Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

THERESIENSTADT
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Theresienstadt (Czech, Terezin). Between 1941 and 1945, under the Nazi regime in
occupied Czechoslovakia, Theresienstadt was a combination of ghetto and concentration
camp for Jews. Located in northern Bohemia about thirty-five miles from Prague, it had
previously been a military fortress established by Austrian empress Maria Theresa
(1717–1780; reigned 1740–1780), from whom it derived its name. In November 1941
the site was reestablished as a ghetto and received the transfer of several thousand Jewish
prisoners who had been held at a separate Gestapo compound a short distance away.
Theresienstadt had a reputation for being a privileged or humane concentration camp,
and Jews transported there from Germany or Prague—mostly Jewish war veterans, elderly
men and women, and Jews married to Aryans—were treated very differently from those
sent to other camps. Theresienstadt became known as a model camp, in the sense of connoting
the ideal. In 1942, the character of Theresienstadt changed when the head of the
Reich Security Main Office, Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942), ordered that henceforth
the camp was to be utilized as a transit camp for Jews being sent to the extermination
camps further east. Over one hundred forty thousand prisoners from across Europe were
ultimately to pass through Theresienstadt, and of these ninety thousand were transferred
to their death. Tens of thousands of others died at Theresienstadt itself. The children were
hit especially hard; of approximately fifteen thousand children who passed through the
camp, it is estimated that only about one hundred survived until the end of the war.
Despite all this death, the camp’s reputation as a humane institution remained unblemished
to the outside world. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) sent
delegates to Theresienstadt a number of times to investigate conditions, the most wellknown
being in June 1944. The delegates reported favorably on what they had seen: clean
streets, well-stocked provisions in shop-front establishments, and smartly dressed inmates
who appeared to be gainfully employed. What they had witnessed, though, was all a mask
to the real situation. The Nazis had forced the prisoners to build, paint, and clean portions
of the camp so that the camp would appear pristine; thus, what the ICRC representatives
witnessed was nothing more than a façade (in certain cases, literally). By the time
the report was issued, however, the Jews on whom it was based had already been sent to
their deaths in Auschwitz. Theresienstadt was one of the last Nazi camps to be liberated.
On May 3, 1945, the remaining Nazi guards handed administration of the camp over to
the ICRC; the camp was liberated militarily by Soviet forces five days later, on May 8,
over a week after the suicide of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler (1889–1945).
Third Reich (German, Das Dritte Reich). Term given to the state established by Adolf
Hitler (1889–1945) and the German Nazi Party between 1933 and 1945. In the German
language, the term Reich translates to the English word “empire”; hence, the Third Reich
was Germany’s Third Empire, following the Holy Roman Empire, which was shattered by
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), and the Second Empire (1871–1918), which had been
fashioned by Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) and lost through the reckless rule of Kaiser
(Emperor) Wilhelm II (1859–1941; reigned 1888–1918). Hitler’s third empire was
intended to survive for a thousand years, the product of a rigorous physical expansionist policy,
a strong militarized society, and an ethnically pure state. It was in pursuit of this final
objective that the Third Reich became a regime that defined itself as genocidal in its aims
as well as in its execution of those aims. The Nazi pursuit of racial perfection through the
mass extermination of every Jew on which it could lay its hands was seemingly the clearest
statement that Nazism made about itself and the state it had established.