title: Low Earth orbit

text: A wide variety of sources define LEO in terms of altitude. The altitude of an object in an elliptic orbit can vary significantly along the orbit. Even for circular orbits, the altitude above ground can vary by as much as (especially for polar orbits) due to the oblateness of Earth's spheroid figure and local topography. While definitions based on altitude are inherently ambiguous, most of them fall within the range specified by an orbit period of 128 minutes because, according to Kepler's third law, this corresponds to a semi-major axis of . For circular orbits, this in turn corresponds to an altitude of above the mean radius of Earth, which is consistent with some of the upper altitude limits in some LEO definitions.


title: Low Earth orbit

text: The LEO region is defined by some sources as a region in space that LEO orbits occupy. Some highly elliptical orbits may pass through the LEO region near their lowest altitude (or perigee) but are not in an LEO orbit because their highest altitude (or apogee) exceeds . Sub-orbital objects can also reach the LEO region but are not in an LEO orbit because they re-enter the atmosphere. The distinction between LEO orbits and the LEO region is especially important for analysis of possible collisions between objects which may not themselves be in LEO but could collide with satellites or debris in LEO orbits.


title: Low Earth orbit

text: The mean orbital velocity needed to maintain a stable low Earth orbit is about , which translates to . However, this depends on the exact altitude of the orbit. Calculated for a circular orbit of the orbital velocity is , but for a higher orbit the velocity is reduced to . The launch vehicle's delta-v needed to achieve low Earth orbit starts around .


title: Low Earth orbit

text: The pull of gravity in LEO is only slightly less than on the Earth's surface. This is because the distance to LEO from the Earth's surface is much less than the Earth's radius. However, an object in orbit is in a permanent free fall around Earth, because in orbit both, the gravitational force and the centrifugal force balance out each other. As a result, spacecrafts in orbit continue to stay in orbit, and people inside or outside such crafts continuously experience weightlessness.


title: Low Earth orbit

text: Objects in LEO encounter atmospheric drag from gases in the thermosphere (approximately 80–600 km above the surface) or exosphere (approximately and higher), depending on orbit height. Orbits of satellites that reach altitudes below decay fast due to atmospheric drag. Objects in LEO orbit Earth between the denser part of the atmosphere and below the inner Van Allen radiation belt.


title: Low Earth orbit

text: Equatorial low Earth orbits (ELEO) are a subset of LEO. These orbits, with low inclination to the Equator, allow rapid revisit times of low-latitude places on Earth and have the lowest delta-v requirement (i.e., fuel spent) of any orbit, provided they have the direct (not retrograde) orientation with respect to the Earth's rotation. Orbits with a very high inclination angle to the equator are usually called polar orbits or Sun-synchronous orbits.


title: Low Earth orbit

text: Higher orbits include medium Earth orbit (MEO), sometimes called intermediate circular orbit (ICO), and further above, geostationary orbit (GEO). Orbits higher than low orbit can lead to early failure of electronic components due to intense radiation and charge accumulation.


title: Low Earth orbit

text: In 2017, "very low Earth orbits" (VLEO) began to be seen in regulatory filings. These orbits, below about , require the use of novel technologies for orbit raising because they operate in orbits that would ordinarily decay too soon to be economically useful.


title: Low Earth orbit

text: A low Earth orbit requires the lowest amount of energy for satellite placement. It provides high bandwidth and low communication latency. Satellites and space stations in LEO are more accessible for crew and servicing.


title: Low Earth orbit

text: Since it requires less energy to place a satellite into a LEO, and a satellite there needs less powerful amplifiers for successful transmission, LEO is used for many communication applications, such as the Iridium phone system. Some communication satellites use much higher geostationary orbits and move at the same angular velocity as the Earth as to appear stationary above one location on the planet.


