Nazi Terminology - A

A

• 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".
• SS-Abschnitt - SS district or district headquarters.
• Abwehr (German for defence) - was a German military intelligence (information gathering) organisation from 1921 to 1944. After 4 February 1938, its name in title was Foreign Affairs/Defence Office of the Armed Forces High Command (Amt Ausland/Abwehr im Oberkommando der Wehrmacht).
• 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 Orleans, who adopted the name Philippe Egalité during the French Revolution.
• agrarpolitischer Apparat (aA) – Agrarian Apparatus; Agricultural Affairs Bureau of the NSDAP.
  • Leadership hierarchy: Reichsleitungsfachberater held by Richard Walther Darré; Gaufachberater; Bezirksfachberater; Kreisfachberater; Ortsgruppenfachberater
  • Agents: LVL; Landesfachberater (consultants)
  • Administrative: Hilfsreferenten (staff members); Sachbearbeiter (aides); Hilfsreferenten responsible for day-to-day propaganda campaign
• Ahnenerbe "Ancestral Heritage" - a think tank established under the patronage of Heinrich Himmler to research the history of the Aryan race and prove its superiority.
• Ahnenpass (ancestor passport) allowing to document one's Aryan race lineage.
• Akademiker (academic) - 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 Third Reich, but remained minuscule in actual numbers.
• a. Kr. - abbreviation of Auf Kriegsdauer, which means "for the duration of the war". It was added to a title to indicate the limited promotion prospects for bureaucrats.
• Aktion 1005 - ("Action 1005"), also called the Sonderaktion 1005 ("special action 1005") or Enterdungsaktion ("exhuming action"), was the 1942-44 secret Nazi operation for concealing evidence of their own largest mass-killings. Laborers ---facetiously called "Sonderkommando 1005" ("special commando/s 1005")--- would be taken under guard to a closed death camp to clear the site of structures while a sub-unit, the "Leichenkommandos" (corpse commandos), were forced to exhume bodies from mass graves, burn the remains (usually on timber and iron-rail "roasts"), and sometimes to grind down larger bone pieces in portable bone-crusher mills. Some Einsatzgruppen mass graves were also cleared out. (Note: without the 1005 appended, in the camps the word Sonderkommando (lit. special unit) euphemistically referred to prisoner-laborers generally ---they stoked the crematoria, shaved newcomers' hair, processed seized belongings, etc., but were not involved in the exhuming action.)
• Aktion Reinhard - code name for the deadliest phase of the Final Solution, the creation of purpose-built extermination camps. Thought to be named for RSHA chief Reinhard Heydrich.
• Aktion T4 – code name for the extermination of mentally ill and handicapped patients by the Nazi authorities. (Named after Tiergartenstraße 4, the address of Nazi Central Office in Berlin.)
• Aktivismus (activism) - 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.
• Allbuch (Book of Everything) - National Socialist Germanization of Lexikon.
• Alles für Deutschland (Everything for Germany) – Motto applied to the blades of uniform daggers worn by the SA and National Socialist Motor Corps (NSKK).
• Alljuda - antisemitic Germanization of the term "international Jewry" that borrowed from the word alldeutsch (all- or pan-German), as in the antisemitic slogan "All-Germany against All-Jewry!" The National Socialists used the word Alljuda to suggest the Allgegenwart (omnipresence) of the Jewish danger and the "world conspiracy of Judaism".
• Alter Kämpfer "old fighter" – 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 – old state or old country; term used after the annexation of Austria in 1938 to refer to that part of Germany that was within the 1937 (pre-annexation) boundaries.
• Amtsleiter – convener of NSDAP Party committees. They were personally answerable to Hitler.
• Amtswalter (office steward) - Old German-sounding Nazi synonym for "official" or "civil servant" (Beamter) 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 Beamten.
• Anbauschlacht - Battle for Cultivation.
• Ansatz (attack) - First World War military term, used in National Socialist vocabulary in the same ways as the word Einsatz, though less frequently; one referred to bringing a piece of equipment, troops or a weapon "zum Ansatz" (into attack, or play).
• Anschluss (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 (the Comintern) directed by Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union.
• anti-semitism- Antisemitism (alternatively spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism, also known as judeophobia) is prejudice and hostility toward Jews as a religious, racial, or ethnic group. Not specific to the Third Reich.
• Arbeit adelt "Labor ennobles" – Motto applied to the blades of uniform daggers worn by officers of the Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD, the State Labor Service).
• Arbeit macht frei – "Work will set you free", 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.
• Arbeitnehmerschaft – workforce. The Nazis took this word to mean both manual and mental workers.
• "Arbeitertum der Faust und der Stirn" – "Workers of both manual and mental labor" i.e. blue-collar and white-collar workers; the Nazi Party self description as an "all-inclusive workers' party" (a term originally designed to carry anti-Communist overtones).
• Arbeitsschlacht (battle for work) - propaganda term for the totality of measures involved in work creation. Because of its military and activist sound, Battle for Work was one of Hitler's favorite terms until 1937 (the de facto end of unemployment). It was patterned after the Fascist Italian battaglia del grano (battle for grain).
• Ariernachweis - a Certificate of Descent (to show "Aryan" heritage) (popular name).
• Aryan - the Germanic "master race" or Übermensch, according to Nazi doctrine
• Arisierung - "Aryanization", "to make Aryan", i.e. seizure of Jewish property in favour of a non-Jewish German.
• Asoziale - "asocial" people. During the Nazi era, the word meant "scum", "inferior" people, the ballastexistenzen ("ballast-existences"—dead weight, waste-lives) of the socially marginalized, those considered by the Nazis to be "unwanted". 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 (as they were called by the Nazis) were considered to be "foreign race 'asoziale".
• Aufbruch der Nation (a new start for the 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 (Erhebung).
• Ausrichtung (alignment) - favorite NS word, borrowed from military usage, for external and internal "normalization" of the movement's followers (Volk Comrade). External uniformity of dress corresponded to inner ideological alignment regarding NS goals.
• Autobahnen—The "autobahns", a freeway system planned 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.