Where possible, in the exhibition we use the names used by the depicted people themselves. We have reviewed non-German personal names and place names for spelling mistakes and incorrect or outdated variants (e.g. German “Josef” instead of Polish “Józef”) and—where this could be clearly resolved—corrected them. In some cases, however, it was not possible to avoid adopting the spellings found in the sources available to us, even if other spellings seemed more likely. This is the case, for example, in the transmission of foreign names in German official documents from the Nazi era.

For the names and terms from the Russian and Ukrainian languages written in the original Cyrillic script, we adopted conventional English spellings.

This exhibition refers to “Germans” in many places, including in the title of the exhibition. However, this is not always the actual citizenship or the self-attributed nationality of the persons concerned. In some cases, it is rather an attribution by the National Socialists. For example, Austrians were legally considered “Germans” after the annexation of Austria to the German Reich in 1938. In addition, many people from other territories that had been annexed or occupied by the German Reich from 1938 onwards were considered “Volksdeutsche” (ethnic Germans). They were considered “Germans” due to their German origin or because of cultural categories, even though they had Polish, Czechoslovakian, or French citizen­ship, for example. Jews—even those with German citizenship—were not considered “Germans” by the National Socialists.

Even in the case of other countries of origin, the nationality of the persons mentioned does not always correspond to their citizenship, or it is based on attributions. For example, many citizens of the Soviet Union would have preferred being described as Ukrainians, but in the language of the National Socialists, all Soviet citizens were generally labelled as “Russian”.

The exhibition frequently uses the terms mother, father, adoption, family, parents, and parenthood. For the most part, it clearly states whether the relationship between children and adults is biological or social, or both. We do not evaluate or hierarchise the form of the relationship between children and parents—biological or social. The relationship of an adopted or quasi-adopted child to its biological parents does not “naturally” constitute a more intensive bond than that to its social parents.

In many cases, adopted children feel the need to find out something about their biological parents. There are several examples of this in the exhibition. On the other hand, there are children for whom the relationship with their social parents is a fulfilling relationship and who have no interest in their biological parents or parent. Both must be respected.

Historical research on National Socialism is faced with the problem that the perspective of the persecuted often cannot be portrayed because they have left behind few or no sources. In the case of “forbidden contact”, sometimes sources about a relationship only exist because the persons were persecuted and this was “documented” by the Nazi authorities. The result­ing documents are perpetrator sources.

In addition, conveying the history of National Socialism also relies on the use of problematic terms and, in some cases, the language of the perpetrators in order to highlight the conditions to which people were subjected because of how they were categorised. This always harbours the danger of reproducing these categorisations. This is why, for example, the propaganda posters or documents produced by the National Socialists shown in this exhibition are embedded in explanatory captions. Terms coined by perpetrators are also placed in quotation marks in this exhibition to identify them as such. Many of these terms are explained in the glossary in this
booklet.

The exhibition seeks to avoid reproducing the idea that there are only two genders and to take all genders into account. In some cases, however, we have decided to speak specifically about “women” and “men”. This happens where we describe conditions to which people were subjected due to their assigned gender or to socially defined gender roles. Thus, when the exhibition refers to “men” and “women”, this does not preclude these people from also having included persons of other genders. Nazi ideology only recognised two genders, and people who did not fit into this conception were often persecuted.