title: Low Earth orbit

text: Unlike geosynchronous satellite, satellites in LEO have a small field of view and so can observe and communicate with only a fraction of the Earth at a time. That means that a network (or "constellation") of satellites is required to provide continuous coverage. Satellites in lower regions of LEO also suffer from fast orbital decay and require either periodic re-boosting to maintain a stable orbit or launching replacement satellites when old ones re-enter.


title: Low Earth orbit

text: The LEO environment is becoming congested with space debris because of the frequency of object launches. This has caused growing concern in recent years, since collisions at orbital velocities can be dangerous or deadly. Collisions can produce additional space debris, creating a domino effect known as Kessler syndrome. The Orbital Debris Program, part of NASA, tracks over 25,000 objects larger than 10 cm in LEO, the estimated number between 1 and 10 cm in diameter is 500,000. The amount of particles bigger than 1 mm exceeds 100 million. The particles travel at speeds up to , so even a small particle impact can severely damage a spacecraft.


title: Bay leaf

text: The bay leaf is an aromatic leaf commonly used in cooking. It can be used whole, either dried or fresh, in which case it is removed from the dish before consumption, or less commonly used in ground form. It may come from several species of tree, the bay laurel and the California bay tree being the most common. The flavor that a bay leaf imparts to a dish has not been universally agreed upon, but most agree it is a subtle addition.


title: Bay leaf

text: The leaves contain about 1.3% essential oils (ol. lauri folii), consisting of 45% eucalyptol, 12% other terpenes, 8-12% terpinyl acetate, 3–4% sesquiterpenes, 3% methyleugenol, and other α- and β-pinenes, phellandrene, linalool, geraniol, terpineol, and also contain lauric acid.


title: Bay leaf

text: If eaten whole, bay leaves are pungent and have a sharp, bitter taste. As with many spices and flavourings, the fragrance of the bay leaf is more noticeable than its taste. When the leaf is dried, the aroma is herbal, slightly floral, and somewhat similar to oregano and thyme. Myrcene, a component of many essential oils used in perfumery, can be extracted from the bay leaf. They also contain eugenol.


title: Bay leaf

text: In Indian cuisine, bay laurel leaves are sometimes used in place of Indian bay leaf, although they have a different flavour. They are most often used in rice dishes like biryani and as an ingredient in garam masala. Bay (laurel) leaves are called (, in Hindi) and Tejpātā (তেজপাতা) in Bengali and তেজ পাত in Assamese.


title: Bay leaf

text: In the Philippines, dried bay laurel leaves are used in several Filipino dishes, such as menudo, beef pares, and adobo.


title: Bay leaf

text: Bay leaves were used for flavouring by the ancient Greeks. They are a fixture in the cooking of many European cuisines (particularly those of the Mediterranean), as well as in the Americas. They are used in soups, stews, brines, meat, seafood, vegetable dishes, and sauces. The leaves also flavour many classic French and Italian dishes. The leaves are most often used whole (sometimes in a ) and removed before serving (they can be abrasive in the digestive tract). Thai and Laotian cuisine employs bay leaf (, ) in a few Arab-influenced dishes, notably massaman curry.


title: Bay leaf

text: Bay leaves can also be crushed or ground before cooking. Crushed bay leaves impart more fragrance than whole leaves, but are more difficult to remove and thus they are often used in a muslin bag or tea infuser. Ground bay laurel may be substituted for whole leaves and does not need to be removed, but it is much stronger.


title: Bay leaf

text: Bay leaves are also used in the making of jerk chicken in the Caribbean Islands. The bay leaves are soaked and placed on the cool side of the grill. Pimento sticks are placed on top of the leaves, and the chicken is placed on top and smoked. The leaves are also added whole to soups, stews, and other Caribbean dishes.


title: Bay leaf

text: Bay leaves can also be used scattered in a pantry to repel meal moths, flies, and cockroaches. Mediouni-Ben Jemaa and Tersim 2011 find the essential oil to be usable as an insect repellent.


