This freshly released book provides readers with an increased understanding of and sensitivity to the many powerful ways in which personal names are used by both perpetrators and victims during wartime. Whether to declare allegiance or seek refuge, names are routinely used to survive under life-threatening conditions. To illustrate this point, this book concentrates on one of the most terrifying and yet fascinating events of modern history: the Holocaust. More specifically, this book examines the different ways in which personal names were used by Nationalist Socialists and targeted victims of their genocidal ideology. Although there are many excellent scientific and popular works which have dealt with the Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, this work stands alone in its investigation of the importance of naming both for this horrific period and for other genocidal periods of human history.
The author, I. M. Nick, is a researcher in sociolinguistics, editor-in-chief of Names: The Journal of the American Name Society, and president of the Germanic Society for Forensic Linguistics. She is the Immediate Past President of the American Name Society.