Wikipedia

Ich

Joined 11 February 2004
User:Ich in high school.

Ich was born in the U.S. during the Reagan administration; after an accidental five-and-a-half-year layover in New York, he now finds himself in Berlin. He chose the username "Ich" because it was available.

"Third Reich" vs. "Nazi Germany"

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Whenever I find the term "Third Reich" in an article, I usually change it to "Nazi Germany" or "during Nazi rule", which has less ideological baggage and is clearer to the unfamiliar reader.

The term "Drittes Reich" ("Third Empire") was coined in 1923 by German nationalist Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in a book of the same name, echoing ideas and language from much older Christian millennialism, messianism, and eschatology.[a] An admirer of Mussolini, he imagined a future "third" German empire with a strong leader, as a successor to Germany's "first" (Holy Roman Empire, 800-1806) and "second" empires (German Empire, 1871-1918). Moeller van den Bruck's writings were influential among conservatives, and the Nazis incorporated many of his themes into their ideology and propaganda, adopting the term "Drittes Reich" to cast their brutal dictatorship as a rebirth and continuation of a perceived glorious national history. Using "Third Reich" implicitly accepts this tendentious, decontextualized narrative. In light of the term's origins, it should not be used uncritically.[b]

Nonetheless, it wasn't long before opponents of Nazism were mockingly using the term "Fourth Reich" to imply the Nazi regime's days were numbered. After the Nazis had seized power, the term fell out of favor, due to its religious overtones and the associations with Moeller van den Bruck, who despite his ideological influence had been an opponent of Hitler. In July 1939, the Ministry of Propaganda ordered the press to stop using "Drittes Reich", suggesting instead "nationalsozialistisches Deutschland" or "Deutsches Reich". Under Nazi rule, Germany's official name was "Deutsches Reich" from 1933–1943; from 1943–1945, it was "Großdeutsches Reich".

After the war, former Nazis and Mitläufer generally preferred "Drittes Reich", as it came across as a neutral, anodyne-sounding name for the Nazis' murderous reign of terror. Beginning in the 1980s, the phrase "Drittes Reich" fell out of favor among German academics; by the 1990s, it had been supplanted in German newspapers and popular usage by "NS/Nazi-Zeit" or "NS-Diktatur" ("National Socialist/Nazi-Era" and "National Socialist Dictatorship" respectively). When the phrase is used in German today, it is often presented with a distancing "sogenannte »Dritte Reich«" ("so-called 'Third Reich'"), highlighting the need for a nuanced and critical awareness of the term's baggage.

I feel the reason many writers in English use "Third Reich" is because they are looking for more ornate language or want a (fancy) synonym to avoid constantly repeating the word "Nazi". I believe it is important to use language carefully, and while I can't change the way some books are named (like 1960's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or 1985's The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich), I am doing what I can to reduce Wikipedia's (mis)use of the term.

Lastly, if you consider the terms "Third Reich" and "Nazi Germany" effectively interchangeable, then my changes are at worst a quixotic but wholly uncontroversial waste of my own time.

  1. ^ Although it is large and complicated topic, the Nazis often publicly appropriated religious imagery, particularly in the early years before their grasp on power was secure. The term Tausendjähriges Reich ("Thousand-Year Empire") had previously been used to describe a future Second Coming of Jesus (cf. Revelation 20:4 "They ... reigned with Christ a thousand years.") and the Nazis adopted the term.
  2. ^ "First Reich" and "Second Reich" are similarly ahistorical. These terms were not used contemporarily and are very rarely used in scholarship outside the narrow context of Nazi ideology and historiography.

"Died" vs. "was murdered" in the Holocaust

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There are over 90,000 Stolpersteine in Germany alone, making it the world's largest decentralized memorial. A typical example:
Here Lived Josef Herz
Born 1894
Fled to Westerburg 1940
Deported to Majdanek 1942
Murdered 6 August 1942.
 
The Holocaust memorial at the intersection of Bahnhofstraße and Sigismundstraße in Konstanz, Germany.

In a similar vein, "died in the Holocaust" should be avoided in favor of "was murdered in the Holocaust". The verb "murder" is used preferentially by scholars and institutions such as Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the German government.