title: Bay leaf

text: Bay leaves have been used in entomology as the active ingredient in killing jars. The crushed, fresh, young leaves are put into the jar under a layer of paper. The vapors they release kill insects slowly but effectively and keep the specimens relaxed and easy to mount. The leaves discourage the growth of molds. They are not effective for killing large beetles and similar specimens, but insects that have been killed in a cyanide killing jar can be transferred to a laurel jar to await mounting. There is confusion in the literature about whether "Laurus nobilis" is a source of cyanide to any practical extent, but there is no evidence that cyanide is relevant to its value in killing jars. It certainly is rich in various essential oil components that could incapacitate insects in high concentrations; such compounds include 1,8-cineole, alpha-terpinyl acetate, and methyl eugenol. It also is unclear to what extent the alleged effect of cyanide released by the crushed leaves has been mis-attributed to "Laurus nobilis" in confusion with the unrelated "Prunus laurocerasus", the so-called cherry laurel, which certainly does contain dangerous concentrations of cyanogenic glycocides together with the enzymes to generate the hydrogen cyanide from the glycocides if the leaf is physically damaged.


title: Bay leaf

text: Bay leaves are used in Eastern Orthodoxy liturgy. To mark Jesus' destruction of Hades and freeing of the dead, parishioners throw bay leaves and flowers into the air, letting them flutter to the ground.


title: Bay leaf

text: Some members of the laurel family, as well as the unrelated but visually similar mountain laurel and cherry laurel, have leaves that are poisonous to humans and livestock. While these plants are not sold anywhere for culinary use, their visual similarity to bay leaves has led to the oft-repeated belief that bay leaves should be removed from food after cooking because they are poisonous. This is not true; bay leaves may be eaten without toxic effect. However, they remain unpleasantly stiff even after thorough cooking, and if swallowed whole or in large pieces they may pose a risk of harming the digestive tract or causing choking. Thus, most recipes that use bay leaves will recommend their removal after the cooking process has finished.


title: Bay leaf

text: The Canadian government requires that the bay leaves contain no more than 4.5% total ash material, with a maximum of 0.5% of which is insoluble in hydrochloric acid. To be considered dried, they have to contain 7% moisture or less. The oil content cannot be less than 1 milliliter per 100 grams of the spice.


title: Drought

text: A drought is defined as drier than normal conditions. This means that a drought is "a moisture deficit relative to the average water availability at a given location and season". A drought can last for days, months or years. Drought often exerts substantial impacts on the ecosystems and agriculture of affected regions, and causes harm to the local economy. Annual dry seasons in the tropics significantly increase the chances of a drought developing and subsequent wildfires. Periods of heat can significantly worsen drought conditions by hastening evaporation of water vapour.


title: Drought

text: Drought is a recurring feature of the climate in most parts of the world, becoming more extreme and less predictable due to climate change, which dendrochronological studies date back to 1900. There are three kinds of drought effects, environmental, economic and social. Environmental effects include the drying of wetlands, more and larger wildfires, loss of biodiversity. Economic consequences include disruption of water supplies for municipal economies; lower agricultural, forest, game, and fishing outputs; higher food-production costs; and problems with water supply for the energy sector. Social and health costs include the negative effect on the health of people directly exposed to this phenomenon (excessive heat waves), high food costs, stress caused by failed harvests, water scarcity, etc. Prolonged droughts have caused mass migrations and humanitarian crisis.


title: Drought

text: Many plant species, such as those in the family Cactaceae (or cacti), have drought tolerance adaptations like reduced leaf area and waxy cuticles to enhance their ability to tolerate drought. Some others survive dry periods as buried seeds. Semi-permanent drought produces arid biomes such as deserts and grasslands. Most arid ecosystems have inherently low productivity.


title: Drought

text: The most prolonged drought ever in the world in recorded history continues in the Atacama Desert in Chile (400 years). Throughout history, humans have usually viewed droughts as "disasters" due to the impact on food availability and the rest of society. Humans have often tried to explain droughts as either a natural disaster, caused by humans, or the result of supernatural forces.


