Eagle's Nest- Hitler's isolated cabin on a mountaintop high above Berchtesgaden. A hairpin road carved into the Bavarian mountainside led to a long underground passageway drilled into the rock. This in turn gave access to an elevator that rose 370 feet to the cabin perched at the top. From the Eagle's Nest the Fuhrer had a superb view of the surrounding scenery. He preferred to be there alone, but on occasion he brought visitors with him and took pleasure in impressing them with the view. On October 18, 1938, he was accompanied by French Ambassador Andre Francois-Poncet to his retreat. The French envoy later expressed his astonishment at the experience. He wondered if this structure could have been the product of a normal mind.
Edelweiss- Code name for a directive issued by Hitler on July 23, 1942, concerning a prospective attack by Army Group A on the Baku oil fields in the Caucasus. The army group occupying the area was to await the arrival of the Italian Alpine Corps. Situated on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, Baku was the center of a district of large oil fields with refineries and engineering industries. The Fuhrer regarded the success of Edelweiss as a prime necessity for continuing the war. The major German attack in September, 1942 won Maikop, but it fell short of the oil fields at Grozny and never reached Baku.
Einsatzstab Rosenberg (Rosenberg Task Force)- An organization headed by Alfred Rosenberg and designated by Hitler to confiscate selections of the great art treasures in France and other occupied countries. Guided by Hermann Goering and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Rosenberg was ordered to transport to Germany "cultural goods which appear valuable to you and to safeguard them there." Rosenberg assumed that he had a free hand to sequester all "ownerless Jewish property." His official report to Hitler stated that between October 1940 and July 1944 he had appropriated the following art works: 21,903 art objects of all kinds, brought to Germany in twenty-nine shipments, including 137 freight cars. Among them there were 5,281 paintings, including works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Goya, Gainsborough, Fragonard, and other masters; 5,825 handmade objects, such as porcelains, bronzes, and coins; several hundred icons; and 2,477 pieces of furniture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The art works from France, including those from the Louvre, were valued at $1 billion. The better works were selected by Goering for his own collections. The Vichy government, citing the Hague Convention, protested in vain. After the war these works of art were returned to their original owners.
Eisernes Kreuz- (Iron Cross) A military decoration for heroism. The Iron Cross was originated by King Frederick William III of Prussia on March 10, 1813. Originally, there were three classes: Iron Cross (Second Class), Iron Cross (First Class), and Grand Cross. In its special form of a gold breast star it was awarded only twice, to General Gebhart Leberecht Prince Blucher von Wahlstatt, after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo (1815), and to General Paul von Hindenburg, the World War I hero (1918). By the original terms the Iron Cross was to be reinstituted at the outbreak of a major war: after 1813 this was done three times (1870, 1914, and 1939). On September 1, 1939, the beginning of World War II, Hitler announced the revival of the medal, but he changed its grading, design, and ribbon. He introduced a new grade termed the Ritterkreuz (Knight's Cross). In World War II, the following medals were awarded: Iron Cross, 6,973; Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves, 853; Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, 150; Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds, 27; Knight's Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds, awarded only to Col. Hans-Ulrich Rudel.
In setting conditions for an award of the Iron Cross, Hitler abolished the decoration for noncombat service. Women were declared eligible, but only one woman received the medal in World War II. Hitler personally decorated Hanna Reitsch with the Iron Cross (first class) in October 1942 for her services as a test pilot for military aircraft. Hitler himself had been awarded the Iron Cross (first class) on August 4, 1918, for valor in combat. It was the main decoration he wore together with the Party Golden Badge and the Wound Badge of World War I.
El Alamein- One of the decisive battles of World War II. On July 1, 1942, General Erwin Rommel, known as the Desert Fox, ordered his men of the Afrika Korps to stop at El Alamein, a stony, waterless desert spot about 60 miles west of Alexandria. Early the next month, Prime Minister Winston Churchill placed General Bernard Law Montgomery in charge of the British Eighth Army. Throughout the summer, reinforcements--jeeps, trucks, Sherman tanks, planes, and ammunition--were rushed to Montgomery from England and the United States. Montgomery waited to strike until he had superiority in armor and in the air. Reorganizing his army with extreme care, he used deception on a vast scale, convincing the Germans that he would strike in the south instead of in the north. He spoke coldly to his troops: "Kill Germans, even the padres--one per weekday and two on Sundays".
