Increase your Vocabulary! Words to know-2

Source: https://hmh.org/education/resources/vocabulary-terms-related-holocaust/ Links to an external site.

Allies
The nations fighting Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during World War II, primarily Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States.

Antisemitism
Dislike or hatred of the Jews

Aryan
Term used by the Nazis to describe northern European physical characteristics (such as blonde hair and blue eyes) as racially “superior”. (There is actually no such thing biologiclly as the Aryan" race".)

Concentration Camp
Camps in which Jews were imprisoned by the Nazis, located in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe. There were three different kinds of camps: transit, labor and extermination. Many prisoners in concentration camps died within months of arriving from violence or starvation.

Final Solution
Term used by the Nazis to describe their plan to annihilate the entire Jewish population of Europe.

Gas Chambers
Large, sealed rooms (usually with shower nozzles) used for murdering prisoners of concentration camps; many people were led into gas chambers with the belief they were going in to take a shower.

Gestapo
The secret state police of the German army, organized to stamp out any political opposition.

Ghetto
A section of a city where Jews were forced to live, usually with several families living in one house, separated from the rest of the city by walls or wire fences, and used primarily as a station for gathering Jews for deportation to concentration camps.

Holocaust
Term first used in the late 1950s to describe the systematic torture and murder of approximately six million European Jews and millions of other "undesirables" by the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945.

Pogrom
An organized, state-sponsored attack on a group of people.

SS
Schutzstaffel; the German army’s elite guard, organized to serve as Hitler’s personal protectors and to administer the concentration camps.