178-759: Additional : Operation Reinhard or Operation Reinhardt ( German : Aktion Reinhard or Aktion Reinhardt ; also Einsatz Reinhard or Einsatz Reinhardt ) was the codename of the secret German plan in World War II to exterminate Polish Jews in the General Government district of German- occupied Poland . This deadliest phase of the Holocaust was marked by the introduction of extermination camps . The operation proceeded from March 1942 to November 1943; about 1.47 million or more Jews were murdered in just 100 days from late July to early November 1942,
356-460: A de facto official language of Namibia after the end of German colonial rule alongside English and Afrikaans , and had de jure co-official status from 1984 until its independence from South Africa in 1990. However, the Namibian government perceived Afrikaans and German as symbols of apartheid and colonialism, and decided English would be the sole official language upon independence, stating that it
534-721: A meeting of the Nazi Party (the Reichsleiter ) and of regional party leaders (the Gauleiter ). The day after Hitler's speech, on 13 December 1941, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: With respect of the Jewish Question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they again brought about a world war, they would see their annihilation in it. That wasn't just
712-402: A second language , and 75–100 million as a foreign language . This would imply the existence of approximately 175–220 million German speakers worldwide. German sociolinguist Ulrich Ammon estimated a number of 289 million German foreign language speakers without clarifying the criteria by which he classified a speaker. As of 2012 , about 90 million people, or 16% of
890-587: A "commonly used" language and the Pan South African Language Board is obligated to promote and ensure respect for it. Cameroon was also a colony of the German Empire from the same period (1884 to 1916). However, German was replaced by French and English, the languages of the two successor colonial powers, after its loss in World War I . Nevertheless, since the 21st century, German has become
1068-844: A Jewish substitution policy in Upper Silesia and in Galicia under the " extermination through labour " doctrine. Many Poles had already been sent to the Reich, creating a labour shortage in the General Government. Around March 1942, while the first extermination camp (Bełżec) began gassing, the deportation trains arriving in the Lublin reservation from Germany and Slovakia were searched for the Jewish skilled workers. After selection, they were delivered to Majdan Tatarski instead of for "special treatment" at Bełżec. For
1246-573: A catch-word. The world war is here and the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. Cesarani notes that by 1943, as the military position of the German forces deteriorated, the Nazi leadership became more openly explicit about the Final Solution. In March, Goebbels confided to his diary: "On the Jewish question especially, we are in it so deeply that there is no getting out any longer. And that
1424-556: A greater need for regularity in written conventions. While the major changes of the MHG period were socio-cultural, High German was still undergoing significant linguistic changes in syntax, phonetics, and morphology as well (e.g. diphthongization of certain vowel sounds: hus (OHG & MHG "house") → haus (regionally in later MHG)→ Haus (NHG), and weakening of unstressed short vowels to schwa [ə]: taga (OHG "days")→ tage (MHG)). A great wealth of texts survives from
1602-570: A joint assault in Kovno , Wilno , and Lwów). The murders continued uninterrupted. On 12 October 1941, in Stanisławów , some 10,000–12,000 Jewish men, women, and children were shot at the Jewish cemetery by the German uniformed SS-men and Ukrainian Auxiliary Police during the so-called " Bloody Sunday [ de ; uk ] " (de) . The shooters began firing at 12 noon and continued without stopping by taking turns. There were picnic tables set up on
1780-417: A lack of coherence and planning for the future in Jewish policy, even when we would most expect it. The classic instance is the invasion of Poland in 1939, when not even the most elementary consideration had been given to what should happen to Poland's Jews either in the shorter or longer term. Given that Poland was home to the largest Jewish population in the world, and that, in a couple of years, it would house
1958-453: A native tongue today, mostly descendants of German colonial settlers . The period of German colonialism in Namibia also led to the evolution of a Standard German-based pidgin language called " Namibian Black German ", which became a second language for parts of the indigenous population. Although it is nearly extinct today, some older Namibians still have some knowledge of it. German remained
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#17328512868432136-584: A part of Reinhard, and neither was Auschwitz-Birkenau functioning as an extermination center until November 1944 in Polish lands annexed by Hitler and added to Germany proper . The conference at Wannsee gave impetus to the so-called second sweep of the Holocaust by the bullet in the east. Between April and July 1942 in Volhynia , 30,000 Jews were murdered in death pits with the help of dozens of newly formed Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft . Owing to good relations with
2314-679: A popular foreign language among pupils and students, with 300,000 people learning or speaking German in Cameroon in 2010 and over 230,000 in 2020. Today Cameroon is one of the African countries outside Namibia with the highest number of people learning German. In the United States, German is the fifth most spoken language in terms of native and second language speakers after English, Spanish , French , and Chinese (with figures for Cantonese and Mandarin combined), with over 1 million total speakers. In
2492-578: A prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe! Raul Hilberg , in his book The Destruction of the European Jews , was the first historian to systematically document and analyse
2670-664: A rate which is approximately 83% higher than the commonly suggested figure for the kill rate in the Rwandan genocide . In the time frame of July to October 1942, the overall death toll, including all killings of Jews and not just Operation Reinhard, amounted to two million killed in those four months alone. It was the single fastest rate of genocidal killing in history. During the operation, as many as two million Jews were sent to Bełżec , Sobibór , and Treblinka to be murdered in purpose-built gas chambers . In addition, facilities for mass-murder using Zyklon B were developed at about
2848-588: A relatively short period of time. The plans to exterminate all the Jews of Europe were formalized at the Wannsee Conference , held at an SS guesthouse near Berlin, on 20 January 1942. The conference was chaired by Heydrich and attended by 15 senior officials of the Nazi Party and the German government. Most of those attending were representatives of the Interior Ministry , the Foreign Ministry , and
3026-475: A result, the surviving texts are written in highly disparate regional dialects and exhibit significant Latin influence, particularly in vocabulary. At this point monasteries, where most written works were produced, were dominated by Latin, and German saw only occasional use in official and ecclesiastical writing. While there is no complete agreement over the dates of the Middle High German (MHG) period, it
3204-501: A separate area from the Jewish work units. Wooden watchtowers and barbed-wire fences camouflaged with pine branches surrounded all camps. The killing centres had no electric fences, as the size of the prisoner Sonderkommandos (work units) remained comparatively easy to control – unlike in camps such as Dachau and Auschwitz. To assist with the arriving transports only specialised squads were kept alive, removing and disposing of bodies, and sorting property and valuables from
3382-516: A short time, these Jewish laborers were temporarily spared death, while their families and all others were murdered. Some were relegated to work at a nearby airplane factory or as forced labor in the SS -controlled Strafkompanies and other work camps. Hermann Höfle was one of the chief supporters and implementers of this policy. There were problems with food supplies and the ensuing logistical challenges. Globočnik and Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger complained and
3560-664: A significant step in the systematic murder of the Jews in occupied Europe , beginning in the General Government district of German- occupied Poland . Within months, three top-secret camps (at Bełżec , Sobibór , and Treblinka ) were built to efficiently murder tens of thousands of Jews every day. These camps differed from Auschwitz and Majdanek , which initially operated as forced-labour camps before facilities for mass death were installed (gas chambers, crematoria etc.) Even after becoming death camps fitted with crematoria, konzentrationslager like Auschwitz remained largely dedicated to forced labor. Unlike "mixed" extermination camps,
3738-647: A total of 1,274,166 arrivals at the four Aktion Reinhard camps until the end of 1942 but the British code-breakers did not understand the meaning of the message, which amounted to material evidence of how many people the Germans had murdered. In the winter of 1941, before the Wannsee Conference but after the commencement of Operation Barbarossa , the Nazis' need for forced labor greatly intensified. Himmler and Heydrich approved
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#17328512868433916-465: Is a good thing. Experience teaches that a movement and a people who have burned their bridges fight with much greater determination and fewer constraints than those that have a chance of retreat." When Himmler addressed senior SS personnel and leading members of the regime in the Posen speeches on 4 October 1943, he used "the fate of the Jews as a sort of blood bond to tie the civil and military leadership to
