Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was a German politician who was the 4th Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel, a leading member of the German Nazi Party, and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany. He is primarily known for being a principal architect of the Holocaust.
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German Nazi politician and philologist who was the Gauleiter of Berlin, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, and then Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945. He was one of Adolf Hitler's closest and most devoted followers, known for his skills in public speaking and his deeply virulent antisemitism which was evident in his publicly voiced views. He advocated progressively harsher discrimination, including the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust.
The Schutzstaffel was a major paramilitary organisation under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany, and later throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II.
The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior government officials of Nazi Germany and Schutzstaffel (SS) leaders, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The purpose of the conference, called by the director of the Reich Security Main Office SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, was to ensure the co-operation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be deported to occupied Poland and murdered. Conference participants included representatives from several government ministries, including state secretaries from the Foreign Office, the justice, interior, and state ministries, and representatives from the SS. In the course of the meeting, Heydrich outlined how European Jews would be rounded up and sent to extermination camps in the General Government, where they would be killed.
Zyklon B was the trade name of a cyanide-based pesticide invented in Germany in the early 1920s. It consists of hydrogen cyanide, as well as a cautionary eye irritant and one of several adsorbents such as diatomaceous earth. The product is notorious for its use by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust to murder approximately 1.1 million people in gas chambers installed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, and other extermination camps.
Oswald Ludwig Pohl was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era. As the head of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office and the head administrator of the Nazi concentration camps, he was a key figure in the Final Solution, the genocide of the European Jews. After the war, Pohl went into hiding; he was apprehended in 1946. Pohl stood trial in 1947, was convicted of crimes against humanity, and sentenced to death. After repeatedly appealing his case, he was executed by hanging in 1951.
Einsatzgruppen were Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany that were responsible for mass murder, primarily by shooting, during World War II (1939–1945) in German-occupied Europe. The Einsatzgruppen had an integral role in the implementation of the so-called "Final Solution to the Jewish question" in territories conquered by Nazi Germany, and were involved in the murder of much of the intelligentsia and cultural elite of Poland, including members of the Catholic priesthood. Almost all of the people they murdered were civilians, beginning with the intelligentsia and swiftly progressing to Soviet political commissars, Jews, and Romani people, as well as actual or alleged partisans throughout Eastern Europe.
The Reich Security Main Office was an organization under Heinrich Himmler in his dual capacity as Chef der Deutschen Polizei and Reichsführer-SS, the head of the Nazi Party's Schutzstaffel (SS). The organization's stated duty was to fight all "enemies of the Reich" inside and outside the borders of Nazi Germany.
The Allgemeine SS was a major branch of the Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces of Nazi Germany; it was managed by the SS Main Office (SS-Hauptamt). The Allgemeine SS was officially established in the autumn of 1934 to distinguish its members from the SS-Verfügungstruppe, which later became the Waffen-SS, and the SS-Totenkopfverbände, which, in addition to their combat roles were in charge of the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps. SS formations committed many war crimes against civilians and allied servicemen.
The Sicherheitspolizei, often abbreviated as SiPo, was a term used in Germany for security police. In the Nazi era, it referred to the state political and criminal investigation security agencies. It was made up by the combined forces of the Gestapo and the Kriminalpolizei between 1936 and 1939. As a formal agency, the SiPo was incorporated into the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in 1939, but the term continued to be used informally until the end of World War II in Europe.
The Madagascar Plan was a plan proposed by the Nazi German government to forcibly relocate the Jewish population of Europe to the island of Madagascar. Franz Rademacher, head of the Jewish Department of the German Foreign Office, proposed the idea in June 1940, shortly before the Fall of France. The proposal called for the handing over of control of Madagascar, then a French colony, to Germany as part of the eventual peace terms.
The Nuremberg Laws were antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935, at a special meeting of the Reichstag convened during the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. 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 any 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 and Black people. This supplementary decree defined Romani people as "enemies of the race-based state", the same category as Jews.
The SS Main Economic and Administrative Office was a Nazi organization responsible for managing the finances, supply systems and business projects of the Allgemeine-SS. It also ran the concentration camps and was instrumental in the implementation of the Final Solution through such subsidiary offices as the Concentration Camps Inspectorate and SS camp guards.
Otto Adolf Eichmann was a German-Austrian official of the Nazi Party, an officer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), and one of the major organisers of the Holocaust. He participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the implementation of the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned. Following this, he was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to Nazi ghettos and Nazi extermination camps across German-occupied Europe. He was captured and detained by the Allies in 1945, but escaped and eventually settled in Argentina. In May 1960, he was tracked down and apprehended by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, and put on trial before the Supreme Court of Israel. The highly publicised Eichmann trial resulted in his conviction in Jerusalem, following which he was executed by hanging in 1962.
Deutsche Wirtschaftsbetriebe, abbreviated DWB, was a project launched by Nazi Germany in World War II. Organised and managed by the Allgemeine SS, its aim was to profit from the use of slave labour extracted from the Nazi concentration camp inmates.
The Politische Abteilung, also called the "concentration camp Gestapo," was one of the five departments of a Nazi concentration camp set up by the Concentration Camps Inspectorate (CCI) to operate the camps. An outpost of both the Gestapo and the criminal police (Kripo), the political department evolved into the most important of the five.
Ostindustrie GmbH was one of many industrial projects set up by the Nazi German Schutzstaffel (SS) using Jewish and Polish forced labor during World War II. Founded in March 1943 in German-occupied Poland, Osti operated confiscated Jewish and Polish prewar industrial enterprises, including foundries, textile plants, quarries and glassworks. Osti was headed by SS-Obersturmführer Max Horn, who was subordinated directly to Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office. At its height, some 16,000 Jews and 1,000 Poles worked for the company, interned in a network of labor and concentration camps in the Lublin District of the semi-colonial General Government territory.
Operation Desert was a German synthetic fuel project during World War II. It attempted to build a shale oil industrial production complex for utilization of Swabian Alb oil shale deposits.
Helmut Krausnick was a German historian and writer. From 1959 to 1972, he was the head of the Institute of Contemporary History, a leading German research institute on the history of National Socialism.
The Holocaust in Germany was the systematic persecution, deportation, imprisonment, and murder of Jews in Germany as part of the Europe-wide Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany. The term typically refers only to the areas that were part of Germany prior to the Nazi regime coming to power and excludes some or all of the territories annexed by Nazi Germany, such as Austria or the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
