his belief in Germany's right to territorial expansion; the Nazi Party won the greatest share of the popular vote in the two Reichstag general elections of 1932, making them the largest party in the legislature by far, but still short of an outright majority. Because none of the parties were willing or able to put together a coalition government, in 1933 Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul Von Hindenburg, through the support and connivance of traditional conservative nationalists who believed that they could control him and his party. Through the use of emergency presidential decrees by Hindenburg, a change in the Weimar Constitution which allowed the Cabinet to rule by direct decree, bypassing both Hindenburg and the Reichstag, the Nazis had soon established a one-party state.
The Sturmabteilung and the Schutzstaffel functioned as the paramilitary organizations of the Nazi Party. Using the SS for the task, Hitler purged the party's more and economically radical factions in the mid-1934 Night of the Long Knives, including the leadership of the SA. After the death of President Hindenburg, political power was concentrated in Hitler's hands and he became Germany's head of state as well as the head of the government, with the title of Führer, meaning "leader". From that point, Hitler was the dictator of Nazi Germany, known as the "Third Reich", under which Jews, political opponents and other "undesirable" elements were marginalized, imprisoned or murdered. Many millions of people were exterminated in a genocide which became known as the Holocaust during World War II, including around two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe. Following Germany's defeat in World War II and the discovery of the full extent of the Holocaust, Nazi ideology became universally disgraced.
It is regarded as immoral and evil, with only a few fringe racist groups referred to as neo-Nazis, describing themselves as followers of National Socialism. The full name of the party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei for which they used the acronym NSDAP; the term "Nazi" was in use before the rise of the NSDAP as a colloquial and derogatory word for a backwards farmer or peasant, characterizing an awkward and clumsy person. In this sense, the word Nazi was a hypocorism of the German male name Ignatz – Ignatz being a common name at the time in Bavaria, the area from which the NSDAP emerged. In the 1920s, political opponents of the NSDAP in the German labour movement seized on this and – using the earlier abbreviated term "Sozi" for Sozialist as an example – shortened NSDAP's name, Nationalsozialistische, to the dismissive "Nazi", in order to associate them with the derogatory use of the term mentioned above; the first use of the term "Nazi" by the National Socialists occurred in 1926 in a publication by Joseph Goebbels called Der Nazi-Sozi.
In Goebbels' pamphlet, the word "Nazi" only appears when linked with the word "Sozi" as an abbreviation of
Hauptsturmführer
Hauptsturmführer was a Nazi Party paramilitary rank, used in several Nazi organizations such as the SS, NSKK and the NSFK. The rank of Hauptsturmführer was a mid-level commander and had equivalent seniority to a captain in the German Army and the equivalency of captain in foreign armies; the rank of Hauptsturmführer evolved from the older rank of Sturmhauptführer, created as a rank of the Sturmabteilung. The SS used the rank of Sturmhauptführer from 1930 to 1934 at which time, following the Night of the Long Knives, the name of the rank was changed to Hauptsturmführer although the insignia remained the same. Sturmhauptführer remained an SA rank until 1945; some of the most infamous SS members are known to have held the rank of Hauptsturmführer. Among them are Josef Mengele, the infamous doctor assigned to Auschwitz; the insignia of Hauptsturmführer was three silver pips and two silver stripes on a black collar patch, worn opposite a unit insignia patch. On the field grey duty uniform, the shoulder boards of an army Hauptmann were displayed.
The rank of Hauptsturmführer was senior to the rank of Obersturmführer and junior to Sturmbannführer. Table of ranks and insignia of the Waffen-SS
Dachau
Dachau is a town in Upper Bavaria, in the southern part of Germany. It is a major district town—a Große Kreisstadt—of the administrative region of Upper Bavaria, about 20 kilometres north-west of Munich, it is now a popular residential area for people working in Munich with 45,000 inhabitants. The historic centre of town with its 18th-century castle is situated on an elevation and visible over a great distance. Dachau was founded in the 9th century, it was home to many artists during the late early 20th centuries. The town is known for its proximity to the infamous Dachau concentration camp built in 1933 by the Nazis, in which tens of thousands of prisoners died; the origin of the name is not known, it originated with the Celts who lived there before the Germans came. An alternative idea is that it comes from the old high German word daha meaning clay, ouwe, water overflown land; as the Amper River would divert into backwaters in several places, there were many fords making it possible to cross the river.