4094-580: Is a recognized minority language in the following countries: In France, the High German varieties of Alsatian and Moselle Franconian are identified as " regional languages ", but the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of 1998 has not yet been ratified by the government. Namibia also was a colony of the German Empire, from 1884 to 1915. About 30,000 people still speak German as
4272-547: Is also notable for its broad spectrum of dialects , with many varieties existing in Europe and other parts of the world. Some of these non-standard varieties have become recognized and protected by regional or national governments. Since 2004, heads of state of the German-speaking countries have met every year, and the Council for German Orthography has been the main international body regulating German orthography . German
4450-546: Is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages . The Germanic languages are traditionally subdivided into three branches: North Germanic , East Germanic , and West Germanic . The first of these branches survives in modern Danish , Swedish , Norwegian , Faroese , and Icelandic , all of which are descended from Old Norse . The East Germanic languages are now extinct, and Gothic
4628-472: Is called the "German Sprachraum ". German is the official language of the following countries: German is a co-official language of the following countries: Although expulsions and (forced) assimilation after the two World wars greatly diminished them, minority communities of mostly bilingual German native speakers exist in areas both adjacent to and detached from the Sprachraum. Within Europe, German
4806-430: Is complicated by the existence of several varieties whose status as separate "languages" or "dialects" is disputed for political and linguistic reasons, including quantitatively strong varieties like certain forms of Alemannic and Low German . With the inclusion or exclusion of certain varieties, it is estimated that approximately 90–95 million people speak German as a first language , 10–25 million speak it as
4984-520: Is generally seen as ending when the 1346–53 Black Death decimated Europe's population. Modern High German begins with the Early New High German (ENHG) period, which Wilhelm Scherer dates 1350–1650, terminating with the end of the Thirty Years' War . This period saw the further displacement of Latin by German as the primary language of courtly proceedings and, increasingly, of literature in
5162-595: Is generally seen as lasting from 1050 to 1350. This was a period of significant expansion of the geographical territory occupied by Germanic tribes, and consequently of the number of German speakers. Whereas during the Old High German period the Germanic tribes extended only as far east as the Elbe and Saale rivers, the MHG period saw a number of these tribes expanding beyond this eastern boundary into Slavic territory (known as
5340-559: Is less closely related to languages based on Low Franconian dialects (e.g., Dutch and Afrikaans), Low German or Low Saxon dialects (spoken in northern Germany and southern Denmark ), neither of which underwent the High German consonant shift. As has been noted, the former of these dialect types is Istvaeonic and the latter Ingvaeonic, whereas the High German dialects are all Irminonic; the differences between these languages and standard German are therefore considerable. Also related to German are
5518-435: Is one of the major languages of the world . German is the second-most widely spoken Germanic language , after English, both as a first and as a second language . German is also widely taught as a foreign language , especially in continental Europe (where it is the third most taught foreign language after English and French), and in the United States. Overall, German is the fourth most commonly learned second language, and
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5696-587: Is one of the three biggest newspapers in Namibia and the only German-language daily in Africa. An estimated 12,000 people speak German or a German variety as a first language in South Africa, mostly originating from different waves of immigration during the 19th and 20th centuries. One of the largest communities consists of the speakers of "Nataler Deutsch", a variety of Low German concentrated in and around Wartburg . The South African constitution identifies German as
5874-401: Is partly derived from Latin and Greek , along with fewer words borrowed from French and Modern English . English, however, is the main source of more recent loanwords . German is a pluricentric language ; the three standardized variants are German , Austrian , and Swiss Standard German . Standard German is sometimes called High German , which refers to its regional origin. German
6052-510: Is the Sachsenspiegel , the first book of laws written in Middle Low German ( c. 1220 ). The abundance and especially the secular character of the literature of the MHG period demonstrate the beginnings of a standardized written form of German, as well as the desire of poets and authors to be understood by individuals on supra-dialectal terms. The Middle High German period
6230-566: Is the only language in this branch which survives in written texts. The West Germanic languages, however, have undergone extensive dialectal subdivision and are now represented in modern languages such as English, German, Dutch , Yiddish , Afrikaans , and others. Within the West Germanic language dialect continuum, the Benrath and Uerdingen lines (running through Düsseldorf - Benrath and Krefeld - Uerdingen , respectively) serve to distinguish
6408-481: Is understood in all areas where German is spoken. Approximate distribution of native German speakers (assuming a rounded total of 95 million) worldwide: As a result of the German diaspora , as well as the popularity of German taught as a foreign language , the geographical distribution of German speakers (or "Germanophones") spans all inhabited continents. However, an exact, global number of native German speakers
6586-673: The Ostsiedlung ). With the increasing wealth and geographic spread of the Germanic groups came greater use of German in the courts of nobles as the standard language of official proceedings and literature. A clear example of this is the mittelhochdeutsche Dichtersprache employed in the Hohenstaufen court in Swabia as a standardized supra-dialectal written language. While these efforts were still regionally bound, German began to be used in place of Latin for certain official purposes, leading to
6764-501: The Ostbahn . Each camp had an unloading ramp at a fake railway station, as well as a reception area that contained undressing barracks, barber shops, and money depositories. Beyond the receiving zone, at each camp was a narrow, camouflaged path known as the Road to Heaven (called Himmelfahrtsstraße or der Schlauch by the SS ), which led to the extermination zone consisting of gas chambers, and
6942-626: The SS Courts Office , prosecuted so many Nazi officers for individual violations that Himmler personally ordered him to restrain his cases by April 1944. Operation Reinhard ended in November 1943. Most of the staff and guards were then sent to northern Italy for further Aktion against Jews and local partisans . Globočnik went to the San Sabba concentration camp, where he supervised the detention, torture and murder of political prisoners . To cover up
7120-559: The Waffen SS , not the Einsatzgruppen . An additional 17,000 Jews perished there in a ghetto uprising crushed a year later with the aid of Belarusian Auxiliary Police . An Israeli historian Dina Porat claimed that the Final Solution, i.e.: "the systematic overall physical extermination of Jewish communities one after the other—began in Lithuania" during the massive German chase after
7298-454: The Aktion T4, including Christian Wirth , Franz Stangl , and Irmfried Eberl , were all given key roles in the implementation of the "Final Solution" in 1942. The origin of the operation's name is debated by Holocaust researchers. Various German documents spell the name differently, some with "t" after "d" (as in "Aktion Reinhardt"), others without it. Yet another spelling ( Einsatz Reinhart )
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7476-627: The Alamanni , Bavarian, and Thuringian groups, all belonging to the Elbe Germanic group ( Irminones ), which had settled in what is now southern-central Germany and Austria between the second and sixth centuries, during the great migration. In general, the surviving texts of Old High German (OHG) show a wide range of dialectal diversity with very little written uniformity. The early written tradition of OHG survived mostly through monasteries and scriptoria as local translations of Latin originals; as
7654-571: The Anschluss with Austria in 1938, Central Offices for Jewish Emigration were established in Vienna and Berlin to increase Jewish emigration, without covert plans for their forthcoming annihilation. The outbreak of war and the invasion of Poland brought a population of 3.5 million Polish Jews under the control of the Nazi and Soviet security forces , and marked the start of the Holocaust in Poland . In
7832-522: The Early Middle Ages . German is an inflected language , with four cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative); three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and two numbers (singular, plural). It has strong and weak verbs . The majority of its vocabulary derives from the ancient Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, while a smaller share
8010-473: The European Union 's population, spoke German as their mother tongue, making it the second most widely spoken language on the continent after Russian and the second biggest language in terms of overall speakers (after English), as well as the most spoken native language. The area in central Europe where the majority of the population speaks German as a first language and has German as a (co-)official language
8188-687: The General Government on 16 December 1941, Governor-General Hans Frank said: "But what will happen to the Jews? Do you believe they will be lodged in settlements in Ostland ? In Berlin, we were told: why all this trouble; we cannot use them in the Ostland or the Reichskommissariat either; liquidate them yourselves!" Two days later, Himmler recorded the outcome of his discussion with Hitler. The result was: " als Partisanen auszurotten " ("exterminate them as partisans"). Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer wrote that
