key terms

Question 1

Slav Peoples

Answer 1

A very diverse ethnic group including Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Croats, Serbs and Slovenes, living mainly in Central and Eastern Europe.

Question 2

Degenerate

Answer 2

A person considered to be lacking some usual or expected property or quality, such as physical, mental, or moral.

Question 3

Eugenics

Answer 3

Theory that a race or group of people could be genetically improved through selective breeding, first formulated by Charles Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton in 1883.

Question 4

Euthanasia

Answer 4

Intentionally ending a life to relieve pain and suffering

Question 5

Internal Exile

Answer 5

A mental process, not a physical one.

People switched off from the Nazified outside world and retreated into a non-Nazi world inside their own homes or inside their own private thoughts.

Question 6

Mischlinge

Answer 6

Meaning ‘crossbreed’ in German, Nazis used this term to denote persons with both Aryan and Jewish ancestry.

Question 7

Zionism

Answer 7

Movement for the return of Jewish people to their historic homeland in Palestine.

Question 8

Pogrom

Answer 8

An organised massacre of an ethnic group.

The Reichkristallnacht pogrom was not the first massacre against Jews in Europe - there had been a number of pogroms against Jews living in the Russian Empire during 19th century.

Question 9

Aryanisation

Answer 9

Nazi policy of removing all Jews and other non-Aryans from key aspects in Germany’s cultural and economical life.

Policy was designed to lead ultimately to the complete expulsion of non-Aryans from Germany.

Question 10

General Government

Answer 10

The area of Poland occupied by the Nazis in 1939 that was not incorporated into the German Reich but controlled as a semi-autonomous area under Governor Hans Frank.

It became a dumping ground for Jews deported from the Reich.

Most of the death camps that were built in 1941-42 were located within the General Government.

Question 11

Blitzkrieg

Answer 11

Lighting war.

Used to describe German strategy of attacking an enemy with maximum force, combining air attacks with fast-moving motorised army units on the ground in order to achieve a quick victory.

Question 12

Operation Barbarossa

Answer 12

German codename for the invasion of the USSR.

Question 13

Ghetto

Answer 13

Controlled area of a town or city reserved for a particular race, and a feature of life in Europe since the medieval times.

In early stages of the conquest of the East, Nazi authorities herded Jews into overcrowded ghettos in cities such as Warsaw and Lodz.