Nazi-Deutsch/Nazi-German

Last EH on Page iii Nazi-Deutsch/Nazi German An English Lexicon of the Language of the Third Reich ROBERT MICHAEL and KARIN DOERR Forewords by Paul Rose Leslie Morris Wolfgang Mieder GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London iv First EH on Page Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Michael, Robert, 1936– Nazi-Deutsch/Nazi German : an English lexicon of the language of the Third Reich / Robert Michael and Karin Doerr ; forewords by Paul Rose, Leslie Morris and Wolfgang Mieder. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–313–32106–X (alk. paper) 1. German language—Dictionaries—English. 2. German language—Government jargon—Dictionaries. 3. National socialism—Terminology—Dictionaries. 4. Nazis—Language—Dictionaries. 5. Germany—History—1933–1945. 6. German language—Political aspects. 7. Propaganda, German. I. Title: Nazi-German. II. Doerr, Karin, 1951– III. Title. PF3680.M48 2002 943.086'03—dc21 2001042328 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2002 by Robert Michael and Karin Doerr All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001042328 ISBN: 0-313-32106-X First published in 2002 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10987654321 Contents Foreword by Paul Rose vii Foreword by Leslie Morris xi Foreword by Wolfgang Mieder xv Preface xix Acknowledgments xxi The Tradition of Anti-Jewish Language by Robert Michael 1 Nazi-Deutsch: An Ideological Language of Exclusion, Domination, and Annihilation by Karin Doerr 27 Lexicon 47 Appendix 459 Select Bibliography 477 Last EH on Page vi To the six million dead Jews and to all the victims of Nazism. To those good people in Germany and elsewhere in the world who cared and who helped those on the run from murder. To my friend and colleague, the late Stig Hornshøj-Møller, a brilliant scholar who died in his prime, a human being who devoted his life to gaining and using knowledge to fight against evil. —Robert Michael To all those betrayed and injured by German words during the Shoah. —Karin Doerr Foreword Paul Rose The present book by Robert Michael and Karin Doerr, a historian and a Germanist respectively, is an invaluable key that will enable the reader who has no German to gain access to the inner thought patterns and sensibilities of German antisemitic and Nazi mentalities alike. Though there is an enormous public interest in Nazism and the Holocaust, specialists in these fields often are all too aware of the difficulty of conveying the mood, the feel, the logic, which lay beneath the surface of the Third Reich. When a non-German-speaking audience sees Leni Riefenstahl’s noto- rious 1934 Nuremberg Party Rally film Triumph of the Will, the English subtitles of Hitler’s speeches generally leaves them quite mystified as to why the original Ger- man audiences should have found the rhetoric so overwhelming; much of what Hitler says is almost unexceptionable—“patriotism,” “rebirth,” “mobilization,” “order,”“dignity,”“national community,” and so forth. The problem is that these harmless English words do not convey the powerful emotional resonance—almost religious in its intensity—that the original terms carry in German culture. It is this emotionality that completely flooded the German listeners’ critical defenses and ap- pealed directly to their whole soul and being—a mood of ecstatic joy reinforced by the sense of excitement and dynamism that was conjured up by the host of new modern jargon words that Nazi-Deutsch invented. When it came to words con- nected to Jews, of course, the emotional resonance was of very long-standing in German language and culture, and even today German words such as “Jude” (Jew) bear an intensity of revulsion and reaction that is present in no other European language. In the eyes of its inventors, one of the triumphs of this new-speak of Nazi- Deutsch was to transform the traditional language of German antisemitism into something much more modern and suited to the twentieth century. Through this book a non-German speaker may begin to glimpse and even to experience the emotional rapture that possessed so many Germans exposed to the viii Foreword Nazi magic, an enchantment that was fortunately elusive to most of those living outside Germany. As will be seen, that same newspeak was an indispensable acces- sory to the persecution and murder of the European Jews. Scattered through Nazi- Deutsch are to be found the numerous components, some old, some new, that impregnated and animated the new murderous Nazi antisemitism—those med- ical, religious, biological, economic, racial, cultural, and political components all have left their tedious impact on Nazi-Deutsch. We have known too for a long time just how the SS and the bureaucrats of mass-murder concealed their arrangements in a web of metaphorical, ironic, sometimes half-humorous terms: “Resettlement,” “Final