On October 23, 1942, Montgomery hurled his full strength against the Germans. First came a violent artillery attack. The whole horizon burst into tongues of flame. Then 41,000 troops, 9,000 vehicles of all kinds, and 1,000 tanks surged forward on the Afrika Korps. Australians, Englishmen, Scots, New Zealanders, and South Africans pushed forward. Rommel, at this time in Germany for medical attention, had drawn up defensive plans. At Hitler's urgent request he rushed back to North Africa by plane, only to find that the Battle of El Alamein was lost. When his counterattack failed, Rommel decided to withdraw on the night of November 2-3 1942.
El Alamein was one of the great turning points of the war, a tremendous victory for the Allies and a disheartening defeat for Hitler. "It may almost be said," commented Churchill, "before Alamein we never had a victory, after Alamein we never had a defeat."
Enabling Act (Gesetz zur Erhebung der Not von Volk und Reich)- The single law providing the constitutional foundation for Hitler's dictatorship. The Law to Remove the Distress of People and State, enacted on March 24, 1933, represented an alteration of the Weimar Constitution. The Reichstag passed the bill by a vote of 441 to 94. The text of the law follows:
The Reichstag has resolved the following law, which is, with the approval of the National Council, herewith promulgated, after it has been established that the requirements have been satisfied for legislation altering the Constitution.Article 1- National laws can be enacted by the National Cabinet as well as in accordance with the procedure established in the Constitution. This applies also to the laws referred to in article 85, paragraph 2, and in article 87 of the Constitution.
Article 2- The national laws enacted by the National Cabinet may deviate from the Constitution so far as they do not affect the position of the Reichstag and National Council. The powers of the President remain undisturbed.
Article 3- The national laws enacted by the National Cabinet are prepared by the Chancellor and published in the Reichsgesetzblatt. They come into effect, unless otherwise specified, upon the day following their publication. Articles 68 to 77 of the Constitution do not apply to the laws enacted by the National Cabinet.
Article 4- Treaties of the Reich with foreign states which concern matters of national legislation do not require the consent of the bodies participating in legislation. The National Cabinet is empowered to issue the necessary provisions for the execution of these treaties.
Article 5- This law becomes effective on the day of publication. It becomes invalid on April 1, 1937; it further becomes invalid when the present National Cabinet is replaced by another.
Reich President Von HindenburgReich Chancellor Adolf Hitler
Reich Minister of the Interior Frick
Reich Minister for Foreign Affairs Baron Von Neurath
Reich Minister of Finanace Count Schwerin Von Krosigk
Endlosung, Die (The Final Solution)- The cover name of Hitler's plan to destroy all the Jews in Europe. Although estimates vary, about 6 million Jews were annihilated during World War II by officials of the Nazi regime.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler called the Jews "destroyers of civilization" and urged a drastic solution of the long conflict between German Nordics and Jews. When he won political power in 1933, he immediately began an active program to purge the Third Reich of Jewish influence. As the process of Gleichschaltung, or coordination, proceeded, Jews were driven from public life and were reduced to the status of second-class citizens. The process moved from exclusion to persecution, then to expulsion, and ultimately to annihilation. Every Nazi aggression in Europe diminished the possibility of Jewish escape or resistance.
The year 1941 marked a turning point in the anti-Jewish campaign. The invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22 unleashed Hitler's sense of destructive nihilism. Enmeshed in total war, he saw Jews in the way of victory. Several million Jews were incarcerated in Polish ghettos. Emigration was costly. A project initiated in 1940 to expel the Jews to Africa had failed. Hitler decided on a drastic move. At this time the idea of a "final solution," or what he called a "territorial solution," began to form in his mind. The plan called for the complete elimination of European Jewry. Hitler's idee fixe would be implemented at long last.