The oldest findings of human presence here date back to the Stone Age. The most noteworthy findings were discovered near Feldgeding in the adjoining municipality Bergkirchen. Around 1000 B. C. the Celts settled. The name “Dachau” originated in the Celtic Dahauua, which translates to “loamy meadow” and alludes to the loamy soil of the surrounding hills; some theories assume the name “Amper” river may derive from the Celtic word for “water”. At the turn of the first millennium the Romans conquered the area and incorporated it into the province of Rhaetia. A Roman trade road between Salzburg and today’s Augsburg is said to have run through Dachau. Remains of this old route are found along the Amper marshlands; the first known documentation of Dachau occurs in a medieval deed issued by the Noble Erchana of Dahauua to the prince-bishop of Freising, both descendants of the lineage of the Aribonids. With this deed, dated to August 15, 805 A. D. she donated her entire property in Dachau, including five so-called Colonenhöfe and some serfs and bondsman, to devolve to the Bishop of the Diocese of Freising after her death.
During much of the 12th century, Dachau was the primary residence of a smaller branch from the House of Wittelsbach led by Otto I, Count of Scheyern-Dauchau. When Conrad III died in 1182, Duke Otto I of Bavaria purchased the land and granted it market rights, that were affirmed between 1270 and 1280 by Duke Ludwig II der Strenge. In 1467 Sigismund, Duke of Bavaria resigned and kept only Bavaria-Dachau as his domain until his death in 1501. Between 1546 and 1577, the House of Wittelsbach had the Dachau Palace erected in the Renaissance style. From June 1715 to Autumn 1717, Joseph Effner remodeled the palace to suit the contemporary taste in style. At the beginning of the 19th century, the castle's north-, east- and south-wing had to be demolished due to their state of disrepair; the west-wing housing the dance hall with a superb view of the enchanting gardens, still remains today. On the first floor the original renaissance wood carved, coffered ceiling can be admired by visitors. During the second half of the 19th century, the town began to attract landscape artists.
The Dachau art colony, which flourished between 1890 and 1914, brought the town recognition as one of the most important artist's colonies in Germany beside Worpswede. In 1933 the Dachau concentration camp was built east of the city by the Nazis and operated until 1945, it was the first of. 14,100 prisoners were murdered in the camp and another 10,000 in its subcamps. Dachau is 20 km northwest of Munich, it is 482 meters above sea level by the river Amper, with a boundary demarcated by lateral moraines formed during the last ice age and the Amper glacial valley. It is close to a large marshy area called Dachauer Moos. Highest elevation of the district is the so-called "Schlossberg", the lowest point is near the neighborhood of Prittlbach, at the border to the next community of Hebertshausen; the bordering communities are Bergkirchen to the west, Schwabhausen to the northwest, Röhrmoos to the north, Hebertshausen to the northeast, Karlsfeld to the south. To the east the greater district Dachau borders on the greater district of Munich with the community of Oberschleißheim.
The city is divided into 3 zones: Historic Center: Dachau Old Town, Udlding, Unterer Markt, Webling Dachau-East: Oberaugustenfeld, Unteraugustenfeld, Obergrashof, parts of Prittlbach Dachau-South: Himmelreich, parts of GröbenriedSince 1972 the former communities of Pellheim with Pullhausen, Assenhausen and Viehgarten have been incorporated into Dachau. Running from the west, the river Amper runs south of Dachau’s old town, changes its direction at the former paper milling plant to the northeast and continues through Prittlbach into Hebertshausen. Coming from Karlsfeld, the Würm crosses Dachau-East and merges into the river Amper just outside the district limit of Hebertshausen; the Gröbenbach, which has its source south of Puchheim, runs through town coming from the south and merges into the Amper river at several locations near the festival grounds. The Mühlbach, a man made canal, is diverted from the river Amper at the electrical power plant and runs parallel and flows back into it after passing the paper mill.