8366-514: The German states . While these states were still part of the Holy Roman Empire , and far from any form of unification, the desire for a cohesive written language that would be understandable across the many German-speaking principalities and kingdoms was stronger than ever. As a spoken language German remained highly fractured throughout this period, with a vast number of often mutually incomprehensible regional dialects being spoken throughout
8544-724: The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I , and the other being Meißner Deutsch , used in the Electorate of Saxony in the Duchy of Saxe-Wittenberg . Alongside these courtly written standards, the invention of the printing press led to the development of a number of printers' languages ( Druckersprachen ) aimed at making printed material readable and understandable across as many diverse dialects of German as possible. The greater ease of production and increased availability of written texts brought about increased standardisation in
8722-585: The Janowska concentration camp , who were interviewed in the film Janovska Camp at Lvov , among other witnesses, have argued that the Final Solution began in Lwów (Lemberg) in Distrikt Galizien of the General Government during the German advance across Soviet-occupied Poland . Statements and memoirs of survivors emphasize that, when Ukrainian nationalists and ad hoc Ukrainian People's Militia (soon reorganized as
8900-761: The Justice Ministry , including Ministers for the Eastern Territories. At the conference, Heydrich indicated that approximately 11,000,000 Jews in Europe would fall under the provisions of the "Final Solution". This figure included not only Jews residing in Axis-controlled Europe, but also the Jewish populations of the United Kingdom and of neutral nations (Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and European Turkey). Eichmann's biographer David Cesarani wrote that Heydrich's main purpose in convening
9078-491: The Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre of 26–28 August 1941 some 23,600 Jews were shot in front of open pits (including 14,000–18,000 people expelled from Hungary). After an incident in Bila Tserkva in which 90 small children left behind had to be shot separately, Blobel requested that Jewish mothers hold them in their arms during mass shootings. Long before the conference at Wannsee, 28,000 Jews were shot by SS and Ukrainian military in Vinnytsia on 22 September 1941, followed by
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#17328512868439256-418: The Kulmhof extermination camp . Victims were misled under the deceptive guise of " Resettlement in the East", organised by SS Commissioners, which was also tried and tested at Chełmno. By the time the European-wide Final Solution was formulated two months later, Heydrich's RSHA had already confirmed the effectiveness of industrial murder by exhaust fumes, and the strength of deception. Construction work on
9434-545: The Nazi Party policy statement , Jews and the Romani people were the only "alien people in Europe". In 1936, the Bureau of Romani Affairs in Munich was taken over by Interpol and renamed the Center for Combating the Gypsy Menace. Introduced at the end of 1937, the " final solution of the Gypsy Question " entailed round-ups , expulsions, and incarceration of Romani in concentration camps built at, until this point, Dachau , Buchenwald , Flossenbürg , Mauthausen , Natzweiler , Ravensbruck , Taucha and Westerbork . After
9612-439: The Old High German language in several Elder Futhark inscriptions from as early as the sixth century AD (such as the Pforzen buckle ), the Old High German period is generally seen as beginning with the Abrogans (written c. 765–775 ), a Latin-German glossary supplying over 3,000 Old High German words with their Latin equivalents. After the Abrogans , the first coherent works written in Old High German appear in
9790-483: The Reich (Germany and Austria), the Netherlands , Greece , Hungary , Italy and the Soviet Union . An undetermined number of Roma were also murdered in these death camps, many of them children. To achieve their intended purpose, all death camps used subterfuge and misdirection to conceal the truth and trick their victims into cooperation. This element had been developed in Aktion T4, when disabled and handicapped people were taken away for "special treatment" by
9968-408: The Reserve Police Battalion 309 arrived in the city and set the Great Synagogue on fire with hundreds of Jewish men locked inside. The burning of the synagogue was followed by a frenzy of murders both inside the homes around the Jewish neighbourhood of Chanajki, and in the city park, lasting until night time. The next day, some 30 wagons of dead bodies were taken to mass graves. As noted by Browning,
10146-536: The Reserve Police Battalion 101 hand-in-hand with the Trawniki men from Ukraine. Auschwitz alone had enough capacity to fulfill the Nazis' remaining extermination needs. Unlike Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Lublin-Majdanek , which were built in the occupied General Government territory inhabited by the largest concentrations of Jews, the killing centre at Auschwitz subcamp of Birkenau operated in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany directly. The new gas chambers at Bunker I were finished around March 1942 when
10324-406: The SS from "Gekrat" wearing white laboratory coats, thus giving the process an air of medical authenticity. After supposedly being assessed, the unsuspecting T4 patients were transported to killing centres. The same euphemism "special treatment" ( Sonderbehandlung ) was used in the Holocaust . The SS used a variety of ruses to move thousands of new arrivals travelling in Holocaust trains to
10502-414: The Soviet demarcation line in 1941, what had been regarded as exceptional in the Greater Germanic Reich became a normal way of operating in the east. The crucial taboo against the murder of women and children was breached not only in Białystok but also in Gargždai in late June. By July, significant numbers of women and children were being murdered behind all front-lines not only by the Germans but also by
10680-427: The Sprachraum in Europe. German is used in a wide variety of spheres throughout the country, especially in business, tourism, and public signage, as well as in education, churches (most notably the German-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia (GELK) ), other cultural spheres such as music, and media (such as German language radio programs by the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation ). The Allgemeine Zeitung
10858-422: The Standard German language in its written form, and the Duden Handbook was declared its standard definition. Punctuation and compound spelling (joined or isolated compounds) were not standardized in the process. The Deutsche Bühnensprache ( lit. ' German stage language ' ) by Theodor Siebs had established conventions for German pronunciation in theatres , three years earlier; however, this
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#173285128684311036-404: The Ukrainian Auxiliary Police ) began to murder women and children, rather than only male Jews, the "Final Solution" had begun. Witnesses have said that such murders happened both prior to and during the pogroms reportedly triggered by the NKVD prisoner massacre . The question of whether there was some coordination between the Lithuanian and Ukrainian militias remains open (i.e. collaborating for
11214-437: The Ukrainian People's Militia . Formed officially on 20 August 1941, the Reichskommissariat Ukraine —stretching from prewar east-central Poland to Crimea—had become operational theatre of the Einsatzgruppe C. Within the Soviet Union proper, between 9 July 1941 and 19 September 1941 the city of Zhytomyr was made Judenfrei in three murder operations conducted by German and Ukrainian police in which 10,000 Jews perished. In
11392-400: The Upper German dialects spoken in the southern German-speaking countries , such as Swiss German ( Alemannic dialects ) and the various Germanic dialects spoken in the French region of Grand Est , such as Alsatian (mainly Alemannic, but also Central–and Upper Franconian dialects) and Lorraine Franconian (Central Franconian). After these High German dialects, standard German
11570-422: The Wannsee Conference held near Berlin, and culminated in the Holocaust , which saw the murder of 90% of Polish Jews , and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe. The nature and timing of the decisions that led to the Final Solution is an intensely researched and debated aspect of the Holocaust. The program evolved during the first 25 months of war leading to the attempt at "murdering every last Jew in
11748-434: The ghetto uprisings , irrespective of death camps' quota. In two weeks of July 1942, the Słonim Ghetto revolt , crushed with the help of Latvian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft , cost the lives of 8,000–13,000 Jews. The second largest mass shooting (to that particular date) took place in late October 1942 when the insurgency was suppressed in the Pińsk Ghetto ; over 26,000 men, women and children were shot with
11926-408: The pagan Germanic tradition. Of particular interest to scholars, however, has been the Hildebrandslied , a secular epic poem telling the tale of an estranged father and son unknowingly meeting each other in battle. Linguistically, this text is highly interesting due to the mixed use of Old Saxon and Old High German dialects in its composition. The written works of this period stem mainly from
12104-416: The " Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia would have to be eliminated" and that the forthcoming war would be a confrontation between two completely opposing cultures. In May 1941, Gestapo leader Heinrich Müller wrote a preamble to the new law limiting the jurisdiction of military courts in prosecuting troops for criminal actions because: "This time, the troops will encounter an especially dangerous element from
