Glossary beginning with J

1878-1942. Pseudonym for Henryk Goldszmit. Educator, author, physician, and director of a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw. In 1912, founded a home for Jewish orphans in Warsaw that later was located inside the Warsaw ghetto. Despite the possibility of personal freedom, he refused to abandon 200 orphans and was deported with them to Treblinka in 1942. Posthumous (1972) he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

Religion founded in the United States with about 20,000- 30,000 members in Germany by the late 1920s. As a matter of religious belief, Witnesses refused to use the Hitler salute, salute the swastika flag, bear arms in war, or participate in the affairs of government. The Witnesses were banned and their presses confiscated in 1933. After 1935, many Witnesses lost jobs, homes, businesses, and pensions, since they were viewed as enemies of the state. They were arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps, where they were marked by a purple-colored triangle. More than 900 Witness children who refused to join the Hitler Youth were involuntarily removed from parental custody to Nazi penal institutions and juvenile homes. About 10,000 Witnesses from Germany, Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Norway, and Poland were arrested and deported to various concentration camps, between 2,500 and 5,000 of them died in Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and other camps. More than 250 Witnesses were executed for refusing to serve in the German military.

A group of 12 to 24 Jewish men appointed by the Germans in the occupied Polish territories after 1 September 1939 to control the Jewish population which had been concentrated in ghettos before or at the same time, subject to the German civil administration whose orders it had to fulfil unconditionally. Its competencies further included administrative affairs, social welfare and health care. The Jewish Council was obliged to recruit and remunerate workers in accordance with the labour obligation of the male Jewish population, to organise their deployment to labour camps, collect and deliver contributions etc. Later, they were forced to collaborate in the deportation of the Jewish population to the death camps. Some Jewish Councils were in charge of the Ordnungsdienst (security service), the so-called Jewish Police who were not allowed to carry or use any weapons except rubber truncheons.

1897-1945. Close associate of Adolf Hitler, joined the NSDAP (Nazi party) in 1922, in 1926 appointed district leader [Gauleiter] of Berlin-Brandenburg, from 1927 to 1935, edited his own weekly newspaper, "Der Angriff" ["The Assault"], devoted to spreading Nazi ideology. In 1929, Hitler appointed Goebbels as Reich propaganda leader of the Nazi party. On March 13, 1933, after the Nazis had assumed power, Hitler appointed Goebbels Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.