The name derives from the frequent mills in former times along the canal which took advantage of the decline between Mühlbach and Amper. West of the so-called Festwiese runs another canal, called Lodererbach. In town there are still parts of the Schleißheime
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
Bergen-Belsen, or Belsen, was a Nazi concentration camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. Established as a prisoner of war camp, in 1943, parts of it became a concentration camp; this was an "exchange camp", where Jewish hostages were held with the intention of exchanging them for German prisoners of war held overseas. The camp was expanded to accommodate Jews from other concentration camps. After 1945 the name was applied to the displaced persons camp established nearby, but it is most associated with the concentration camp. From 1941 to 1945 20,000 Soviet prisoners of war and a further 50,000 inmates died there. Overcrowding, lack of food and poor sanitary conditions caused outbreaks of typhus, typhoid fever and dysentery, leading to the deaths of more than 35,000 people in the first few months of 1945, shortly before and after the liberation; the camp was liberated on April 1945, by the British 11th Armoured Division. The soldiers discovered 60,000 prisoners inside, most of them half-starved and ill, another 13,000 corpses, including those of Anne and Margot Frank, lying around the camp unburied.
The horrors of the camp, documented on film and in pictures, made the name "Belsen" emblematic of Nazi crimes in general for public opinion in many countries in the immediate post-1945 period. Today, there is a memorial with an exhibition hall at the site. In 1935 the Wehrmacht began to build a large military complex close to the village of Belsen, a part of the town of Bergen, in what was the Province of Hanover; this became the largest military training area in Germany of the time and was used for armoured vehicle training. The barracks were finished in 1937; the camp has been in continuous operation since and is today known as Bergen-Hohne Training Area. It is used by the NATO armed forces; the workers who constructed the original buildings were housed in camps near Fallingbostel and Bergen, the latter being the so-called Bergen-Belsen Army Construction Camp. Once the military complex was completed in 1938/39, the workers' camp fell into disuse. However, after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Wehrmacht began using the huts as a prisoner of war camp.
The camp of huts near Fallingbostel became known as Stalag XI-B and was to become one of the Wehrmacht's largest POW camps, holding up to 95,000 prisoners from various countries. In June 1940, Belgian and French POWs were housed in the former Bergen-Belsen construction workers' camp; this installation was expanded from June 1941, once Germany prepared to invade the Soviet Union, becoming an independent camp known as Stalag XI-C. It was one of three such camps in the area; the others were at Wietzendorf. By the end of March 1942, some 41,000 Soviet POWs had died in these three camps of starvation and disease. By the end of the war, the total number of dead had increased to 50,000; when the POW camp in Bergen ceased operation in early 1945, as the Wehrmacht handed it over to the SS, the cemetery contained over 19,500 dead Soviet prisoners. In the summer of 1943, Stalag XI-C was dissolved and Bergen-Belsen became a branch camp of Stalag XI-B, it served as the hospital for all Soviet POWs in the region until January 1945.
Other inmates/patients were Italian military internees from August 1944 and, following the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising in October 1944, around 1,000 members of the Polish Home Army were imprisoned in a separate section of the POW camp. In April 1943, a part of the Bergen-Belsen camp was taken over by the SS Economic-Administration Main Office, it thus became part of the concentration camp system, run by the SS Schutzstaffel but it was a special case. Having been designated a Zivilinterniertenlager, in June 1943 it was redesignated Aufenthaltslager, since the Geneva Conventions stipulated that the former type of facility must be open to inspection by international committees; this "holding camp" or "exchange camp" was for Jews who were intended to be exchanged for German civilians interned in other countries, or for hard currency. The SS divided this camp into subsections for individual groups. Between the summer of 1943 and December 1944 at least 14,600 Jews, including 2,750 children and minors were transported to the Bergen-Belsen "holding" or exchange camp.
Inmates were made to work, many of them in the "shoe commando" which salvaged usable pieces of leather from shoes collected and brought to the camp from all over Germany and occupied Europe. In general the prisoners of this part of the camp were treated less harshly than some other classes of Bergen-Belsen prisoner until late in the war, due to their perceived potential exchange value. However, only around 2,560 Jewish prisoners were actually released from Bergen-Belsen and allowed to leave Germany. In March 1944, part of the camp was redesignated as an Erholungslager, where prisoners too sick to work were brought from other concentration camps, they were in Belsen to recover and return to their original camps and resume work, but many of them died in Belsen of disease, starvation and lack of medical attention. In August 1944, a new section was created and this became the so-called "women's camp". By November 1944 this camp received around young girls. Most of those who were able to work stayed only for a short while a
Brideshead Revisited
Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is a novel by English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945. It follows, from the 1920s to the early 1940s, the life and romances of the protagonist Charles Ryder, including his friendship with the Flytes, a family of wealthy English Catholics who live in a palatial mansion called Brideshead Castle. Ryder has relationships with two of the Flytes: Julia; the novel explores themes including nostalgia for the age of English aristocracy and the nearly overt homosexuality of Sebastian Flyte's coterie at Oxford University. A faithful and well-received television adaptation of the novel was produced in an 11-part miniseries by Granada Television in 1981; the novel is divided into three parts, framed by a epilogue. The prologue takes place during the final years of the Second World War. Charles Ryder and his battalion are sent to a country estate called Brideshead, which prompts his recollections which form the rest of the story.