title: Drought

text: The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report defines a drought simply as "drier than normal conditions". This means that a drought is "a moisture deficit relative to the average water availability at a given location and season".


title: Drought

text: According to National Integrated Drought Information System, a multi-agency partnership, drought is generally defined as “a deficiency of precipitation over an extended period of time (usually a season or more), resulting in a water shortage”. The National Weather Service office of the NOAA defines drought as "a deficiency of moisture that results in adverse impacts on people, animals, or vegetation over a sizeable area".


title: Drought

text: Drought is a complex phenomenon − relating to the absence of water − which is difficult to monitor and define. By the early 1980's, over 150 definitions of "drought" had already been published. The range of definitions reflects differences in regions, needs, and disciplinary approaches.


title: Drought

text: There are three major categories of drought based on where in the water cycle the moisture deficit occurs: meteorological drought, hydrological drought, and agricultural or ecological drought. A meteorological drought occurs due to lack of precipitation. A hydrological drought is related to low runoff, streamflow, and reservoir storage. An agricultural or ecological drought is causing plant stress from a combination of evaporation and low soil moisture. Some organizations add another category: socioeconomic drought occurs when the demand for an economic good exceeds supply as a result of a weather-related shortfall in water supply. The socioeconomic drought is a similar concept to water scarcity.


title: Drought

text: Mechanisms of producing precipitation include convective, stratiform, and orographic rainfall. Convective processes involve strong vertical motions that can cause the overturning of the atmosphere in that location within an hour and cause heavy precipitation, while stratiform processes involve weaker upward motions and less intense precipitation over a longer duration. Precipitation can be divided into three categories, based on whether it falls as liquid water, liquid water that freezes on contact with the surface, or ice. Droughts occur mainly in areas where normal levels of rainfall are, in themselves, low. If these factors do not support precipitation volumes sufficiently to reach the surface over a sufficient time, the result is a drought. Drought can be triggered by a high level of reflected sunlight and above average prevalence of high pressure systems, winds carrying continental, rather than oceanic air masses, and ridges of high pressure areas aloft can prevent or restrict the developing of thunderstorm activity or rainfall over one certain region. Once a region is within drought, feedback mechanisms such as local arid air, hot conditions which can promote warm core ridging, and minimal evapotranspiration can worsen drought conditions.


title: Drought

text: Within the tropics, distinct, wet and dry seasons emerge due to the movement of the Intertropical Convergence Zone or Monsoon trough. The dry season greatly increases drought occurrence, and is characterized by its low humidity, with watering holes and rivers drying up. Because of the lack of these watering holes, many grazing animals are forced to migrate due to the lack of water in search of more fertile lands. Examples of such animals are zebras, elephants, and wildebeest. Because of the lack of water in the plants, bushfires are common. Since water vapor becomes more energetic with increasing temperature, more water vapor is required to increase relative humidity values to 100% at higher temperatures (or to get the temperature to fall to the dew point). Periods of warmth quicken the pace of fruit and vegetable production, increase evaporation and transpiration from plants, and worsen drought conditions.


title: Drought

text: The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon can sometimes play a significant role in drought. ENSO comprises two patterns of temperature anomalies in the central Pacific Ocean, known as La Niña and El Niño. La Niña events are generally associated with drier and hotter conditions and further exacerbation of drought in California and the Southwestern United States, and to some extent the U.S. Southeast. Meteorological scientists have observed that La Niñas have become more frequent over time.


