Glossary of Nazi Germany

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• 25-point programme – The Nazi Party platform and a codification of its ideology.

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• Abbeförderung – euphemism for killing.
• abgeräumt – slang expression for "murdered".
• Abhörverbrecher – Germans and others in the occupied countries who illegally listened to foreign news broadcasts.
• Abkindern – an ironically intended colloquial designation for the cancellation of a marriage loan through the production of offspring. In German, ab means "off" and Kind means "child".
• Ablieferungspflicht – delivery duty on farm products and other goods which had to be contributed to the state to be sold on the German market.
• Abrechnung mit den Juden – the removal of Jews from the German economy and society, eventually leading to their extermination in the Holocaust.
• Abschaum – political adversaries of the Nazis.
• SS-Abschnitt – SS district or district headquarters.
• Absiedlung – the forceful removal of people from German-occupied or annexed regions. This term is synonymous with Umsiedlung.
• Abstammungsnachweis – used to establish the purity of one's Aryan descent.
• Abteilung – a branch, subsection, department or a division within a main office.
• Abteilungsleiter – the head of a section or department.
• Abwehr – a German military intelligence organisation that operated from 1920 to 1944. After 4 February 1938, its name in title was Amt Ausland/Abwehr im Oberkommando der Wehrmacht.
• Abwehrangelegenheiten – counterespionage issues.
• Abwehrpolizei – counter-espionage police. They were a function of the border police controlled by the Gestapo.
• Abwehrstelle – Military Intelligence Center.
• Achsenmächte – literally, Axis powers.
• "Achtung, Feind hört mit!" – Nazi slogan used as a repeated warning against spies published in newspapers, posted in shop windows and restaurants, printed on notepads and even on matchboxes. Also a film.
• Adolphe Légalité – derisory nickname for Hitler in social-revolutionary SA circles following the Reichswehr Trial held before the Leipzig Supreme Court in late September 1930. In the eyes of radical National Socialists, Hitler's Legality Oath had conceded too much to his political enemies, in the same way as had the Duke of Orléans, who adopted the name Philippe Égalité during the French Revolution.
• Afrika Korps - German Africa Corps of the Wehrmacht.
• agrarpolitischer Apparat – Agricultural Affairs Bureau of the NSDAP, responsible for promoting Blut und Boden ideology.
• * Leadership hierarchy: Reichsleitungsfachberater held by Richard Walther Darré; Gaufachberater; Bezirksfachberater; Kreisfachberater; Ortsgruppenfachberater
• * Agents: LVL; Landesfachberater
• * Administrative: Hilfsreferenten ; Sachbearbeiter ; Hilfsreferenten responsible for day-to-day propaganda campaign
• Ahnenerbe – a think tank established under the patronage of Heinrich Himmler to research the history of the Aryan race and prove its superiority.
• * Ahnenerbe Forschungs- und Lehrgemeinschaft – Society for Research and the Teaching of Ancestral Heritage.
• Ahnennachweise – genealogical tree used to prove ancestry.
• Ahnenpaß – an identification card which was supposed to be carried by all Germans to demonstrate one's Aryan race lineage.
• Ahnenschein – a document used to show correct Aryan descent.
• Akademiker – a member of those professions whose exercise required university study as a prerequisite. The term was avoided because it fostered caste mentality and contradicted the ideal of the Volk community. The proportion of academics from a working-class background increased during the Nazi era, but remained minuscule in actual numbers.
• Auf Kriegsdauer – added to titles to indicate the limited promotion prospects for bureaucrats.
• Aktion – euphemism for a mass-murder operation.
• Aktion 1005 –, also called the Sonderaktion 1005 or Enterdungsaktion, was the 1942–44 secret Nazi operation for concealing evidence of their own largest mass-killings. Laborers – facetiously called "Sonderkommando 1005" – would be taken under guard to a closed death camp to clear the site of structures while a sub-unit, the "Leichenkommandos", were forced to exhume bodies from mass graves, burn the remains, and sometimes to grind down larger bone pieces in portable bone-crusher mills. Some Einsatzgruppen mass graves were also cleared out.
• Aktion Reinhardt – code name given on 4 June 1942 for the assignment to exterminate all Polish Jews in honor of SS Deputy Chief Reinhard Heydrich who had been assassinated during a covert operation.
• Aktion T4 – code name for the extermination of mentally ill and handicapped patients by the Nazi authorities.
• Aktivismus – political maxim of National Socialism as a "fighting movement", as opposed to "bourgeois passivity". It was claimed that only through an activist stance had it been possible to "defeat terrorist Marxism". However, that which propaganda ennobled as activism was, especially at the grass-roots level, often only blind action for action's sake.
• Alles für Deutschland – Motto applied to the blades of uniform daggers worn by the SA and National Socialist Motor Corps.
• Allgemeine SS – general overall body of the SS which included full-time, part-time, active, inactive, and honorary members.
• Alljuda – antisemitic Germanization of the term international Jewry that borrowed from the word alldeutsch, as in the antisemitic slogan "All-Germany against All-Jewry!" The National Socialists used the word Alljuda to suggest the Allgegenwart of the Jewish danger and the "world conspiracy of Judaism"; aggressive terminology that degraded Zionism
• Alpenfestung – the region on the Obersalzberg where Hitler was originally supposed to retreat when conducting the battle against the Allies. Hitler never used the Alpenfestung in this capacity and retreated instead into the bunker in Berlin.
