Aktion T4 was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post-war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße 4, a street address of the Chancellery department set up in early 1940, in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, which recruited and paid personnel associated with Aktion T4. Certain German physicians were authorised to select patients "deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination" and then administer to them a "mercy death". In October 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia note", backdated to 1 September 1939, which authorised his physician Karl Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler to begin the killing.
Raul Hilberg was a Jewish Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the preeminent scholar on the Holocaust. Christopher R. Browning has called him the founding father of Holocaust Studies and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opusThe Destruction of the European Jews is regarded as seminal for research into the Nazi Final Solution.
The identification of the causes of World War I remains controversial. World War I began in the Balkans on July 28, 1914, and hostilities ended on November 11, 1918, leaving 17 million dead and 25 million wounded.
Franz Walter Stahlecker was commander of the SS security forces (Sicherheitspolizei and the Sicherheitsdienst for the Reichskommissariat Ostland in 1941–42. Stahlecker commanded Einsatzgruppe A, the most murderous of the four Einsatzgruppen active in German-occupied Eastern Europe. He was fatally wounded in action by Soviet partisans and was replaced by Heinz Jost.
The history of the Jews in Slovakia goes back to the 11th century, when the first Jews settled in the area.
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through labor in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka in occupied Poland.
ARBOS – Company for Music and Theatre in Vienna, Salzburg and Klagenfurt, is a society specialized in the realisation of new forms of theatre especially of projects for contemporary new music theatre, scenic concerts, theatre for young people, theatre concerts, deaf theatre, directed space, theatrical exhibitions and other forms of the arts.
German collective guilt refers to the notion of a collective guilt attributed to Germany and its people for perpetrating the Holocaust and other atrocities in World War II.
Alan E. Steinweis is an American historian and a professor at the University of Vermont.
Anti-Hungarian sentiment is dislike, distrust, racism, or xenophobia directed against the Hungarians. It can involve hatred, grievance, distrust, intimidation, fear, and hostility towards the Hungarian people, language and culture.
The Holocaust in Slovakia was the systematic dispossession, deportation, and murder of Jews in the Slovak State, a client state of Nazi Germany, during World War II. Out of 89,000 Jews in the country in 1940, an estimated 69,000 were murdered in the Holocaust.
In August 1942, Jozef Tiso, president of the Slovak State and a Catholic priest, gave a speech in Holič, Slovakia, in which he defended the deportation of Jews from Slovakia. Referring to Jews as "parasites" and "the eternal enemy", Tiso claimed that their deportation was both economically necessary and congruent with Christian moral principles. The speech has been recognized as a key part of Tiso's moral legacy, emblematic of his complicity in the Holocaust.
Kerstin von Lingen is a German military historian who specialises in the study of war crimes. She is best known for her works on Field Marshal Albert Kesselring and SS Obergruppenfuehrer Karl Wolff.
From 4 to 7 November 1938, thousands of Jews were deported from Slovakia to the no-man's land on the Slovak−Hungarian border. Following Hungarian territorial gains in the First Vienna Award on 2 November, Slovak Jews were accused of favoring Hungary in the dispute. With the help of Adolf Eichmann, Slovak People's Party leaders planned the deportation, which was carried out by local police and the Hlinka Guard. Conflicting orders were issued to target either Jews who were poor or those who lacked Slovak citizenship, resulting in chaos.
Maria Mesner is an Austrian contemporary historian who heads the gender studies program at the University of Vienna. She is co-editor of the journal Österreichischen Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften and directs the Bruno Kreisky Archives.
The question of how much Germans and other Europeans knew about the Holocaust while it was ongoing continues to be debated by historians. With regards to Nazi Germany, some historians argue that it was an open secret amongst the population whilst others highlight a possibility that the German population were genuinely unaware of the Final Solution. Peter Longerich argues that the Holocaust was an "open secret" by early 1943, but some authors place it even earlier. However, after the war, many Germans claimed that they were ignorant of the crimes perpetrated by the Nazi regime, often using the stereotypical phrase "davon haben wir nichts gewusst".
The Holocaust in Austria was the systematic persecution, plunder and extermination of Jews by German and Austrian Nazis from 1938 to 1945. An estimated 65,000 Jews were murdered and 125,000 forced to flee Austria as refugees.
Andrea Pető is a Hungarian historian. She is a professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University and a Doctor of Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Recognized as a leading scholar on political extremism and how it shapes the collective memory of society, Pető's work evaluates contemporary society from an inter-disciplinary and gendered perspective. She has analyzed the effects of Nazism and Stalinism on Hungary and Eastern Europe, as well as the participation of women in those movements. Pető has been recognized for her scholarly contributions with the Officer's Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit, Bolyai Prize of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the Madame de Staël Prize of the All European Academies.
Michael John is an Austrian historian and exhibitions-curator, internationally known for his research on European and Jewish migration, and on Nazism.
Sabine Strasser is an Austrian social anthropologist who specializes in migration and gender issues. She evaluates the political nature of transnational relationships, particularly with regard to diversity and multiculturalism. She was one of the first researchers hired when the University of Vienna's founded its Inter-University Coordination Center of Women's Studies in 1993. She has taught at the University of Vienna and the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Since 2013, she has served as a professor at the University of Bern.