12282-526: The "sequence of steps in a destruction process is thus determined". If a bureaucracy is motivated "to inflict maximum damage upon a group of people", it is "inevitable that a bureaucracy—no matter how decentralized its apparatus or how unplanned its activities—should push its victims through these stages", culminating in their annihilation. In his monograph, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942 , Christopher Browning argues that Nazi policy toward
12460-539: The 29 September massacre of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar . In Dnipropetrovsk , on 13 October 1941 some 10,000–15,000 Jews were shot. In Chernihiv , 10,000 Jews were murdered and only 260 Jews were spared. In mid-October, during the Krivoy-Rog massacre of 4,000–5,000 Soviet Jews the entire Ukrainian auxiliary police force actively participated. In the first days of January 1942 in Kharkiv , 12,000 Jews were murdered, but smaller massacres continued in this period on daily basis in countless other locations. In August 1942 in
12638-614: The Empire. Its use indicated that the speaker was a merchant or someone from an urban area, regardless of nationality. Prague (German: Prag ) and Budapest ( Buda , German: Ofen ), to name two examples, were gradually Germanized in the years after their incorporation into the Habsburg domain; others, like Pressburg ( Pozsony , now Bratislava), were originally settled during the Habsburg period and were primarily German at that time. Prague, Budapest, Bratislava, and cities like Zagreb (German: Agram ) or Ljubljana (German: Laibach ), contained significant German minorities. In
12816-411: The Final Solution was officially launched at Belzec. Until mid June, 20,000 Silesian Jews were murdered there using Zyklon B . In July 1942, Bunker II became operational. In August, another 10,000–13,000 Polish Jews from Silesia were murdered, along with 16,000 French Jews declared 'stateless', and 7,700 Jews from Slovakia. The infamous 'Gate of Death' at Auschwitz II for the incoming freight trains
12994-473: The French colony, but the plan was abandoned for logistical reasons, mainly a naval blockade . There were also preliminary plans to deport Jews to Palestine and Siberia . Raul Hilberg wrote that, in 1941, in the first phase of the mass-murder of Jews, the mobile killing units began to pursue their victims across occupied eastern territories; in the second phase, stretching across all of German-occupied Europe,
13172-718: The Frisian languages— North Frisian (spoken in Nordfriesland ), Saterland Frisian (spoken in Saterland ), and West Frisian (spoken in Friesland )—as well as the Anglic languages of English and Scots. These Anglo-Frisian dialects did not take part in the High German consonant shift, and the Anglic languages also adopted much vocabulary from both Old Norse and the Norman language . The history of
13350-401: The German grasp" took shape during a five-week period, from 18 September to 25 October 1941. During this time, the sites of the first extermination camps were selected, different methods of murder were tested, Jewish emigration was forbidden, and 11 transports departed for Łódź as a temporary holding station. Of this period, Browning writes, "The vision of the Final Solution had crystallised in
13528-540: The German grasp". Christopher Browning , a historian specializing in the Holocaust, wrote that most historians agree that the Final Solution cannot be attributed to a single decision made at one particular point in time. "It is generally accepted the decision-making process was prolonged and incremental." In 1940, following the Fall of France , Adolf Eichmann devised the Madagascar Plan to move Europe's Jewish population to
13706-475: The German language begins with the High German consonant shift during the Migration Period , which separated Old High German dialects from Old Saxon . This sound shift involved a drastic change in the pronunciation of both voiced and voiceless stop consonants ( b , d , g , and p , t , k , respectively). The primary effects of the shift were the following below. While there is written evidence of
13884-447: The German states; the invention of the printing press c. 1440 and the publication of Luther's vernacular translation of the Bible in 1534, however, had an immense effect on standardizing German as a supra-dialectal written language. The ENHG period saw the rise of several important cross-regional forms of chancery German, one being gemeine tiutsch , used in the court of
14062-463: The German top echelon's newfound intent to pursue Hitler's new anti-Semitic plan to eradicate, rather than expel, Jews. Hitler's earlier ideas about forcible removal of Jews from the German-controlled territories to achieve Lebensraum were abandoned after the failure of the air campaign against Britain , initiating a naval blockade of Germany. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler became
14240-511: The German-occupied zone of Poland, Jews were forced into hundreds of makeshift ghettos , pending other arrangements. In April 1941, the German agriculture and interior ministries designated the SS as an authorized applier of Zyklon B , which meant they were able to use it without any further training or governmental oversight. The launch of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 coincided with
14418-675: The Germanic dialects that were affected by the High German consonant shift (south of Benrath) from those that were not (north of Uerdingen). The various regional dialects spoken south of these lines are grouped as High German dialects, while those spoken to the north comprise the Low German and Low Franconian dialects. As members of the West Germanic language family, High German, Low German, and Low Franconian have been proposed to be further distinguished historically as Irminonic , Ingvaeonic , and Istvaeonic , respectively. This classification indicates their historical descent from dialects spoken by
14596-551: The Holocaust was submitted at Nuremberg . The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union codenamed Operation Barbarossa , which commenced on 22 June 1941, set in motion a " war of annihilation " which quickly opened the door to the systematic mass murder of European Jews. For Hitler, Bolshevism was merely "the most recent and most nefarious manifestation of the eternal Jewish threat". On 3 March 1941, Wehrmacht Joint Operations Staff Chief Alfred Jodl repeated Hitler's declaration that
14774-646: The Irminones (also known as the Elbe group), Ingvaeones (or North Sea Germanic group), and Istvaeones (or Weser–Rhine group). Standard German is based on a combination of Thuringian - Upper Saxon and Upper Franconian dialects, which are Central German and Upper German dialects belonging to the High German dialect group. German is therefore closely related to the other languages based on High German dialects, such as Luxembourgish (based on Central Franconian dialects ) and Yiddish . Also closely related to Standard German are
14952-1008: The Italian autonomous province of South Tyrol . It is also an official language of Luxembourg , Belgium and the Italian autonomous region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia , as well as a recognized national language in Namibia . There are also notable German-speaking communities in France ( Alsace ), the Czech Republic ( North Bohemia ), Poland ( Upper Silesia ), Slovakia ( Košice Region , Spiš , and Hauerland ), Denmark ( North Schleswig ), Romania and Hungary ( Sopron ). Overseas, sizeable communities of German-speakers are found in Brazil ( Blumenau and Pomerode ), South Africa ( Kroondal ), Namibia , among others, some communities have decidedly Austrian German or Swiss German characters (e.g. Pozuzo , Peru). German
15130-441: The Jewish people" as such. We were faced with the question: what about the women and children?–I have decided on a solution to this problem. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men only—in other words, to kill them or have them killed while allowing the avengers, in the form of their children, to grow up in the midst of our sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from
15308-599: The Jewish victims were sent on death trains to centralized extermination camps built for the purpose of systematic murder of Jews. The term "Final Solution" was a euphemism used by the Nazis to refer to their plan for the annihilation of the Jewish people . Some historians argue that the usual tendency of the German leadership was to be extremely guarded when discussing the Final Solution. For example, Mark Roseman wrote that euphemisms were "their normal mode of communicating about murder". However, Jeffrey Herf has argued that
15486-530: The Jews shot in Surazh were women and children of all ages. In late August 1941 the Einsatzgruppen murdered 23,600 Jews in the Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre . A month later, the largest mass shooting of Soviet Jews took place on 29–30 September in the ravine of Babi Yar , near Kyiv , where more than 33,000 Jewish people of all ages were systematically machine-gunned. In mid-October 1941, HSSPF South, under
15664-563: The Jews was radicalized twice: in September 1939, when the invasion of Poland implied policies of mass expulsion and massive loss of Jewish lives; and in spring 1941, when preparation for Operation Barbarossa involved the planning of mass execution, mass expulsion, and starvation—to dwarf what had happened in Jewish Poland. Browning believes that the "Final Solution as it is now understood—the systematic attempt to murder every last Jew within
15842-507: The MHG period. Significantly, these texts include a number of impressive secular works, such as the Nibelungenlied , an epic poem telling the story of the dragon -slayer Siegfried ( c. thirteenth century ), and the Iwein , an Arthurian verse poem by Hartmann von Aue ( c. 1203 ), lyric poems , and courtly romances such as Parzival and Tristan . Also noteworthy
