Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people, usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word γένος with the Latin suffix -caedo.
Genocide denial is the attempt to deny or minimize the scale and severity of an incidence of genocide. Denial is an integral part of genocide and includes secret planning of genocide, propaganda while the genocide is ongoing, and destruction of evidence of mass killings. According to genocide researcher Gregory Stanton, denial "is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres".
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also known as the Holocaust Memorial, is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. It consists of a 19,000-square-metre (200,000 sq ft) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The original plan was to place nearly 4,000 slabs, but before the unveiling a new law was enacted mandating memorials to be wheelchair accessible. After the recalculation, the number of slabs that could legally fit into the designated areas was 2,711. The stelae are 2.38 m long, 0.95 m wide and vary in height from 0.2 to 4.7 metres. They are organized in rows, 54 of them going north–south, and 87 heading east–west at right angles but set slightly askew. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of approximately 3 million Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem.
Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a German term describing processes that since the later 20th century have become key in the study of post-1945 German literature, society, and culture.
A Holocaust memorial day or Holocaust remembrance day is an annual observance to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, the genocide of six million European Jews and of millions of other Holocaust victims by Nazi Germany. Many countries, primarily in Europe, have designated national dates of commemoration. In 2005, the United Nations instituted an international observance, International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Gedenkdienst is the concept of facing and taking responsibility for the darkest chapters of one's own country's history while ideally being financially supported by one's own country's government to do so. Founded in Austria in 1992 by Andreas Maislinger the Gedenkdienst is an alternative to Austria's compulsory national military service as well as a volunteering platform for Austrians to work in Holocaust- and Jewish culture-related institutions around the world with governmental financial support. In Austria it is also referred to as Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service provided by the Austrian Service Abroad. The Austrian Gedenkdienst serves the remembrance of the crimes of Nazism, commemorates its victims and supports Jewish cultural future. The program is rooted in the acknoledgment of responsibility by the Austrian government for the crimes committed by National Socialism.
Maafa, African Holocaust, Holocaust of Enslavement, or Black Holocaust are political neologisms popularized from 1988 onwards and used to describe the history and ongoing effects of atrocities inflicted on African people, particularly when committed by non-Africans which continues to the present day through imperialism, colonialism and other forms of oppression. For example, Maulana Karenga (2001) puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples".
The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, or the International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, is an international memorial day on 27 January that commemorates the victims of the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities between 1933 and 1945 by Nazi Germany, an attempt to implement their "final solution" to the Jewish question. 27 January was chosen to commemorate the date that Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945.
Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum is a Lithuanian museum dedicated to the historical and cultural heritage of Lithuanian Jewry.
Holocaust memorial landscapes in Germany encompass a large group of commemorative works dealing with the outdoor built environment. Most often these memorials attempt to keep the memory of Holocaust victims alive through dissemination of this memory to the public.
The Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust (DRVH) is an annual eight-day period designated by the United States Congress for civic commemorations and special educational programs that help citizens remember and draw lessons from the Holocaust. The annual DRVH period normally begins on the Sunday before the Israeli observance of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, and continues through the following Sunday, usually in April or May. A National Civic Commemoration is held in Washington, D.C., with state, city, and local ceremonies and programs held in most of the fifty states, and on U.S. military ships and stations around the world. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum designates a theme for each year's programs, and provides materials to help support remembrance efforts.
The double genocide theory is the idea that two genocides of equal severity occurred in Eastern Europe, that of the Holocaust against Jews perpetrated by the Nazis and a second genocide that the Soviet Union committed against the local population. The theory first became popular in Lithuania in the early 1990s. A more aggressive version of the theory accuses Jews of complicity in Soviet repression and characterize local participation in the Holocaust as retaliation, especially in Lithuania, eastern Poland, and northern Romania.
Perpetrator trauma, also known as perpetration- or participation-induced traumatic stress , occurs when the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are caused by an act or acts of killing or similar horrific violence.
Prevention of genocide is any action that works toward averting future genocides. Genocides take a lot of planning, resources, and involved parties to carry out, they do not just happen instantaneously. Scholars in the field of genocide studies have identified a set of widely agreed upon risk factors that make a country or social group more at risk of carrying out a genocide, which include a wide range of political and cultural factors that create a context in which genocide is more likely, such as political upheaval or regime change, as well as psychological phenomena that can be manipulated and taken advantage of in large groups of people, like conformity and cognitive dissonance. Genocide prevention depends heavily on the knowledge and surveillance of these risk factors, as well as the identification of early warning signs of genocide beginning to occur.
The Holocaust is conceptualized and narrated in textbooks worldwide in a variety of approaches to treating temporal and spatial scales, protagonists, interpretative paradigms, narrative techniques, didactic methods and national idiosyncrasies with and within which the Holocaust. There exist convergent trends or internationally shared narrative templates, and divergent trends or narrative idiosyncrasies, which generally establish links between the Holocaust and local events. Textbooks in most countries focus most closely, via photographs and legal documentation, on the perpetrators’ point of view. This is a key component of education about the Holocaust.
Genocide education refers to education about patterns and trends in the phenomenon of genocide and/or about the causes, nature and impact of particular instances of genocide.
Holocaust education is efforts, in either formal and non-formal settings, to teach about the Holocaust. Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust addresses didactics and learning, under the larger umbrella of education about the Holocaust, which also comprises curricula and textbooks studies. The expression "Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust" is used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
Museum of the Holocaust – victims of fascism, Odessa – the first Museum in Ukraine, which is based on the events of the genocide of the Jewish population in Transnistria Governorate.
The Memorial at the Frankfurt Grossmarkthalle commemorates the deportation of Jews from Frankfurt am Main in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. From 1941 to 1945, the Gestapo used the cellar of the Grossmarkthalle as a gathering place for the deportation of Jews from the city and the Rhine-Main area. During ten mass deportations between October 1941 and September 1942 alone, about 10,050 people were deported from the Großmarkthalle railway station in freight trains to ghettos, concentration and extermination camps and subsequently murdered. As far as is known, only 179 deportees survived the Second World War.
