Gleichschaltung, or in English co-ordination, was in Nazi terminology the process of Nazification by which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party successively established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society, "from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education".
Sicherheitsdienst, full title Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS, or SD, was the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. Originating in 1931, the organization was the first Nazi intelligence organization to be established and was considered a sister organization with the Gestapo through integration of SS members and operational procedures. Between 1933 and 1939, the SD was administered as an independent SS office, after which it was transferred to the authority of the Reich Main Security Office, as one of its seven departments/offices. Its first director, Reinhard Heydrich, intended for the SD to bring every single individual within the Third Reich's reach under "continuous supervision".
The racial policy of Nazi Germany was a set of policies and laws implemented in Nazi Germany (1933–45) based on a specific racist doctrine asserting the superiority of the Aryan race, which claimed scientific legitimacy. This was combined with a eugenics programme that aimed for racial hygiene by compulsory sterilization and extermination of those who they saw as Untermenschen ("sub-humans"), which culminated in the Holocaust.
The Romani genocide or the Romani Holocaust—also known as the Porajmos, the Pharrajimos, and the Samudaripen —was the effort by Nazi Germany and its World War II allies to commit genocide against Europe's Romani people.
Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges, and thus no trial. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply mean imprisonment, it tends to refer to preventive confinement, rather than confinement after having been convicted of some crime. Use of these terms is subject to debate and political sensitivities.
Volksgemeinschaft is a German expression meaning "people's community". This expression originally became popular during World War I as Germans rallied in support of the war, and it appealed to the idea of breaking down elitism and uniting people across class divides to achieve a national purpose.
Hans Mommsen was a German historian, known for his studies in German social history, and for his functionalist interpretation of the Third Reich, especially for arguing that Hitler was a weak dictator. He was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
Rassenschande or Blutschande was an anti-miscegenation concept in Nazi German racial policy, pertaining to sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans. It was put into practice by policies like the Aryan certificate requirement, and later the Nuremberg Laws, adopted unanimously by the Reichstag on 15 September 1935. Initially, these laws referred predominantly to relations between Germans and non-Aryans. In the early stages the culprits were targeted informally, and then later on punished systematically by a repressive legal apparatus.
Adolf Hitler was a German politician and leader of the Nazi Party. He rose to power to become dictator of Germany, serving as Chancellor from 1933 and Führer ("Leader") from 1934. During his dictatorship from 1933 to 1945, he initiated World War II in Europe by invading Poland in September 1939. He closely supervised military operations during the war and by December 1941 had full control of all strategic decisions, especially on the Eastern Front. He was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust.
The Nuremberg Laws were antisemitic and racial laws in Nazi Germany. They were enacted by the Reichstag on 15 September 1935, at a special meeting convened during the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party (NSDAP). The two laws were the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households; and the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens; the remainder were classed as state subjects, without citizenship rights. A supplementary decree outlining the definition of who was Jewish was passed on 14 November, and the Reich Citizenship Law officially came into force on that date. The laws were expanded on 26 November 1935 to include Romani people. This supplementary decree defined Romanis as "enemies of the race-based state", the same category as Jews.
Nazi eugenics were Nazi Germany's racially based social policies that placed the biological improvement of the Aryan race or Germanic "Übermenschen" master race through eugenics at the center of Nazi ideology. In Germany, eugenics were mostly known under the synonymous term racial hygiene. Following the Second World War, both terms effectively vanished and were replaced by Humangenetik.
Jewish Bolshevism, also Judeo–Bolshevism, is an anti-communist and antisemitic canard, which alleges that the Jews were the originators of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and that they held the primary power among the Bolsheviks. Similarly, the conspiracy theory of Jewish Communism implies that Jews have dominated the Communist movements in the world, and is related to The Zionist Occupation Government conspiracy theory (ZOG), which asserts that Jews control world politics.
While Black people in Nazi Germany were never subject to mass extermination as in the cases of Jews, Romani and Slavs, they were still considered by the Nazis to be an inferior race and, along with Romani people, were subject to the Nuremberg Laws under a supplementary decree.
The propaganda of the National Socialist German Workers' Party regime that governed Germany from 1933 to 1945 promoted Nazi ideology by demonizing the enemies of the Nazi Party, notably Jews and communists, but also capitalists and intellectuals. It promoted the values asserted by the Nazis, including heroic death, Führerprinzip, Volksgemeinschaft, Blut und Boden and pride in the Germanic Herrenvolk. Propaganda was also used to maintain the cult of personality around Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, and to promote campaigns for eugenics and the annexation of German-speaking areas. After the outbreak of World War II, Nazi propaganda vilified Germany's enemies, notably the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States, and in 1943 exhorted the population to total war.
The Commission for Polish Relief (CPR), also known unofficially as Comporel or Hoover Commission, was initiated in late 1939 by former US President Herbert Hoover, following the German and Soviet occupation of Poland. The Commission provided relief to Nazi occupied territories of Poland until December 1941.
National Socialism, more commonly known as Nazism, is the ideology and practices associated with the Nazi Party – officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party – in Nazi Germany, and of other far-right groups with similar aims.
Fritz Balduin Lickint was a German internist and social democrat, who investigated scientifically health problems and social problems related to alcohol and tobacco, described in the 1920s cancer of the lung from smoking and, the cancer pathway alongside the respiratory and upper digestive tract. In 1925 he published about an increase of gastric ulcer and stomach cancer in smokers. All his life Lickint was an engaged social democrat and member of the union "social democratic physicians". Because of his political attitude he lost his job at the Chemnitz hospital in 1934, shortly after the Nazis came into power, and was convened to military service in 1939 as a basic aidman. Not before 1945 he was able to return to his work as a hospital physician and later became hospital director.
Lickint was one of the first physicians describing physical and psychological tobacco dependence as a disease, which needs treatment, suggesting a number of therapies. He also pointed to the "anti-social behavior of many smokers, polluting ambient air recklessly and harming health of other people". Lickint created the term "passive smoking". The Nazis usurped these thoughts, but simultaneously supplied soldiers with cigarettes and cooperated with the German tobacco industry Reemtsma, also in Austria.
Later the propaganda of the tobacco industry in Austria and Germany traced the origin of the non-smoking movement back to the Nazi time, when actually more cigarettes were smoked than ever before. In fact the movement against alcohol and nicotine had started in the social democratic party at the beginning of the 20th century, even though research and ideas of Fritz Lickint were also used in the anti-tobacco movement in Nazi Germany. Though he was not the first to publish statistical evidence suggesting a link between cancer and tobacco consumption, in 1929 Lickint published the most thorough case-series study at the time. In 1939, Lickint in collaboration with The Reich's Committee for the Struggle against Addictive Drugs and the German Antitobacco League published Tobak and Organisms, a 1200-page volume covering 8000 publications which is considered to be the largest scholarly compilation on the ills of tobacco at the time. This in turn earned him the title as the physician "most hated by the tobacco industry." Lickint argued that tobacco was highly addictive and that its usage was responsible for thousands of cancers in Nazi Germany.
