Poland Key Words

Key terminology, regions, and sites related to the Holocaust in Poland include:

• Aktion Anti-Jewish operations involving the mass round-up, deportation, or immediate shooting of ghetto residents by Nazi forces.
• Auschwitz-Birkenau Death and labour camp in southern Poland.
• Belzec Death camp located in southeastern Poland.
• Einsatzgruppen Paramilitary, mobile death squads of the SS that followed the advancing German military into Poland and the USSR to conduct mass shootings of intellectuals, political enemies, and Jewish populations.
• Chelmno First death camp to use gassing and first place located outside Soviet territory in which Jews were systematically killed as part of ‘Final Solution’.
• General Government The administrative unit established by Nazi Germany in October 1939 for the regions of occupied Poland that were not directly annexed into the German Reich. Governed by Hans Frank from Kraków, this territory contained the majority of the sealed ghettos and killing centres.
• Ghetto Enclosed, heavily guarded urban sectors where Jewish populations were systematically concentrated, starved, and subjected to forced labour before deportation. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest in Europe (holding nearly 500,000 people), followed closely by the Łódź Ghetto.
• Judenrat Boards of Jewish community leaders appointed by Nazi authorities to implement German decrees, manage municipal services, and ultimately organize deportation lists inside the ghettos.
• Majdanek Death camp located in a suburb of Lublin.
• Operation Reinhard The secretive Nazi code name for the systematic plan to murder all Jews in the General Government area. This operation led directly to the construction and operation of the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka death camps.
• Shtetl Small towns or villages in Eastern Europe with large, historically vibrant Jewish majorities that were completely eradicated during the Holocaust.
• Sobibor Death camp in the Lublin district of Poland.
• Treblinka Death camp located in sparsely populated area near the village of Treblinka.
• Umschlagplatz The physical assembly points or railway transfer squares, where Jews were rounded up and loaded onto freight trains bound for extermination camps.
• Volksdeutsche Ethnic Germans living in Poland who registered on the Nazi Deutsche Volksliste.
• Warthegau A western region of occupied Poland directly annexed into the German Reich. It was subjected to intense ‘Germanisation’, resulting in the mass deportation of ethnic Poles and the opening of the first functioning killing centre at Chelmno.
• Zegota The underground code name for the Council for Aid to Jews, a clandestine branch of the Polish resistance that actively provided false documents, food, and safe houses to Jews escaping the ghettos.