Nazi Terminology - Z

Z

• Z-Plan (or Plan-Z) was the name given to the re-equipment and expansion of the Kriegsmarine (Nazi German Navy) as ordered by Adolf Hitler on 27 January 1939. The plan called for 10 battleships, four aircraft carriers, three battlecruisers, eight heavy cruisers, 44 light cruisers, 68 destroyers and 249 U-boats by 1944 that was meant to challenge the naval power of the United Kingdom. The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 came far too early to implement the plan.
• Zossen - The underground bunker complex that was headquarters for both the German Wehrmacht (OKW) and (Heer) Army High Command (OKH) located approximately 20 miles west of Berlin in Zossen, Germany.
• Zwangsarbeiter - A forced-laborer, a slave-laborer.
• Zwangswirtschaft – Nazi-era forced-labor or compulsion economy.
• Zwischenstaatliche Vertretertagungen – interstate meetings of representatives; DNSAP and NSDAP party congresses of the early years; first one held in Salzburg, Austria.
• Zyklon B Also spelled Cyclon B – tradename of a cyanide-based insecticide used to kill more than one million Jews, Gypsies, communists, and prisoners of war in Nazi gas chambers. (Deaths from Zyklon B account for over one of the eleven million people killed in the Holocaust —the others were killed by other means).