In 1923, protagonist and narrator Charles Ryder, an undergraduate studying history at a college like Hertford College, Oxford, is befriended by Lord Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of the aristocratic Lord Marchmain and an undergraduate at Christ Church. Sebastian introduces Charles to his eccentric friends, including the haughty aesthete and homosexual Anthony Blanche. Sebastian takes Charles to his family's palatial mansion, Brideshead Castle, in Wiltshire where Charles meets the rest of Sebastian's family, including his sister Julia. During the long summer holiday Charles returns home to London, where he lives with his widowed father, Edward Ryder; the conversations there between Charles and Edward provide some of the best-known comic scenes in the novel. Charles is called back to Brideshead after Sebastian incurs a minor injury, Sebastian and Charles spend the remainder of the holiday together. Sebastian's family are Roman Catholic, which influences the Flytes' lives as well as the content of their conversations, all of which surprises Charles, who had always assumed Christianity was "without substance or merit".
Lord Marchmain had converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism to marry his wife, but he abandoned both his marriage and his new religion, moved to Venice, Italy. Left alone, Lady Marchmain focuses more on her faith, enthusiastically espoused by her eldest son, Lord Brideshead, by her youngest daughter, Cordelia. Sebastian, a troubled young man, descends into alcoholism, drifting away from the family over a two-year period, he flees to Morocco. He finds some solace as an under-porter and object of charity at a Catholic monastery in Tunisia. Meanwhile Charles finds success as an architectural painter and visits Latin America to paint the buildings there, he is commissioned by Brideshead to paint Marchmain House, the Flytes' London house, before its demolition. Sebastian's drifting leads to Charles's own estrangement from the Flytes. Charles marries and fathers two children, but he becomes cold towards his wife, she is unfaithful to him, he forms a relationship with Sebastian's younger sister Julia.
Julia has married but separated from the rich but unsophisticated Canadian–born businessman and politician Rex Mottram. This marriage caused great sorrow to her mother, because Rex, though planning to convert to Roman Catholicism, turns out to have divorced a previous wife in Canada, so he and Julia ended up marrying without fanfare in the Savoy Chapel, an Anglican church that accepts divorced people. Charles and Julia plan to divorce their respective spouses. Cordelia returns from ministering to the wounded in the Spanish Civil War with disturbing news about Sebastian's nomadic existence and steady decline over the past few years, she predicts. On the eve of the Second World War, the ageing Lord Marchmain, terminally ill, returns to Brideshead to die in his ancestral home. Appalled by the marriage of his eldest son Brideshead to a middle-class widow past childbearing age, he names Julia heir to the estate, which prospectively offers Charles marital ownership of the house. However, Lord Marchmain's return to the faith on his deathbed changes the situation: Julia decides she cannot enter a sinful marriage with Charles, moved by Lord Marchmain's reception of the sacraments.
The plot concludes in the early spring of 1943. Charles is "homeless, middle-aged and loveless", he has become an army officer and finds himself unexpectedly billeted at Brideshead, taken into military use. He finds the house damaged by the army, but the private chapel, closed after Lady Marchmain's death in 1926, has been reopened for the soldiers' worship, it occurs to him that the efforts of the builders – and, by extension, God's efforts – were not in vain, although their purposes may have appeared, for a time, to have been frustrated. Catholicism is a significant theme of the book. Evelyn Waugh was a convert to Catholicism and Brideshead depicts the Roman Catholic faith in a secular literary form. Waugh wrote to his literary agent A. D. Peters, that "I hope the last conversation with Cordelia gives the theological clue; the whole thing is steeped in theology, but I begin to agree that the theologians won't recognize it."The book brings the reader, through the narration of the agnostic Charles Ryder, in contact with the flawed but Catholic Flyte family.