At the Wannsee Conference, held on January 20, 1942, the course of action was completed: "In the course of the execution of the Final Solution, Europe will be combed from west to east". Responsibility for the project was placed in the hands of Heinrich Himmler and his assistants in the Gestapo. Under their guidance the Nazi apparatus went into action. The extermination camps of Poland began to operate at full blast. Jews inside Germany, already under legal and economic restrictions, were rounded up and sent to labor camps regarded as way stations to extermination camps. The action was disguised as "resettlement in the East," and deception was used to lead doomed Jews to the gas chambers. Most were killed, although some managed to save their lives despite incredibly bad conditions in Nazi-founded ghettos.
The campaign spread from the ghettos of Poland to virtually every nation in Nazi-controlled Europe. Each country reacted in its own way, depending upon its special history, traditions, and attitude toward Jews and upon the strength of the Nazi pressure. Most of the Jewish citizens of Poland, the Netherlands, Greece, and Czechoslovakia were killed in the gas chambers. About half of the Jews in Romania and Hungary perished. Most Jews managed to survive in Denmark and Bulgaria, where the local population offered them protection and escape possibilities.
The campaign of destruction was unprecendented. There had been violence against Jews throughout history, but nothing to compare with the Endlosung in dimensions and total configuration. The uniqueness of the phenomenon required the coinage of a new word, genocide, to describe it.
Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art)- Forms of modern art to which Hitler objected. A frustrated artist himself, the Fuhrer leaned toward realism and rejected all modern art from expressionism to cubism as Verfallskunst, or entartete Kunst (degenerate art). In 1936 he authorized Professor Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts and a prominent painter, to head a purge tribunal to confiscate all specimens of decadent art from more than 100 museums in Germany. The jury collected 12,890 works of art, of whihc 700 were sold in Lucerne to obtain foreign currency for armaments. Expropriated were painting by 112 artists, including 1,000 by Emil Nolde, 500 by Max Beckmann, 4000 by Oskar Kokoschka, and 200 by George Grosz. There were also paintings by such non-German artists as Picasso, Gauguin, Matisse, Cezanne, Dufy, Chirico, and Van Gogh.
On March 31, 1937, the confiscated paintings were shown at the Exhibit of Degenerate Art in Munich. This was the most popular display ever staged in the Third Reich. More than 2 million visitors stared at the unframed paintings under such captions as: "Thus did sick minds view Nature!" and "German Peasants in the Yiddish Manner". Later, in March 1939, 4,829 of these paintings were burned at fire department headquarters in Berlin.
Euthanasia Program- Eugenic measures designed to improve the quality of the German "race". On July 14, 1933, the Law for the Protection of Heriditary Health was promulgated for this purpose. This was the beginnning of a development that culminated in enforced "mercy" deaths for the incurably insane and in plans for exterminating peoples said to be biologically inferior, such as Jews, Poles, Russians, and Gypsies. The program comprised three major classifications: 1) euthanasia for incurables, 2) direct extermination by Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) 3) experiments in mass sterilization.
Hitler supported the program as a stimulus to "national heath" and the "racial integrity of the German people." In 1935 he stated that if war came, he would implement the idea of euthanasia, "because I am of the opinion that such a program could be put into effect more smoothly and readily in time of war, that in the general upheaval of war the open resistance to be anticipated on the part of the Church would not play the part that might be expected." To ensure secrecy, only tried and trusted Nazis and SS leaders were enlisted to implement the program. In the course of World War II the Nazi leadership began to show less and less restraint in the destruction of Jews and captured Eastern peoples. Sterilization was induced by medication, x-ray, and intrauterine irritation. At the same time there were experiements involving high altitude, low temperature, and the drinking of seawater as well as experiments with typhus, infectious jaundice, bone grafting, and mustard gas.
On December 9, 1946, twenty-three SS physicians and scientists were brought to trial at Nuremberg before American Military Tribunal No. 1 for war crimes. Twenty of the defendents were physicians who stood at the top of the medical hierarchy of the Third Reich, while three occupied administrative posts.
Extermination Camps (Death Camps)- Concentration camps that specialized in the execution of the unwanted persons in the Third Reich. Originally, concentration camps were designed as prisons for "preventative custody." After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, some of the camps were transformed into extermination centers to implement the policy of genocide. The more important extermination camps were located in occupied Poland, such as those at Auschwitz, Maidanek, and Treblinka.