title: Drought

text: Conversely, during El Niño events, drier and hotter weather occurs in parts of the Amazon River Basin, Colombia, and Central America. Winters during the El Niño are warmer and drier than average conditions in the Northwest, northern Midwest, and northern Mideast United States, so those regions experience reduced snowfalls. Conditions are also drier than normal from December to February in south-central Africa, mainly in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Botswana. Direct effects of El Niño resulting in drier conditions occur in parts of Southeast Asia and Northern Australia, increasing bush fires, worsening haze, and decreasing air quality dramatically. Drier-than-normal conditions are also in general observed in Queensland, inland Victoria, inland New South Wales, and eastern Tasmania from June to August. As warm water spreads from the west Pacific and the Indian Ocean to the east Pacific, it causes extensive drought in the western Pacific. Singapore experienced the driest February in 2014 since records began in 1869, with only 6.3 mm of rain falling in the month and temperatures hitting as high as 35 °C on 26 February. The years 1968 and 2005 had the next driest Februaries, when 8.4 mm of rain fell.


title: Drought

text: Global climate change is expected to trigger droughts with a substantial impact on agriculture throughout the world, and especially in developing nations. Along with drought in some areas, flooding and erosion could increase in others. Some proposed climate change mitigation actions that focus on more active techniques, solar radiation management through the use of a space sunshade for one, may also carry with them increased chances of drought.


title: Drought

text: There is a rise of compound warm-season droughts in Europe that are concurrent with an increase in potential evapotranspiration.


title: Drought

text: Human activity can directly trigger exacerbating factors such as over farming, excessive irrigation, deforestation, and erosion adversely impact the ability of the land to capture and hold water. In arid climates, the main source of erosion is wind. Erosion can be the result of material movement by the wind. The wind can cause small particles to be lifted and therefore moved to another region (deflation). Suspended particles within the wind may impact on solid objects causing erosion by abrasion (ecological succession). Wind erosion generally occurs in areas with little or no vegetation, often in areas where there is insufficient rainfall to support vegetation.


title: Drought

text: Loess is a homogeneous, typically nonstratified, porous, friable, slightly coherent, often calcareous, fine-grained, silty, pale yellow or buff, windblown (Aeolian) sediment. It generally occurs as a widespread blanket deposit that covers areas of hundreds of square kilometers and tens of meters thick. Loess often stands in either steep or vertical faces. Loess tends to develop into highly rich soils. Under appropriate climatic conditions, areas with loess are among the most agriculturally productive in the world. Loess deposits are geologically unstable by nature, and will erode very readily. Therefore, windbreaks (such as big trees and bushes) are often planted by farmers to reduce the wind erosion of loess. Wind erosion is much more severe in arid areas and during times of drought. For example, in the Great Plains, it is estimated that soil loss due to wind erosion can be as much as 6100 times greater in drought years than in wet years.


title: Drought

text: One can divide the effects of droughts and water shortages into three groups: environmental, economic and social (including health).


title: Drought

text: Effects vary according to vulnerability. For example, subsistence farmers are more likely to migrate during drought because they do not have alternative food-sources. Areas with populations that depend on water sources as a major food-source are more vulnerable to famine.


title: Drought

text: Water stress affects plant development and quality in a variety of ways: firstly drought can cause poor germination and impaired seedling development. At the same time plant growth relies on cellular division, cell enlargement, and differentiation. Drought stress impairs mitosis and cell elongation via loss of turgor pressure which results in poor growth. Development of leaves is also dependent upon turgor pressure, concentration of nutrients, and carbon assimilates all of which are reduced by drought conditions, thus drought stress lead to a decrease in leaf size and number. Plant height, biomass, leaf size and stem girth has been shown to decrease in maize under water limiting conditions. Crop yield is also negatively effected by drought stress, the reduction in crop yield results from a decrease in photosynthetic rate, changes in leaf development, and altered allocation of resources all due to drought stress. Crop plants exposed to drought stress suffer from reductions in leaf water potential and transpiration rate. Water-use efficiency increases in crops such as wheat while decreasing in others, such as potatoes.


title: Drought

text: Plants need water for the uptake of nutrients from the soil, and for the transport of nutrients throughout the plant: drought conditions limit these functions leading to stunted growth. Drought stress also causes a decrease in photosynthetic activity in plants due to the reduction of photosynthetic tissues, stomatal closure, and reduced performance of photosynthetic machinery. This reduction in photosynthetic activity contributes to the reduction in plant growth and yields. Another factor influencing reduced plant growth and yields include the allocation of resources; following drought stress plants will allocate more resources to roots to aid in water uptake increasing root growth and reducing the growth of other plant parts while decreasing yields.