The Catholic themes of divine grace and reconciliation are pervasive in the book. Most of the major characters undergo a conversion in another. Lord Marchmain, a convert from Anglic
The Untouchables (1959 TV series)
The Untouchables is an American crime drama that ran from 1959 to 1963 on the ABC Television Network, produced by Desilu Productions. Based on the memoir of the same name by Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley, it fictionalized Ness's experiences as a Prohibition agent, fighting crime in Chicago in the 1930s with the help of a special team of agents handpicked for their courage, moral character, incorruptibility, nicknamed the Untouchables; the book was made into a film in 1987 by Brian De Palma, with a script by David Mamet, a second, less-successful TV series in 1993. A dynamic, hard-hitting action drama, a landmark television crime series, The Untouchables won series star Robert Stack an Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series in 1960; the series focused on the efforts of a real-life squad of Prohibition agents employed by the United States Department of the Treasury and led by Eliot Ness, that helped bring down the bootleg empire of "Scarface" Al Capone, as described in Ness's bestselling 1957 memoir.
This squad was nicknamed "The Untouchables", because of their honesty. Eliot Ness himself had died in May 1957, shortly before his memoir and the subsequent TV adaptation were to bring him fame beyond any he experienced in his lifetime; the pilot for the series was a two-part episode entitled "The Untouchables" aired on CBS's Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse on April 20 and 27, 1959. Retitled "The Scarface Mob", these episodes, which featured Neville Brand as Al Capone, were the only episodes in the series to be more-or-less directly based on Ness's memoir, ended with the conviction and imprisonment of Capone. CBS, which had broadcast most of Desilu's television output since 1951 beginning with I Love Lucy, was offered the new series following the success of the pilot film. Chairman William S. Paley rejected it on the advice of network vice president Hubbell Robinson. ABC agreed to air the series, The Untouchables premiered on October 15, 1959. In the pilot movie, the mobsters spoke with unrealistic pseudo-Italian accents, but this idiosyncratic pronunciation was dropped when the series debuted.
The weekly series first followed the premise of a power struggle to establish a new boss in Capone's absence. As the series continued, there developed a fictionalized portrayal of Ness and his crew as all-purpose crime fighters who went up against an array of gangsters and villains of the 1930s, including Ma Barker, Dutch Schultz, Bugs Moran, Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll, Legs Diamond, Lucky Luciano, in one episode, Nazi agents; the terse narration by gossip columnist Walter Winchell, in his distinctive New York accent, was a stylistic hallmark of the series, along with its melancholy theme music by Nelson Riddle and its shadowy black-and-white photography, influenced by film noir. The show drew harsh criticism from some Italian-Americans, including Frank Sinatra, who felt it promoted negative stereotypes of them as mobsters and gangsters; the Capone family unsuccessfully sued CBS, Desilu Productions, Westinghouse Electric Corporation for their depiction of the Capone family. In the first episode of the first season, the character of "Agent Rossi", a person of Italian extraction who had witnessed a gangland murder, was added to Ness's team.
On March 9, 1961, Anthony Anastasio, chief of the Brooklyn waterfront and its International Longshoremen's Association, marched in line with a picket group who identified themselves as "The Federation of Italian-American Democratic Organizations". In protest formation outside the ABC New York headquarters, they had come together to urge the public boycott of Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company products, including Chesterfield King cigarettes, the lead sponsor of The Untouchables, they expressed displeasure with the program, which to them vilified Italian-Americans, stereotyping them as the singular criminal element. The boycott and the attendant firestorm of publicity had the effect Anastasio and his confederates wanted. Four days after the picket of ABC, L&M, denying it had bowed to intimidation, announced it would drop its sponsorship of The Untouchables, maintaining the decision was based on network-scheduling conflicts; the following week, the head of Desilu, Desi Arnaz, in concert with ABC and the "Italian-American League to Combat Defamation", issued a formal three-point manifesto: There will be no more fictional hoodlums with Italian names in future productions.