16020-492: The Nazi Party, the civil service, industry, and the Wehrmacht armed forces—but their cooperation is viewed as "so complete that we may truly speak of their fusion into a machinery of destruction". For Hilberg, the key stages in the destruction process were: definition and registration of the Jews; expropriation of property; concentration into ghettoes and camps; and, finally, annihilation. Hilberg gives an estimate of 5.1 million as
16198-488: The Nazi cause". Today, I am going to refer quite frankly to a very grave chapter. We can mention it now among ourselves quite openly and yet we shall never talk about it in public. I'm referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. Most of you will know what it's like to see 100 corpses side by side or 500 corpses or 1,000 of them. To have coped with this and—except for cases of human weakness—to have remained decent, that has made us tough. This
16376-489: The Nazi leadership decided that the European Jews should be exterminated. The controversy is commonly described as the functionalism versus intentionalism debate which began in the 1960s, and subsided thirty years later. In the 1990s, the attention of mainstream historians moved away from the question of top executive orders triggering the Holocaust and focused on factors that were overlooked earlier, such as personal initiative and ingenuity of countless functionaries in charge of
16554-405: The Nazi project to murder every Jew in Europe. The book was initially published in 1961, and issued in an enlarged version in 1985. Hilberg's analysis of the steps that led to the destruction of European Jews revealed that it was "an administrative process carried out by bureaucrats in a network of offices spanning a continent". Hilberg divides this bureaucracy into four components or hierarchies:
16732-541: The Order Police varied between locations, but for Police Battalion 309 participating in the first mass murder of 5,500 Polish Jews in the Soviet-controlled Białystok (a Polish provincial capital ), Major Weiss explained to his officers that Barbarossa is a war of annihilation against Bolshevism, and that his battalions would proceed ruthlessly against all Jews, regardless of age or sex. After crossing
16910-604: The Red Army across the Reichskommissariat Ostland . The subject of the Holocaust in Lithuania has been analysed by Konrad Kweit from USHMM who wrote: "Lithuanian Jews were among the first victims of the Holocaust [beyond the eastern borders of occupied Poland]. The Germans carried out the mass executions [...] signaling the beginning of the 'Final Solution'." About 80,000 Jews were murdered in Lithuania by October (including in formerly Polish Wilno ) and about 175,000 by
17088-552: The Soviet military bunkers around Białystok . Although other methods of extermination, such as the cyanic poison Zyklon B , were already in use at other Nazi killing centres such as Auschwitz, the Aktion Reinhard camps used lethal exhaust gases from captured Soviet tank engines. Fumes would be discharged directly into the gas chambers for a given period, then the engines would be switched off. SS guards would determine when to reopen
17266-619: The Soviet prisoners of war, and by up to a thousand Sonderkommando prisoners whom the Trawniki guards used to terrorise. The SS called their volunteer guards " Hiwis ", an abbreviation of Hilfswillige (lit. "willing to help" ). According to the testimony of SS- Oberführer Arpad Wigand during his 1981 war crimes trial in Hamburg, only 25 percent of recruited collaborators could speak German. By mid-1942, two more death camps had been built on Polish lands: Sobibór (operational by May 1942) under
17444-734: The Ukrainian Hilfsverwaltung , these auxiliary battalions were deployed by the SS also in Russia Center, Russia South, and in Byelorussia; each with about 500 soldiers divided into three companies. They participated in the extermination of 150,000 Volhynian Jews alone, or 98 percent of the Jewish inhabitants of the entire region. In July 1942 the Completion of the Final Solution in the General Government territory which included Distrikt Galizien ,
17622-474: The United States on 11 December 1941, "meant that holding European Jews hostage to deter the US from entering the conflict was now pointless". Cesarani concludes, the Holocaust "was rooted in anti-Semitism, but it was shaped by war". The fact that the Nazis were, ultimately, so successful in murdering between five and six million Jews was not due to the efficiency of Nazi Germany or the clarity of their policies. "Rather,
17800-684: The Wannsee Conference Protocol) was found by the Allies in March 1947; it was too late to serve as evidence during the first Nuremberg Trial , but was used by prosecutor General Telford Taylor in the subsequent Nuremberg Trials . After the end of World War II, surviving archival documents provided a clear record of the Final Solution policies and actions of Nazi Germany. They included the Wannsee Conference Protocol, which documented
17978-529: The aid of Belarusian Auxiliary Police before the ghetto's closure. During the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II), 13,000 Jews were killed in action before May 1943. Numerous other uprisings were quelled without impacting the pre-planned Nazi deportations actions. About two-thirds of the overall number of victims of the Final Solution were murdered before February 1943, which included
18156-607: The beginning of July 1941, and requested that, "as a matter of principle, any Jew" behind the German-Soviet frontier was to be "regarded as a partisan". His new orders gave the SS and police leaders full authority for the mass-murder behind the front lines. By August 1941, all Jewish men, women, and children were shot. In the second phase of annihilation, the Jewish inhabitants of central, western, and south-eastern Europe were transported by Holocaust trains to camps with newly built gassing facilities. Raul Hilberg wrote: "In essence,
18334-750: The bodies faster. The size of the Sonderkommando was nearly quadrupled in preparation for the Special Operation Hungary ( Sonderaktion Ungarn ). In May 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau became the site of one of the two largest mass murder operations in modern history, after the Großaktion Warschau deportations of the Warsaw Ghetto inmates to Treblinka in 1942. It is estimated that until July 1944 approximately 320,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed at Birkenau in less than eight weeks. The entire operation
18512-484: The burial pits, up to 10 metres (33 ft) deep, later replaced by cremation pyres with rails laid across the pits on concrete blocks; refuelled continuously by the Totenjuden . Both Treblinka and Bełżec were equipped with powerful crawler excavators from Polish construction sites in the vicinity, capable of most digging tasks without disrupting surfaces. At each camp, the SS guards and Ukrainian Trawnikis lived in
18690-692: The buried bodies, using giant grills made from wood and railway tracks. Afterwards, bone fragments were ground up in special milling machines, and all remains were then re-buried in new pits. The Aktion was overseen by squads of Trawniki guards . After the war, some of the SS officers and guards were tried and sentenced at the Nuremberg trials for their role in Operation Reinhard and Sonderaktion 1005 . Many others escaped conviction, such as Ernst Lerch , Globočnik's deputy and chief of his Main Office, whose case
18868-628: The camps' overall layout were based on a pilot project of mobile killing conducted at the Chełmno extermination camp ( Kulmhof ), which entered operation in late 1941 and used gas vans . Chełmno was not a part of Reinhard. It came under the direct control of SS- Standartenführer Ernst Damzog , commander of the SD in Reichsgau Wartheland . It was set up around a manor house similar to Sonnenstein . The use of gas vans had been previously tried and tested in
19046-455: The catastrophic rate of killing was due to German persistence ... and the duration of the murderous campaigns. This last factor was largely a consequence of allied military failure." The entry of the U.S. into the War is also crucial to the time-frame proposed by Christian Gerlach , who argued in his 1997 thesis that the Final Solution decision was announced on 12 December 1941, when Hitler addressed
19224-449: The changing area, the men and boys were separated from the women and children and everyone was ordered to disrobe for a communal bath: "quickly – they were told – or the water will get cold". The old and sick, or slow, prisoners were taken to a fake infirmary named the Lazarett , that had a large mass grave behind it. They were killed by a bullet in the neck, while
19402-493: The chief architect of a new plan, which came to be called The Final Solution to the Jewish question . On 31 July 1941, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring wrote to Reinhard Heydrich (Himmler's deputy and chief of the RSHA ), authorising him to make the "necessary preparations" for a "total solution of the Jewish question" and coordinate with all affected organizations. Göring also instructed Heydrich to submit concrete proposals for
19580-634: The civilian population, and therefore, have the right and obligation to secure themselves." Himmler and Heydrich assembled a force of about 3,000 men from Security Police , Gestapo , Kripo , SD , and the Waffen-SS , as the so-called "special commandos of the security forces" known as the Einsatzgruppen , to eliminate both communists and Jews in occupied territories. These forces were supported by 21 battalions of Orpo Reserve Police under Kurt Daluege , adding up to 11,000 men. The explicit orders given to
19758-474: The co-operation of various German state agencies in the SS-led Holocaust, as well as some 3,000 tons of original German records captured by Allied armies, including the Einsatzgruppen reports , which documented the progress of the mobile killing units assigned, among other tasks, to murder Jewish civilians during the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. The evidential proof which documented the mechanism of