The Holocaust was systematic, premeditated, state-sponsored mass-murder, and its victims were not accidental deaths or casualties of war: they were murder victims. This encompasses not just fatal beatings, hangings, drownings, burnings, live burials, electric fences, shootings, firings squads, gas chambers, gas vans, poison injections, horrific medical experimentation, etc.: deaths in a ghetto, train car, or concentration camp from forced labor, deliberate squalid conditions, overcrowding, malnutrition, dehydration, cold, heat, exhaustion, suffocation, epidemic disease, or deprivation of medical care are still premeditated murders (i.e. foreseen and intentional). If someone deliberately locks a person in an unheated cellar without food or water for a week, the resulting death is not an accident: it is murder. In the Warsaw Ghetto, the official daily food ration was 180 calories, far below the level needed to sustain human life. (Polish people outside the ghetto received about 700 calories per day; Germans received 2,600.) Executions carried out by starvation are sometime referred to as "immurement"; the ghettos in German-occupied Poland have been described as instruments of "slow, passive murder". The Hunger Plan was the deliberate genocide of millions by starvation.

Furthermore, some Jews were driven to suicide to escape the torture, arrests, further persecution, or to end their needless, relentless suffering. A suicide committed by a person as a result of having been subjected to unspeakable psychological horrors is an indirect but still wholly deliberate murder.

The verb "die" is neutral and accurate for plenty of deaths, but when applied to the Holocaust, it obscures the Nazis' crimes. It is certainly appropriate to say "up to 12,000 people died during the 1900 Galveston hurricane"; the sentence "up to 900,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka extermination camp where they died" awkwardly elides the fact that these were premeditated murders. Using verbs like "died" or "perished" avoids assigning any blame or responsibility to the perpetrators.

From a legal standpoint, the governments of Allied-occupied, East, West, and reunited Germany all prosecuted and convicted perpetrators for the murders that took place during the Holocaust. Arguments that "murder is a legal term; the killings were lawful at the time" are a red herring: Germany's Federal Constitutional Court has ruled that Nazi Germany operated as an Unrechtsstaat or Verbrecherstaat, a criminal state whose legal system was perverted to pursue criminal means. The actions taken to legalize these murders were illegitimate and void ab initio, the same way that just following orders is not a defense for committing a war crime. When prosecuting perpetrators of Nazi crimes, post-war German courts have repeatedly applied the Radbruch formula, ruling that laws that deliberately pursued injustice were fundamentally incompatible with the tenets of a legal system, and thus were never valid laws, i.e. "an unjust law is no law at all."

In Germany, the federal government has taken full responsibility for the Holocaust and frequently refers to the events that took place during the Holocaust as "murder", such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. State and local governments also commonly use the term "murder" without qualification or controversy, as well as newspapers, academics, memorials, foundations, and companies that were involved as perpetrators. Simply put: murder is "the verb of choice in Germany's culture of public remembrance".

The Nazis' victims deserve better than to have words minced about their murders.

Articles

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Gzuckier saw fit to give me this for adding {{spoiler}} to Genesis.
 
For having really sweet hair. Dylan 03:16, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
 
Thanks for your help! Sausa11 17:28, 20 May 2020 (UTC)
 
Thank you for your tireless efforts across the project to bring needed clarity and accuracy to the ways we describe the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery. I can't get a real count on the number of edits, but it's definitely in excess of 1,500. I am deeply grateful. Firefangledfeathers 18:31, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

Some pages I created or substantially improved. Much of the work I've done has been translating pages from German, with a particular focus on German music and breweries.

Beer and breweries

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Other food and drink

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Berlin

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Other German-ish stuff

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Music

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I took this picture

Art, Culture, & Misc.

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Probably the coolest picture I've taken

People

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&c.

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CB This user is color blind.
DGAFThis user does not give a fuck.
  This user has been on Wikipedia for 20 years, 9 months and 10 days.
 
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 		This user likes to translate articles from German to English.
 This editor is a Most Pluperfect Labutnum and is entitled to display this Book of Knowledge with Coffee Cup Stain, Cigarette Burn, Chewed Broken Pencil, Sticky Note, and Bookmark.
 This user enjoys the music of
Frank Zappa
 This user has adopted the typo "Cincinatti" to nurture.
 This user has adopted the typo "Carribean" to nurture.
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