Abstract

In Germany, during the Hitler period, the German language underwent a marked change with regard to usage, word
formation, and style. It came to reflect not only the antisemitism of National Socialist ideology but it also significantly altered the original meaning of certain words. For example, the Nazi government introduced new words or imposed new meanings on old words in order to achieve the objective of camouflaging many of its policies, including the genocide. The results of this tampering with the language became so characteristic of the Hitler period that the German of that time has come to be identified in everyday usage as well as in the literature as "Nazi German."

Many of its features that were associated with the genocide ceased to exist after the end of Nazi rule, others have survived into present usage. In order to establish how this vocabulary of genocide has been recorded in or omitted from German reference works, we have traced a few terms through dictionaries of pre-Nazi and post-Nazi vintage. The results give an idea of how a nation like Germany deals with its darkest chapter in history in its standard dictionaries.