19936-402: The command of Friedrich Jeckeln , had reported the indiscriminate murder of more than 100,000 people. By the end of December 1941, before the Wannsee Conference, over 439,800 Jewish people had been murdered, and the Final Solution policy in the east became common knowledge within the SS. Entire regions were reported " free of Jews " by the Einsatzgruppen . Addressing his district governors in
20114-412: The conference was to assert his authority over the various agencies dealing with Jewish issues. "The simplest, most decisive way that Heydrich could ensure the smooth flow of deportations" to death camps, according to Cesarani, "was by asserting his total control over the fate of the Jews in the Reich and the east" under the single authority of the RSHA . A copy of the minutes of this meeting (later called
20292-448: The construction of stationary facilities for the mass murder a few months later. The Reinhard death camps adapted progressively as each new site was built. Taken as a whole, Globočnik's camps at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka had almost identical design, including staff members transferring between locations. The camps were situated within wooded areas well away from population centres. All were constructed near branch lines that linked to
20470-456: The dead victims. The Totenjuden forced to work inside death zones were deliberately isolated from those who worked in the reception and sorting area. Periodically, those who worked in the death zones would be killed and replaced with new arrivals to remove any potential witnesses to the scale of the mass murder. During Operation Reinhard , Globočnik oversaw the systematic murder of more than 2,000,000 Jews from Poland, Czechoslovakia , France ,
20648-772: The deadliest phase of the Final Solution. More Jews were murdered at Treblinka than at any other Nazi extermination camp apart from Auschwitz . By the time the mass killings of Operation Reinhard ended in 1943, roughly two million Jews in German-occupied Poland had been murdered. The total number of people murdered in 1942 in Lublin/Majdanek , Bełżec , Sobibór , and Treblinka was 1,274,166 by Germany's own estimation , not counting Auschwitz II Birkenau nor Kulmhof . Their bodies were buried in mass graves initially. Both Treblinka and Bełżec were equipped with powerful crawler excavators from Polish construction sites in
20826-430: The development of non-local forms of language and exposed all speakers to forms of German from outside their own area. With Luther's rendering of the Bible in the vernacular, German asserted itself against the dominance of Latin as a legitimate language for courtly, literary, and now ecclesiastical subject-matter. His Bible was ubiquitous in the German states: nearly every household possessed a copy. Nevertheless, even with
21004-452: The dialect so as to make the work as natural and accessible to German speakers as possible. Copies of Luther's Bible featured a long list of glosses for each region, translating words which were unknown in the region into the regional dialect. Luther said the following concerning his translation method: One who would talk German does not ask the Latin how he shall do it; he must ask the mother in
21182-511: The disguised killing sites without panic. Mass deportations were called " resettlement actions "; they were organised by special Commissioners and conducted by uniformed police battalions from Orpo and Schupo in an atmosphere of terror. Usually, the deception was absolute; in August 1942, people of the Warsaw Ghetto lined up for several days to be "deported" to obtain bread allocated for travel. Jews unable to move or attempting to flee were shot on
21360-770: The early phases of Operation Reinhard , bodies were simply thrown into mass graves and covered with lime . From 1943, to hide the evidence of the crime, the victims' remains were burned in open air pits. Special Leichenkommando (corpse units) had to exhume bodies from the mass graves around these death camps for incineration. Reinhard still left a paper trail; in January 1943, Bletchley Park intercepted an SS telegram by SS- Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle , Globočnik's deputy in Lublin, to SS- Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in Berlin . The decoded Enigma message contained statistics showing
21538-591: The earth. On 19 October 1943, five days after the prisoner revolt in Sobibór , Operation Reinhard was terminated by Odilo Globocnik on behalf of Himmler. The camps responsible for the murder of nearly 2,700,000 Jews were soon closed. Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka were dismantled and ploughed over before spring. The operation was followed by the single largest German massacre of Jews in the entire war carried out on 3 November 1943; with approximately 43,000 prisoners shot one-by-one simultaneously in three nearby locations by
21716-507: The eastern provinces of Banat , Bukovina , and Transylvania (German: Banat, Buchenland, Siebenbürgen ), German was the predominant language not only in the larger towns—like Temeschburg ( Timișoara ), Hermannstadt ( Sibiu ), and Kronstadt ( Brașov )—but also in many smaller localities in the surrounding areas. In 1901, the Second Orthographic Conference ended with a (nearly) complete standardization of
21894-540: The end of 1941 according to official reports . Within one week from the start of Operation Barbarossa , Heydrich issued an order to his Einsatzgruppen for the on-the-spot execution of all Bolsheviks, interpreted by the SS to mean all Jews. One of the first indiscriminate massacres of men, women, and children in Reichskommissariat Ukraine took the lives of over 4,000 Polish Jews in occupied Łuck on 2–4 July 1941, murdered by Einsatzkommando 4a assisted by
22072-464: The experience and personnel from earlier population resettlement programmes—especially the HSSPF and Adolf Eichmann 's RSHA for "Jewish affairs and evacuations". Peter Longerich argues that the search for a finite date on which the Nazis embarked upon the extermination of the Jews is futile, in his book Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (2011). Longerich writes: "We should abandon
22250-531: The extermination camps of Operation Reinhard kept no prisoners, except as needed to advance the camp's industrial-scale murder. Very few Jews escaped death (notably, only two at Bełżec). All other victims were murdered on arrival. The organizational apparatus behind the new extermination plan had been put to the test already during the "euthanasia" Aktion T4 programme ending in August 1941, during which more than 70,000 Polish and German disabled men, women, and children were murdered. The SS officers responsible for
22428-509: The extermination camps, this is remarkable." Whereas Browning places the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews in the context of the Wehrmacht victories on the Eastern front, Cesarani argues that the German subsequent realisation that there would be no swift victory over the Soviet Union "scuppered the last territorial 'solution' still on the table: expulsion to Siberia". Germany's declaration of war on
22606-539: The first killing centre at Bełżec in occupied Poland began in October 1941, three months before the Wannsee Conference. The new facility was operational by March the following year. By mid-1942, two more death camps had been built on Polish lands: Sobibór operational by May 1942, and Treblinka operational in July. From July 1942, the mass murder of Polish and foreign Jews took place at Treblinka as part of Operation Reinhard ,
22784-627: The gas doors based on how long it took for the screaming to stop from within (usually 25 to 30 minutes). Special teams of camp inmates ( Sonderkommando ) would then remove the corpses on flatbed carts. Before the corpses were thrown into grave pits, gold teeth were removed from mouths, and orifices were searched for jewellery, currency, and other valuables. All acquired goods were managed by the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (Main SS Economic and Administrative Department). During
22962-435: The home, the children on the streets, the common man in the market-place and note carefully how they talk, then translate accordingly. They will then understand what is said to them because it is German. When Christ says ' ex abundantia cordis os loquitur ,' I would translate, if I followed the papists, aus dem Überflusz des Herzens redet der Mund . But tell me is this talking German? What German understands such stuff? No,
23140-436: The implementation of the new projected goal. Broadly speaking, the extermination of Jews was carried out in two major operations. With the onset of Operation Barbarossa , mobile killing units of the SS , the Einsatzgruppen , and Order Police battalions were dispatched to the occupied Soviet Union for the express purpose of murdering all Jews. During the early stages of the invasion, Himmler himself visited Białystok at
23318-474: The influence of Luther's Bible as an unofficial written standard, a widely accepted standard for written German did not appear until the middle of the eighteenth century. German was the language of commerce and government in the Habsburg Empire , which encompassed a large area of Central and Eastern Europe . Until the mid-nineteenth century, it was essentially the language of townspeople throughout most of
23496-560: The killers of the occupied USSR moved to the victims, whereas outside this arena, the victims were brought to the killers. The two operations constitute an evolution not only chronologically, but also in complexity." Massacres of about one million Jews occurred before plans for the Final Solution were fully implemented in 1942, but it was only with the decision to annihilate the entire Jewish population that extermination camps such as Auschwitz II Birkenau and Treblinka were fitted with permanent gas chambers to murder large numbers of Jews in
23674-449: The killing fields. No written evidence of Hitler ordering the Final Solution has ever been found to serve as a "smoking gun", and therefore, this one particular question remains unanswered. Hitler made numerous predictions regarding the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe prior to the beginning of World War II. During a speech given on 30 January 1939 , on the sixth anniversary of his accession to power, Hitler said: Today I will once more be
