Sonderbehandlung
Sign in to saveAlso known as S.B.
thumb|Himmler (front right, beside prisoner) while visiting the Dachau Concentration Camp in 1936 '''' (, "special treatment") is any sort of preferential treatment. However, the word Sonderbehandlung was used as a euphemism for mass murder by Nazi functionaries and the SS, who commonly used the abbreviation S.B.'' in documentation. It first came to prominence during Aktion T4, where SS doctors killed mentally ill and disabled patients between 1939 and 1941, and was one of a number of nonspecific words the Nazis used to document mass murder and genocide. Another notable example was .
~11 min read
Encyclopedic overview
8 sectionsContents
- Background
- Usage
- Equipment
- Sensitivity
- Nazi perspectives
- See also
- References
- Bibliography
thumb|Himmler (front right, beside prisoner) while visiting the Dachau Concentration Camp in 1936 '''' (, "special treatment") is any sort of preferential treatment. However, the word Sonderbehandlung was used as a euphemism for mass murder by Nazi functionaries and the SS, who commonly used the abbreviation S.B.'' in documentation. It first came to prominence during Aktion T4, where SS doctors killed mentally ill and disabled patients between 1939 and 1941, and was one of a number of nonspecific words the Nazis used to document mass murder and genocide. Another notable example was .
This term was also used to imprecisely refer to the equipment used to perpetrate their crimes, such as gas chambers and Zyklon B. The true meaning of was widely known in the SS, and in April 1943, Heinrich Himmler was so concerned about the security of it that he had it redacted in a secret report.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Sonderbehandlung” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.