The Nazi state developed a particular vocabulary for the Holocaust. The vocabulary did several jobs at once. It described the operation in terms that were precise enough for the bureaucracy to function. It concealed the operation from outsiders who did not know the codes. It softened the operation for the perpetrators themselves, allowing them to do the work without ever quite naming what they were doing. The language is part of how the killing was administered. Reading the German documents of the period requires understanding what each phrase actually meant. The euphemisms were not accidental. They were deliberate.
The central euphemisms
The most-cited single phrase is Endlösung der Judenfrage, the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. The phrase appears in German government documents from 1941 onwards. It refers to the murder of all the Jews of Europe. The civil servants who used the phrase, and the SS officers who carried out the policy, knew what it meant. The deniers have over the years attempted to read the phrase as referring to forced emigration or resettlement. The argument fails on the documentary record: the phrase is used in contexts where its meaning is clear, including in Heydrich’s speech at the Wannsee Conference and in the Posen speeches Himmler delivered to senior SS officers in October 1943.
Sonderbehandlung, special treatment, was the phrase used in the camp records to mean killing on arrival. The phrase appears in tens of thousands of Auschwitz documents. A prisoner’s file marked SB had been gassed. Sonderbehandlung 14f13, a particular subcategory, referred to prisoners selected from the camps for killing under the T4 medical infrastructure. The phrase concealed nothing from the camp bureaucracy. It concealed everything from outsiders.
Aussiedlung, resettlement, was the standard term for deportation. Jews were told they were being resettled to the east for labour. The deportation cards in the Westerbork transit camp, the Drancy transit camp, the Theresienstadt transit camp, all spoke of resettlement. The destinations on the cards, where they were specified, were vague: the east, a labour reserve. The deportees boarded the trains believing what they had been told. Many figured out the truth before the trains arrived; many did not.
Umsiedlung, a similar term, meant the same thing in slightly different bureaucratic contexts. The Operation Reinhard correspondence used Umsiedlung consistently. Letters from Reinhard headquarters in Lublin to the Ministry of the East referred to the Umsiedlung of Jewish populations as a measured administrative task.
Evakuierung, evacuation, was used in the death march context: the SS evacuated camps to march the prisoners to other camps deeper inside the Reich. Evacuation was a more honest term than the others, in the sense that the prisoners did indeed move; but the operational reality was a march in which a large fraction of the prisoners would be killed.
Vernichtung, destruction, and Ausrottung, extermination, were the more direct terms, used in the SS internal documents and in the speeches Himmler made to closed audiences of senior SS officers. The Posen speeches of 4 and 6 October 1943 are the central case: Himmler described, to assembled senior SS officers, what they were doing as the extermination of the Jewish people, and praised them for managing to remain decent men while doing it. The recordings and transcripts of the Posen speeches survived the war. They are some of the most damning documentary evidence in the Holocaust archive.
The technical vocabulary
Beyond the headline euphemisms was a wider technical vocabulary. Selection, the choice of arrivals at the camp ramp between immediate killing and admission to labour, was a clinical word. Special action, Sonderaktion, meant a mass killing operation in a particular town. Cleansing, Säuberung, meant the killing of the Jewish population of a particular area. Deportation, Deportation, was used both for what we would now call deportation and for the deeper sense of removal. Resettlement was distinct from deportation in some contexts and synonymous in others, depending on the speaker and the audience.
Categories of person were named in the bureaucratic style. Schutzhäftling, protective custody prisoner, meant a prisoner held under the indefinite SS detention that had begun in 1933. Jude, Jew, was a legal category under the Nuremberg Laws. Mischling, half-breed, of the first or second degree, was a partial Jewish category. Geltungsjude, deemed Jew, was a particular bureaucratic subcategory of Mischling who were treated as Jews. Versippt, intermarried, was a status that affected how a person was processed in the deportation lists.
The killing methods themselves were named with the same clinical detachment. Spezialeinrichtung, special facility, meant a gas chamber. The Sonderkommando, special unit, was the prisoner labour unit that operated the gas chambers and crematoria. The Sonderbehandlung was what happened in the special facility. The Sonderwagen, special vehicle, was a mobile gas van.
The propaganda vocabulary
The wider vocabulary of Nazi antisemitism, intended for public consumption, ran in parallel. The Jew was Volksschadling, a parasite on the body politic. The Jewish people were a Krankheit, a disease, requiring treatment. The vocabulary of medical and biological metaphor, used systematically, mapped the killing onto the categories of public health: hygiene, disinfection, cleansing, treatment. The metaphor was useful because it allowed the killing to be discussed in language that did not, on the surface, reveal what it was about.
What the language tells us
The careful reader of the German documents, both at the time and since, can usually decode the vocabulary. The decoders included the Allied intelligence services from 1941 onwards, the post-war prosecutors at Nuremberg, the historians of the second half of the twentieth century, and most readably the German Jewish philologist Victor Klemperer, whose LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii, published in 1947, is the classic study of how the Nazi state used language. Klemperer, who survived the war in hiding inside Germany because he was married to a non-Jewish German woman, kept a diary throughout the period that traces in detail the verbal codes by which the regime described itself.
The vocabulary also tells us something about the perpetrators. They knew what they were doing. They did not have a vocabulary that hid the killing from themselves; they had a vocabulary that made the killing administratively manageable while keeping it socially undiscussable. The two functions are different. The killing was discussed inside the relevant institutions in clear terms when necessary. It was concealed from outsiders, including from German civilians who were not part of the killing apparatus, by the use of the euphemisms. The result was a population in which large numbers of people knew, in a general way, what was happening, and very few people knew, in detailed terms, what was happening. The euphemisms were the mechanism that made this possible.
See also
Sources
- Victor Klemperer, LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii, 1947 (English: The Language of the Third Reich, Athlone Press, 2000)
- Saul Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution, Harvard University Press, 1992
- Christopher Browning, The Path to Genocide, Cambridge University Press, 1992
- Heinrich Himmler, Posen speeches, 4 and 6 October 1943, recorded by the SS audio service
- USHMM: Nazi Camps Vocabulary