23852-534: The lands of a conquered USSR". For Longerich, to see mass-murder as the Final Solution was an acknowledgement by the Nazi leadership that there would not be a German military victory over the USSR in the near future. David Cesarani emphasises the improvised, haphazard nature of Nazi policies in response to changing war time conditions in his overview, Final Solution: The Fate of the European Jews 1933–49 (2016). "Cesarani provides telling examples", wrote Mark Roseman , "of
24030-497: The large death factory at Treblinka for the destruction of the Warsaw Jews, and the addition of a gas chamber to the concentration camp at Auschwitz for the murder of the Jews of Silesia". Longerich suggests that it "was only in the summer of 1942, that mass killing was finally understood as the realization of the Final Solution, rather than as an extensively violent preliminary to some later program of slave labor and deportation to
24208-623: The largest concentrations of German speakers are in the states of Rio Grande do Sul (where Riograndenser Hunsrückisch developed), Santa Catarina , and Espírito Santo . Final Solution of the Jewish Question The Final Solution ( German : die Endlösung , pronounced [diː ˈʔɛntˌløːzʊŋ] ) or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question ( German : Endlösung der Judenfrage , pronounced [ˈɛntˌløːzʊŋ deːɐ̯ ˈjuːdn̩ˌfʁaːɡə] )
24386-632: The largest number of murders in the Final Solution, as bringing together three separate developments within Nazi Germany : the concentration camps which had been established in Germany since 1933; an expansion of the gassing technology of the Nazi euthanasia programme to provide a murder technique of greater efficiency and psychological detachment; and the creation of "factories of death" to be fed endless streams of victims by mass uprooting and deportation that utilized
24564-416: The last camp to become operational, used knowledge learned by the SS previously. With two powerful engines, run by SS-Scharführer Erich Fuchs , and the gas chambers soon rebuilt of bricks and mortar, this death factory had murdered between 800,000 and 1,200,000 people within 15 months, disposed of their bodies, and sorted their belongings for shipment to Germany. The techniques used to deceive victims and
24742-470: The leadership of SS-Hauptsturmführer Franz Stangl, and Treblinka (operational by July 1942) under SS-Obersturmführer Irmfried Eberl. The SS pumped exhaust fumes from a large internal-combustion engines through long pipes into sealed rooms, murdering the people inside by carbon monoxide poisoning . Beginning in February–March 1943, the bodies of the dead were exhumed and cremated in pits. Treblinka,
24920-557: The local Ukrainian and Lithuanian auxiliary forces . On 29 July 1941, at a meeting of SS officers in Vileyka (Polish Wilejka , now Belarus), the Einsatzgruppen had been given a dressing-down for their low execution figures . Heydrich himself issued an order to include the Jewish women and children in all subsequent shooting operations. Accordingly, by the end of July the entire Jewish population of Vileyka, men, women and children, were murdered. Around 12 August, no less than two-thirds of
25098-681: The main phase of the extermination programme in the West launched by Eichmann on 11 June 1942 from Berlin. The Holocaust trains run by the Deutsche Reichsbahn and several other national railway systems delivered condemned Jewish captives from as far as Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Moravia, Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, and even Scandinavia. The cremation of exhumed corpses to destroy any evidence left behind began in early spring and continued throughout summer. The nearly completed clandestine programme of murdering all deportees
25276-554: The mass murder of Polish prisoners at Soldau , and in the extermination of Jews on the Russian Front by the Einsatzgruppen . Between early December 1941 and mid-April 1943, 160,000 Jews were sent to Chełmno from the General Government via the Ghetto in Łódź . Chełmno did not have crematoria; only the mass graves in the woods. It was a testing ground for the establishment of faster methods of murdering and incinerating people, marked by
25454-453: The mass murder of more than two million people in Poland during Operation Reinhard, the Nazis implemented the secret Sonderaktion 1005 , also called Aktion 1005 or Enterdungsaktion (" exhumation action"). The operation, which began in 1942 and continued until the end of 1943, was designed to remove all traces that mass murder. Leichenkommando ("corpse units") comprising camp prisoners were created to exhume mass graves and cremate
25632-497: The mass transfer was stopped even before the three extermination camps were operational. Approximately 178 million German Reichsmarks' worth of Jewish property (equivalent to 727 million 2021 euros ) was taken from the victims, with vast transfers of gold and valuables to the Reichsbank 's "Melmer" account, Gold Pool, and monetary reserve. Not only the German authorities were in receipt of Jewish property, because corruption
25810-448: The minds of the Nazi leadership, and was being turned into reality." This was the peak of Nazi victories against the Soviet Army on the Eastern Front , and, according to Browning, the stunning series of German victories led to both an expectation that the war would soon be won, and the planning of the final destruction of the " Jewish-Bolshevik enemy". Browning describes the creation of the extermination camps, which were responsible for
25988-402: The mother in the home and the plain man would say, Wesz das Herz voll ist, des gehet der Mund über . Luther's translation of the Bible into High German was also decisive for the German language and its evolution from Early New High German to modern Standard German. The publication of Luther's Bible was a decisive moment in the spread of literacy in early modern Germany , and promoted
26166-414: The murders were led by a commander "who correctly intuited and anticipated the wishes of his Führer " without direct orders. For reasons unknown, the number of victims in the official report by Major Weis was cut in half. The next mass-shooting of Polish Jews within the newly formed Reichskommissariat Ostland took place in two days of 5–7 August in occupied Pińsk , where over 12,000 Jews were murdered by
26344-423: The ninth century, chief among them being the Muspilli , Merseburg charms , and Hildebrandslied , and other religious texts (the Georgslied , Ludwigslied , Evangelienbuch , and translated hymns and prayers). The Muspilli is a Christian poem written in a Bavarian dialect offering an account of the soul after the Last Judgment , and the Merseburg charms are transcriptions of spells and charms from
26522-406: The notion that it is historically meaningful to try to filter the wealth of available historical material and pick out a single decision" that led to the Holocaust. Timothy Snyder writes that Longerich "grants the significance of Greiser's murder of Jews by gas at Chełmno in December 1941", but also detects a significant moment of escalation in spring 1942, which includes "the construction of
26700-411: The presence of a railway station with awaiting "medical personnel" and signs directing people to disinfection facilities. Treblinka also had a booking office with boards naming the connections for other camps further east. The Jews most apprehensive of danger were brutally beaten to speed up the process. At times, the new arrivals who had suitable skills were selected to join the Sonderkommando . Once in
26878-473: The presence of only a few German SS men over 5,000 Jews were massacred in Polish Zofjówka by the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police leading to the town's complete sweep from existence. Historians find it difficult to determine precisely when the first concerted effort at annihilation of all Jews began in the last weeks of June 1941 during Operation Barbarossa. Dr. Samuel Drix ( Witness to Annihilation ), Jochaim Schoenfeld ( Holocaust Memoirs ), and several survivors of
27056-462: The pronunciation of the ending -ig as [ɪk] instead of [ɪç]. In Northern Germany, High German was a foreign language to most inhabitants, whose native dialects were subsets of Low German. It was usually encountered only in writing or formal speech; in fact, most of High German was a written language, not identical to any spoken dialect, throughout the German-speaking area until well into the 19th century. However, wider standardization of pronunciation
27234-456: The remark is probably as close as historians will ever get to a definitive order from Hitler for the genocide carried out during the Holocaust. Within two years, the total number of shooting victims in the east had risen to between 618,000 and 800,000 Jews. Several scholars have suggested that the Final Solution began in the newly formed district of Bezirk Bialystok . The German army took over Białystok within days. On Friday, 27 June 1941,
27412-498: The rest were being forced into the gas chambers. To drive the naked people into the execution barracks housing the gas chambers, the guards used whips, clubs, and rifle butts. Panic was instrumental in filling the gas chambers because the need to evade blows on their naked bodies forced the victims rapidly forward. Once packed tightly inside (to minimize available air), the steel air-tight doors with portholes were closed. The doors, according to Treblinka Museum research, originated from
27590-497: The role of euphemisms in Nazi propaganda has been exaggerated, and in fact Nazi leaders often made direct threats against Jews. For example, during his speech of 30 January 1939 , Hitler threatened " the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe ". From gaining power in January 1933 until the outbreak of war in September 1939, the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany was focused on intimidation, expropriating their money and property, and encouraging them to emigrate. According to
