Glossary beginning with N

A concentration camp near Hamburg, Germany, opened in December 1938, initially as a satellite of Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Neuengamme became an independent camp in June 1940. British troops liberated Neuengamme on May 4, 1945.

A subcamp of Ravensbrück concentration camp that existed from September 1944 to May 1945, where prisoners were forced to work at the local airfield, in a Dornier airplane parts factory and preparing anti-tank ditches. The prisoners included Polish female political prisoners deported from Warsaw in September 1944, Jewish prisoners evacuated from Auschwitz in December 1944 and January 1945, and Dutch, French, Greek, German, Hungarian, Russian, and Ukrainian political prisoners.

The Night and Fog Decree was an order issued on December 7, 1941 to seize "persons endangering German security," who were not to be executed immediately but were to vanish without a trace. It was applied against members of the resistance in western Europe. About 7,000 people, mostly French resistance fighters, were murdered in this operation.

Also known as "night of broken glass," or Crystal Night. This pogrom against Jewish synagogues and businesses as well as organized vandalism against Jewish homes was unleashed in Germany and Austria on November 9-10, 1938. More than 28,000 Jewish men were arrested and deported to concentration camps, several thousand German Jewish women were held in municipal jails, and 91 Jews were killed in the violence.

The two laws issued in 1935 to further legal exclusion from German life of persons considered alien, drawing a distinction between so-called Aryans (persons with "German or related blood") and so-called non-Aryans. These laws reduced the rights of German Jews, since they could no longer vote or hold office, although they retained the right to German passports. These laws were proclaimed at the annual Nazi party rally in Nuremberg on September 15, 1935. They were also implemented against German Gypsies and Afro-Germans.

The International Military Tribunal (opened in Berlin on October 18, 1945 and then continued in Nuremberg from November 1945 until October 1946) and also the twelve "successor" trials prosecuted by the United States between December 1946 and April 1949 against leaders of the Third Reich ministries, the military, industrial concerns, German legal and medical professions, and the SS.