There will be more stress on the law-enforcement role of "Rico Rossi", Ness's right-hand man on the show. There will be an emphasis on the "formidable influence" of Italian-American officials in reducing crime and an emphasis on the "great contributions" made to American culture by Americans of Italian descent; the series incurred the displeasure of the powerful director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, when the fictionalized scripts depicted Ness and his Treasury agents involved in operations that were the province of the FBI; the second episode of the series, for example, depicted Ness and his crew involved in the capture of the Ma Barker gang, an incident in which the real-life Ness played no part. The producers agreed to insert a spoken disclaimer on future broadcasts of the episode stating that the FBI had primary responsibility for the Barker case; the Untouchables was an unusually violent program for its time and its excessive violence and frank depictions of drug abuse and prostitution were described by the National Association for Better Radio and Television as "not fit for the television
The Holocaust
The Holocaust known as the Shoah, was a genocide during World War II in which Nazi Germany, aided by local collaborators, systematically murdered some six million European Jews—around two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe—between 1941 and 1945. Jews were targeted for extermination as part of a larger event during the Holocaust era, in which Germany and its collaborators persecuted and murdered other groups, including Slavs, the Roma, the "incurably sick", political and religious dissenters such as communists and Jehovah's Witnesses, gay men. Taking into account all the victims of Nazi persecution, the death toll rises to over 17 million. Germany implemented the persecution of the Jews in stages. Following Adolf Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor in January 1933, the regime built a network of concentration camps in Germany for political opponents and those deemed "undesirable", starting with Dachau on 22 March 1933. After the passing of the Enabling Act on 24 March, which gave Hitler plenary powers, the government began isolating Jews from civil society, which included a boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933 and enacting the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935.
On 9–10 November 1938, during Kristallnacht, Jewish businesses and other buildings were ransacked, smashed or set on fire throughout Germany and Austria, which Germany had annexed in March that year. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, triggering World War II, the regime set up ghettos to segregate Jews. Thousands of camps and other detention sites were established across German-occupied Europe; the deportation of Jews to the ghettos culminated in the policy of extermination the Nazis called the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", discussed by senior Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942. As German forces captured territories in the East, all anti-Jewish measures were radicalized. Under the coordination of the SS, with directions from the highest leadership of the Nazi Party, killings were committed within Germany itself, throughout occupied Europe, across all territories controlled by the Axis powers. Paramilitary death squads called Einsatzgruppen, in cooperation with Wehrmacht police battalions and local collaborators, murdered around 1.3 million Jews in mass shootings between 1941 and 1945.
By mid-1942, victims were being deported from the ghettos in sealed freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, they were killed in gas chambers. The killing continued until the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945; the term holocaust, first used in 1895 to describe the massacre of Armenians, comes from the Greek: ὁλόκαυστος, translit. Holókaustos; the Century Dictionary defined it in 1904 as "a sacrifice or offering consumed by fire, in use among the Jews and some pagan nations". The biblical term shoah, meaning "destruction", became the standard Hebrew term for the murder of the European Jews, first used in a pamphlet in 1940, Sho'at Yehudei Polin, published by the United Aid Committee for the Jews in Poland. On 3 October 1941 the cover of the magazine The American Hebrew used the phrase "before the Holocaust" to refer to the situation in France, in May 1943 The New York Times, discussing the Bermuda Conference, referred to the "hundreds of thousands of European Jews still surviving the Nazi Holocaust".
In 1968 the Library of Congress created a new category, "Holocaust, Jewish". The term was popularized in the United States by the NBC mini-series Holocaust, about a fictional family of German Jews, in November 1978 the President's Commission on the Holocaust was established; as non-Jewish groups began to include themselves as Holocaust victims too, many Jews chose to use the terms Shoah or Churban instead. The Nazis used the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". Most Holocaust historians define the Holocaust as the enactment, between 1941 and 1945, of the German state policy to exterminate the European Jews. In Teaching the Holocaust, Michael Gray, a specialist in Holocaust education, offers three definitions: "the persecution and murder of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945", which views the events of Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938 as an early phase of the Holocaust; the third definition fails, Gray writes, to acknowledge that only the Jewish people were singled out for annihilation.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines the Holocaust as the "systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators", distinguishing between the Holocaust and the targeting of other groups during "the era of the Holocaust". According to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, most historians regard the start of the "Holocaust era" as January 1933, when Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany. Other victims of the Holocaust era include. Hitler came to see the Jews as "uniquely dangerous to Germany", according to Peter Hayes, "and therefore uniquely destined t