27768-400: The same time at the Majdanek concentration camp and at Auschwitz II-Birkenau , near the earlier-established Auschwitz I camp. After the German–Soviet war began, the Nazis undertook their European-wide " Final Solution to the Jewish Question ". In January 1942, during a secret meeting of German leaders chaired by Reinhard Heydrich , Operation Reinhard was drafted; it was soon to become
27946-452: The side with bottles of vodka and sandwiches for those who needed to rest from the deafening noise of gunfire. It was the single largest massacre of Polish Jews in Generalgouvernement prior to mass gassings of Aktion Reinhard , which commenced at Bełżec in March 1942. Notably, the extermination operations in Chełmno had begun on 8 December 1941, one-and-a-half months before Wannsee, but Chełmno—located in Reichsgau Wartheland —was not
28124-416: The spot. Even though death in the cattle cars from suffocation and thirst was rampant, affecting up to 20 percent of trainloads, most victims were willing to believe that the German intentions were different. Once alighted, the prisoners were ordered to leave their luggage behind and march directly to the "cleaning area" where they were asked to hand over their valuables for "safekeeping". Common tricks included
28302-492: The states of North Dakota and South Dakota , German is the most common language spoken at home after English. As a legacy of significant German immigration to the country , German geographical names can be found throughout the Midwest region , such as New Ulm and Bismarck (North Dakota's state capital), plus many other regions. A number of German varieties have developed in the country and are still spoken today, such as Pennsylvania Dutch and Texas German . In Brazil,
28480-449: The third most commonly learned second language in the United States in K-12 education. The language has been influential in the fields of philosophy, theology, science, and technology. It is the second most commonly used language in science and the third most widely used language on websites . The German-speaking countries are ranked fifth in terms of annual publication of new books, with one-tenth of all books (including e-books) in
28658-493: The total number of Jews murdered. He breaks this figure down into three categories: Ghettoization and general privation: over 800,000; open-air shootings: over 1,300,000; extermination camps: up to 3,000,000. With respect to the "functionalism versus intentionalism" debate about a master plan for the Final Solution, or the lack thereof, Hilberg posits what has been described as "a kind of structural determinism". Hilberg argues that "a destruction process has an inherent pattern" and
28836-445: The vicinity, capable of most digging tasks without disrupting surfaces. Although other methods of extermination, such as the cyanic poison Zyklon B , were already being used at other Nazi killing centres such as Auschwitz, the Aktion Reinhard camps used lethal exhaust gases from captured tank engines. The Holocaust by bullets (as opposed to the Holocaust by gas ) went on in the territory of occupied Poland in conjunction with
29014-515: The war effort . Each death camp was managed by between 20 and 35 officers from the Totenkopfverbände ( Death's Head Units) sworn to absolute secrecy, and augmented by the Aktion T4 personnel selected by Globočnik. The extermination program was designed by them based on prior experience from the forced euthanasia centres. The bulk of the actual labour at each "final solution" camp was performed by up to 100 mostly Ukrainian Trawniki guards , recruited by SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Streibel from among
29192-438: The world being published in German. German is most closely related to other West Germanic languages, namely Afrikaans , Dutch , English , the Frisian languages , and Scots . It also contains close similarities in vocabulary to some languages in the North Germanic group , such as Danish , Norwegian , and Swedish . Modern German gradually developed from Old High German , which in turn developed from Proto-Germanic during
29370-415: The written form of German. One of the central events in the development of ENHG was the publication of Luther's translation of the Bible into High German (the New Testament was published in 1522; the Old Testament was published in parts and completed in 1534). Luther based his translation primarily on the Meißner Deutsch of Saxony , spending much time among the population of Saxony researching
29548-458: Was photographed by the SS . In total, between April and November 1944, Auschwitz II received over 585,000 Jews from over a dozen regions as far as Greece, Italy, and France, including 426,000 Jews from Hungary, 67,000 from Łódź , 25,000 from Theresienstadt , and the last 23,000 Jews from the General Government. Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945, when the gassing had already stopped. Historians disagree as to when and how
29726-449: Was a Nazi plan for the genocide of individuals they defined as Jews during World War II . The "Final Solution to the Jewish question " was the official code name for the murder of all Jews within reach, which was not restricted to the European continent. This policy of deliberate and systematic genocide starting across German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural and geopolitical terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at
29904-429: Was a "neutral" language as there were virtually no English native speakers in Namibia at that time. German, Afrikaans, and several indigenous languages thus became "national languages" by law, identifying them as elements of the cultural heritage of the nation and ensuring that the state acknowledged and supported their presence in the country. Today, Namibia is considered to be the only German-speaking country outside of
30082-407: Was an artificial standard that did not correspond to any traditional spoken dialect. Rather, it was based on the pronunciation of German in Northern Germany, although it was subsequently regarded often as a general prescriptive norm, despite differing pronunciation traditions especially in the Upper-German-speaking regions that still characterise the dialect of the area today – especially
30260-469: Was built of brick and cement mortar in 1943, and the three-track rail spur was added. Until mid-August, 45,000 Thessaloniki Jews were murdered in a mere six months, including over 30,000 Jews from Sosnowiec (Sosnowitz) and Bendzin Ghettos . The spring of 1944 marked the beginning of the last phase of the Final Solution at Birkenau. The new big ramps and sidings were constructed, and two freight elevators were installed inside Crematoria II and III for moving
30438-470: Was dropped for lack of witness testimony. German language German (German: Deutsch , pronounced [dɔʏtʃ] ) is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family , mainly spoken in Western and Central Europe . It is the most spoken native language within the European Union . It is the most widely spoken and official (or co-official) language in Germany , Austria , Switzerland , Liechtenstein , and
30616-427: Was established on the basis of public speaking in theatres and the media during the 20th century and documented in pronouncing dictionaries. Official revisions of some of the rules from 1901 were not issued until the controversial German orthography reform of 1996 was made the official standard by governments of all German-speaking countries. Media and written works are now almost all produced in Standard German which
30794-419: Was explicitly addressed by Heinrich Himmler in his Posen speeches made to the leadership of the Nazi Party on 4 October and during a conference in Posen ( Poznań ) of 6 October 1943 in occupied Poland. Himmler explained why the Nazi leadership found it necessary to murder Jewish women and children along with the Jewish men. The assembled functionaries were told that the Nazi state policy was "the extermination of
30972-426: Was operational from 17 March 1942, with leadership brought in from Germany under the guise of Organisation Todt (OT). Globočnik was given control over the entire programme. All the secret orders he received came directly from Himmler and not from SS-Gruppenführer Richard Glücks , head of the greater Nazi concentration camp system, which was run by the SS-Totenkopfverbände and engaged in slave labour for
31150-446: Was ordered personally by Himmler. He set the initial deadline for 31 December 1942. When the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the area of the General Government was enlarged by the inclusion of regions that had been annexed by the Soviet Union since the 1939 invasion. The murders of Jews from the Łódź Ghetto in the Warthegau district began in early December 1941 with the use of gas vans (approved by Heydrich) at
31328-420: Was relayed two months later. On 13 October 1941, SS and Police Leader Odilo Globočnik headquartered in Lublin received an oral order from Himmler – anticipating the fall of Moscow – to begin the construction of the first extermination camp at Bełżec in the General Government territory of occupied Poland. The order preceded the Wannsee Conference by three months. The new camp
31506-439: Was rife within the death camps. Many of the individual SS members and policemen involved in the murders took cash, property, and valuables for themselves. The higher-ranking SS men stole on an enormous scale. It was a common practice among the top echelon. Two Majdanek commandants, Karl-Otto Koch and Hermann Florstedt , were tried by the SS for it in April 1945. SS- Sturmbannführer Georg Konrad Morgen , an SS judge from
31684-530: Was used in the Höfle Telegram . It is generally believed that Aktion Reinhardt , outlined at the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, was named after Reinhard Heydrich, the coordinator of the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish Question , which entailed the extermination of the Jews living in the European countries occupied by Nazi Germany. Heydrich was attacked by British-trained Czechoslovakian agents on 27 May 1942 and died of his injuries eight days later. The earliest memo spelling out Einsatz Reinhard
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