Glossary beginning with P

Term used by the German occupation power for the destruction of entire villages and execution of their inhabitants in retaliation for the (suspected) participation in resistance actions or granting support to partisans. Introduction of the principle of collective responsibility through a decree on "counteracting acts of violence in the GG" of 31-09-1939 and Himmler's decree on "counteracting criminal gangs" of 30-09-1942. The operations were carried out by units of SS, Gestapo and military police as it suited the occupants, larger operations were supported by the German army. A total of 440 villages in Poland were destructed and their inhabitants killed in this way.

Born in 1920. A poet, who also translated poetry by Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore and the Russian poets Segey Yesenin, Aleksandr Blok and Osip Mandelstam. His parents were deported in June 1942 from the Cernauti ghetto to a camp in Transnistria (eastern Romania), where they were killed by the SS. Celan spent two years at forced labor under the Germans before fleeing to the Soviet army, reentering Cernauti after Russian troops liberated and annexed the town in February 1944. He moved to Bucharest in 1945, to Vienna in 1947, and settled in Paris in 1948. He was awarded the Büchner Prize in 1960. He committed suicide in 1970.

The self-help organisation "Network People First Germany" (Netzwerk People First Deutschland e.V.) uses the term "persons with learning difficulties" instead of "disabilities". "For many people, the words 'learning disabilities' indicate that we are stupid or unable to learn. This is not true. We learn differently. Sometimes we learn more slowly or we need special help. That is why we want to be called persons with learning difficulties." Source: http://www.people1.de/was_mensch.html

Members of the Jungvolk, boys aged 10 to 14 in the pre-Hitler Youth. They were required to undergo an initiation test consisting of questions about condensed quotes from Nazi dogma, knowing all verses of the "Horst Wessel Song," running 60 meters in 12 seconds, and taking part in a cross-country hike for 1.5 days.

A state prison in Berlin constructed between 1869 and 1879. From 1933 to 1945, more than 3,000 people were executed at the Plötzensee prison. Those executed at Plötzensee included communist resistance groups, members of the Kreisau circle and participants of the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Numerous foreign prisoners from occupied European countries were also killed at Plötzensee. The execution shed and its surrounding became a memorial site in 1952.

German and foreign political opponents of the Nazi regime were frequently arrested and sent to jails, labor and concentration camps. Their prisoner uniform had a red triangle, often with the initial for their country of origin (P for Poland, I for Italy).

The German designation for the territories of Czechoslovakia occupied by the Wehrmacht on March 16, 1939.