Solution,”“Evacuation,”“Disappearance,”“Night and Fog,”“Cargo,”“Selec- tion,”“Annihilation,”“Extermination.”An English-speaker might find the last two terms, in particular, graphic and realistic enough in their meaning; but here again the peculiarities of German language and its role in both the history of German antisemitism and the Holocaust need to be understood. Above all, there is the con- stant fluctuation in German antisemitic language between the metaphorical and the physical meaning of words that in English are concrete. Thus, in the Nurem- berg trials transcripts we find several pages in both Julius Streicher’s and Alfred Rosenberg’s trials dealing with what exactly “extermination” and “annihilation” mean, with Rosenberg arguing from the dictionary that they can be used in a harmlessly (?) and purely metaphorical or spiritual sense. The judges at Nurem- berg saw through this sophistry and ridiculed it. Unfortunately, there has been a tendency of late to seek to revive this absurd Nuremberg defense not only by such Holocaust deniers as David Irving, but even by serious historians inclined to think that sometimes the historical interpretations that go most against common sense must be the most brilliant. Many of the terms used in Nazi-Deutsch embody a certain kind of German humor, a certain sarcastic irony that can be a little misleading to someone not ac- quainted with German culture. One has to beware of taking some of the derogatory terms used for the Nazi elite and Nazi ideas to be somehow proof of a healthy mood of resistance, or of a certain liberal or at least anti-Nazi attitude. More often than not, the prime attitude involved is simply a corrosive cynicism. My own favorite of these terms is the slightly obscene Reichsgletscherspalte (Reich-glacier- crevasse) eponym for the redoubtably glacial Leni Riefenstahl. Caution is, there- fore, in order: a derogatory or scornful label does not mean that the user eschewed opportunistic collaboration with Nazi circles. In Germany, all too often, resent- ment of power went hand in hand with a craven servility. If Nazi-Deutsch glaringly exposes the uniqueness of Nazism and indeed of Ger- man culture, we are still left with some major unresolved, if hotly debated, prob- lems concerning German and Nazi antisemitisms. Was antisemitism all along embedded in German culture? What is the relationship of traditional German antisemitism to other antisemitisms? How did Nazi antisemitism grow out of exist- ing German antisemitic traditions? Did the older German antisemitic traditions lead, through Nazism, to the Holocaust? Robert Michael’s thoughtful essay pro- vides an accurate historical context for the reader to ponder these fundamental historical questions. Scholars who are skeptical about tracing unbroken connec- Paul Rose ix tions between older European antisemitisms, whether Christian or secular, are sometimes too easily satisfied with offering obvious methodological objections to the continuity of European antisemitisms or to the continuity of German antisemitism. The result is that serious efforts to understand antisemitism and the Holocaust are frequently frustrated. Given the need to be critically minded and to appreciate the complexity of these continuities and connections, and admitting the fact that these may very often be more indirect than they seem at first sight, it is difficult all the same to come away from a reading of the sources assembled in Pro- fessor Michael’s essay without feeling that the web of links and influences and connections is indeed real and must be taken more seriously than many historians are currently prepared to do. Foreword Leslie Morris A lexicon of Nazi-Deutsch violates the very principles of secrecy and obfuscation that govern the language of genocide: the lexicon lays bare the range and scope of Nazi language, explicates the terms that were meant to remain obscure, creates lex- ical order out of the chaos and darkness of this language, and, most significantly, insists on the transparency of this language. Yet the language of genocide is not transparent, but rather opaque: it is language that is denaturalized, stylized, calling attention to itself as language at the same time that it seeks to obscure and sanitize the reality to which it refers. The philosopher Berel Lang, in one of the most inter- esting critical studies on language and genocide, describes Nazi-Deutsch as a “linguistic lie,” in which “moral violation thus takes on the guise of literary form.”1 Lang explains that “as the person who is a liar knowingly affirms what is false, so here a linguistic expression affirms what it ‘knows’ to be false.”2 As such, the lexicon presented here contains a fundamental paradox, as its very existence disman- tles the “linguistic lie” that defines the language of genocide.

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