AP®︎ European History: Topic 8.9 Flashcards

Nazi Germany’s systematic persecution and murder of approximately six million European Jews, culminating in continent-wide genocide during World War II.

Nazi project to reorganize Europe by a supposed biological hierarchy, with “Aryan” Germans dominant and designated inferior populations excluded, exploited, displaced, or murdered

Religious antisemitism targeted Jewish belief, while racial antisemitism classified Jewish identity as hereditary and unchangeable regardless of conversion or assimilation

Nazi “national racial community” promising unity among supposedly acceptable Germans while excluding Jews and others classified as alien, hereditary, disabled, or dangerous

Coerced transfer of Jewish businesses, homes, and other property to non-Jewish owners, generally for far less than their value

Site of extrajudicial imprisonment, terror, and often forced labor; unlike an extermination center, it was not necessarily created primarily for immediate mass killing

Nazi racial laws of 1935 that stripped Jews of citizenship rights, prohibited relations with “German blood,” and classified Jewish identity by ancestry

Central Nuremberg Law that deprived Jews of full German citizenship and reduced them to subjects without equal political rights

Central Nuremberg Law prohibiting marriage and sexual relations between Jews and people classified as being of “German or related blood.”

Nazi legal category for people of “mixed ancestry,” generally those classified as having one or two Jewish grandparents

Regime-organized pogrom of November 9–10, 1938, that destroyed Jewish property and synagogues, killed about 100 Jews, and sent about 30,000 Jewish men to camps

Groups racially classified and persecuted by the Nazis through registration, confinement, forced labor, deportation, shootings, and camp murder; roughly 220,000–500,000 were killed

Nazi program that murdered people with disabilities, including through gas chambers, and supplied personnel and techniques later used in extermination centers

German criminal-code provision used by the Nazis to prosecute gay men, who faced imprisonment, forced labor, castration, and death in concentration camps

Sealed, segregated urban district in which German authorities confined Jews under lethal conditions before deportation or death

Jewish councils compelled to administer some German orders in ghettos under coercive conditions that allowed no genuine freedom of choice

April–May 1943 armed Jewish resistance against German liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, lasting almost a month before German forces destroyed the ghetto

Germany’s June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, a racial-ideological war that enabled mass shootings of Jews and other targeted populations

Mobile German killing units that followed the army into Soviet territory and, with other forces and collaborators, shot entire Jewish communities

Ravine near Kyiv where German forces and auxiliaries murdered 33,771 Jews on September 29–30, 1941

Nazi euphemism for the coordinated program to annihilate Europe’s Jews through deportation, shootings, forced labor, starvation, and extermination centers

German Nazi facilities in occupied Poland created primarily for mass murder, unlike concentration camps, which principally imprisoned and exploited inmates

Program to murder the Jews of occupied Poland’s General Government, principally at the Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka extermination centers

Largest Nazi killing center, combining selection, forced labor, and mass murder with Zyklon B; about one million of its at least 1.1 million victims were Jews

Late-war forced evacuations of camp prisoners during which guards murdered stragglers and many others died from starvation, exposure, disease, and exhaustion

Postwar camps housing survivors and other uprooted people who could not immediately return home, often while awaiting emigration

January 1942 meeting where German officials coordinated government agencies’ roles in deporting Europe’s Jews and implementing the already-underway Final Solution

Eichmann’s euphemistically worded minutes of the Wannsee Conference, documenting the Final Solution’s continental scope and interdepartmental coordination