• Alter Kämpfer – A Nazi Party member who joined the party or a party-affiliated organization before the Reichstag election of September 1930, when the Nazi Party made its electoral breakthrough; or who joined the Austrian Nazi Party or an affiliate before the Anschluss. The first 100,000 members of the Party were eligible to wear the Golden Nazi Party Badge. The "old fighters" tended to be the most extreme anti-Semitics in the party.
• Altreich – after the annexation of Austria in 1938, referred to the part of Germany that was within the 1937 boundaries.
• Amt – a main office, branch or department of a ministry within the Reich.
• Amtsgericht – a court of law with functions over the whole legal field.
• Amtsleiter – a convener of NSDAP Party committees. They were personally answerable to Hitler.
• Amtswalter – Old German-sounding Nazi synonym for "official" or "civil servant" and therefore the preferred term for professional functionaries of the party and its branches. Those persons working in the state apparatus continued to be called Beamte.
• Amt Feierabend – aimed to organize workers' after-work activities as part of the Strength Through Joy policy.
• Amt Volksbildungswerk – aimed to organize ideologically approved education for workers as part of the Strength Through Joy policy.
• Anbauschlacht – Battle for Cultivation.
• Angstbrosche – an ironic expression for the Nazi Party pin worn by latecomers to the Party in 1933.
• Anhaltelager – a temporary detention camp.
• Anordnung – an order, instruction or regulation.
• Anschluss – annexation, in particular the annexation of Austria in March, 1938.
• Anti-Comintern Pact – the agreement by Germany, Japan, and Italy to oppose the Communist International directed by Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union.
• Arbeit adelt – Motto applied to the blades of uniform daggers worn by officers of the Reichsarbeitsdienst.
• Arbeit macht frei – an old German peasant saying, not invented by the Nazis. It was placed above the gate to Auschwitz by the commandant Rudolf Höß. The slogan which appeared on the gates of numerous Nazi death camps and concentration camps was not true; those sent to the camps certainly would not be freed in exchange for their hard labor. Instead they were generally worked to death or exterminated when they could no longer perform labour for the Reich.
• Arbeitnehmerschaft – the Nazis took this word to mean both manual and mental workers.
• "Arbeitertum der Faust und der Stirn" – blue-collar and white-collar workers. This was the Nazi Party self-description as an "all-inclusive workers' party".
• Arbeitsdienstführer – an official responsible for labor output and performance in a concentration camp.
• Arbeitserziehungslager – camps established for recently released concentration camp inmates designed to provide additional training for industrial work.
• Arbeitsplatzwechselverordnung – a legal order to change jobs.
• Arbeitsscheue – a person who avoids work. Germans who rejected opportunities to work were categorized and placed in protective custody, which implied that they were slackers. In most instances, they were reported to the Gestapo and thereafter interned at the Buchenwald concentration camp for a three-month period.
• Arbeitsschlacht – propaganda term for the totality of measures involved in work creation. Because of its military and activist sound, Arbeitsschlacht was one of Hitler's favorite terms until 1937. It was patterned after the Fascist Italian battaglia per il grano.
• Ariernachweis – a Certificate of Descent .
• Aryan – the Germanic "master race" or Übermensch, according to Nazi doctrine.
• Arisierung – the process of making something "Aryan" through the seizure of Jewish property in favour of a non-Jewish German.
• Asoziale – during the Nazi era, the term was derogatory, akin to "scum" or the ballastexistenzen of the socially marginalized, those considered by the Nazis to be undesirables. It included the homeless, migrant workers, beggars, vagrants, large families from the lower social strata, families from the edge of town, "like gypsy" migrants, the so-called "work shy", alcoholics, prostitutes and pimps. Gypsies were considered to be "foreign race asoziale".
• Aufbruch der Nation – nationalist interpretation of the beginning of the First World War; it was adopted by the "National Socialist Revolution" to emphasize the overcoming of the party state and of pluralism. This was a parallel concept to the National Rising.
• Aufsichtsverwaltung – supervisory administration'
• Auschwitz – a town near Kraków in southern Poland that was the site of the largest Nazi concentration camps.
• ausgebombt – people rendered homeless due to the Allied bombing campaign against Germany during World War II.
• Auslandsdeutsche – people of Germanic blood who spent their formative years in a German community abroad. Nazi doctrine held that such people were still entitled to the full rights of being German, especially those who remained affiliated with the Fatherland. A considerable number of them were in the United States and Argentina.
• Auslandsnachrichtendienst – intelligence service covering foreign countries. This was one of the functions of the SD as Amt VI of the RSHA.
• Auslandsorganisation – a NSDAP organization tasked to supervise Germans abroad.
• Ausrichtung – a favorite NS word, borrowed from military usage, for external and internal "normalization" of the movement's followers. External uniformity of dress corresponded to inner ideological alignment regarding NS goals.
• Ausrottungsmaßnahmen – extermination measures.
• Außenpolitisches Amt – a NSDAP foreign policy office overseen by Alfred Rosenberg.
• Außenstelle – also known as Außendienststelle; outstation or outpost of the SiPo and SD.
• Autobahn – The "autobahns", a freeway system planned and started by the Weimar Republic but constructed by Nazi Germany. The autobahn construction program was enthusiastically implemented by Hitler as a public works project to help fulfill his promise to reduce unemployment. The autobahn system was used as a model for the construction of the United States Interstate Highway System by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who remarked on the efficiency of the autobahn for military transportation while in Germany as the Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force.