Schindler’s ListBackground Information

• All definitions are from www.dictionary.com unless cited otherwise.

• Information from other sites is cited according to web-site.

• If you want to know more, let me know!

Genocide

• the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group.

Ghetto

• a section of a city, esp. a thickly populated slum area, inhabited predominantly by members of an ethnic or other minority group, often as a result of social or economic restrictions, pressures, or hardships.

• (formerly, in most European countries) a section of a city in which all Jews were required to live.

Anti-Semitism

• discrimination against or prejudice or hostility toward Jews.

Pogrom

• an organized massacre, esp. of Jews.

Nuremberg Laws

• The Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 deprived German Jews of their rights of citizenship, giving them the status of "subjects" in Hitler's Reich. The laws also made it forbidden for Jews to marry or have sexual relations with Aryans or to employ young Aryan women as household help. (An Aryan being a person with blond hair and blue eyes of Germanic heritage.)

• www.mtsu.edu/~baustin/nurmberg.html

Extermination camps

• Extermination camps were built during World War II to systematically kill millions of primarily Jewish victims.

Adolf Eichmann

• Headed Gestapo Department IV B4 for Jewish Affairs

• Served as a self proclaimed 'Jewish specialist' and was the man responsible for keeping the trains rolling from all over Europe to death camps during the Final Solution

• www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/biographies/eichmann.htm

Amon Goeth

• The SS officer Amon Goeth, the Commandant of the Plaszow labor camp, had made the final 'liquidation' of the Crakow ghetto and had experience at three death camps in eastern Poland, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka ...

• http://www.auschwitz.dk/goeth.htm

Generalgouvernment

• (General Government), territorial unit in Poland with its own administration, created by the Nazis on October 26, 1939.

• The Generalgouvernement was to serve as a "racial dumping ground," an endless supply of slave labor, and ultimately, as a site for the mass extermination of European Jewry.

• www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%206246

“Final Solution”

• How to get rid of the Jews was a question answered by Adolf Hitler. His answer was to murder Jews throughout Europe along with other races that were believed to be sub-humans.

• www.library.thinkquest.org/trio/TTQ03068/finalsolution.htm

“Righteous Among the Nations”

• (Non-Jewish) rescuers who have been recognized for their "compassion, courage and morality" because they "risked their lives to save the lives of Jews.“

• www.holocaustforgotten.com/yadvashem.htm