title: Drought

text: Agriculturally, people can effectively mitigate much of the impact of drought through irrigation and crop rotation. Failure to develop adequate drought mitigation strategies carries a grave human cost in the modern era, exacerbated by ever-increasing population densities. President Roosevelt on April 27, 1935, signed documents creating the Soil Conservation Service (SCS)—now the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Models of the law were sent to each state where they were enacted. These were the first enduring practical programs to curtail future susceptibility to drought, creating agencies that first began to stress soil conservation measures to protect farm lands today. It was not until the 1950s that there was an importance placed on water conservation was put into the existing laws (NRCS 2014).


title: Drought

text: The Darfur conflict in Sudan, also affecting Chad, was fueled by decades of drought; combination of drought, desertification and overpopulation are among the causes of the Darfur conflict, because the Arab Baggara nomads searching for water have to take their livestock further south, to land mainly occupied by non-Arab farming people.


title: Drought

text: Approximately 2.4 billion people live in the drainage basin of the Himalayan rivers. India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar could experience floods followed by droughts in coming decades. Drought in India affecting the Ganges is of particular concern, as it provides drinking water and agricultural irrigation for more than 500 million people. The west coast of North America, which gets much of its water from glaciers in mountain ranges such as the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada, also would be affected.


title: Drought

text: In 2005, parts of the Amazon basin experienced the worst drought in 100 years. A 23 July 2006 article reported Woods Hole Research Center results showing that the forest in its present form could survive only three years of drought. Scientists at the Brazilian National Institute of Amazonian Research argue in the article that this drought response, coupled with the effects of deforestation on regional climate, are pushing the rainforest towards a "tipping point" where it would irreversibly start to die. It concludes that the rainforest is on the brink of being turned into savanna or desert, with catastrophic consequences for the world's climate. According to the WWF, the combination of climate change and deforestation increases the drying effect of dead trees that fuels forest fires.


title: Drought

text: By far the largest part of Australia is desert or semi-arid lands commonly known as the outback. A 2005 study by Australian and American researchers investigated the desertification of the interior, and suggested that one explanation was related to human settlers who arrived about 50,000 years ago. Regular burning by these settlers could have prevented monsoons from reaching interior Australia. In June 2008 it became known that an expert panel had warned of long term, maybe irreversible, severe ecological damage for the whole Murray-Darling basin if it did not receive sufficient water by October 2008. Australia could experience more severe droughts and they could become more frequent in the future, a government-commissioned report said on July 6, 2008. Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery, predicted that unless it made drastic changes, Perth in Western Australia could become the world's first ghost metropolis, an abandoned city with no more water to sustain its population. The long Australian Millennial drought broke in 2010.


title: Drought

text: Recurring droughts leading to desertification in East Africa have created grave ecological catastrophes, prompting food shortages in 1984–85, 2006 and 2011. During the 2011 drought, an estimated 50,000 to 150,000 people were reported to have died, though these figures and the extent of the crisis are disputed. In February 2012, the UN announced that the crisis was over due to a scaling up of relief efforts and a bumper harvest. Aid agencies subsequently shifted their emphasis to recovery efforts, including digging irrigation canals and distributing plant seeds. The 2020-2022 Horn of Africa drought has surpassed the horrific drought in 2010-2011 in both duration and severity.


title: Drought

text: In 2012, a severe drought struck the western Sahel. The Methodist Relief & Development Fund (MRDF) reported that more than 10 million people in the region were at risk of famine due to a month-long heat wave that was hovering over Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Burkina Faso. A fund of about £20,000 was distributed to the drought-hit countries.


title: Drought

text: Throughout history, humans have usually viewed droughts as "disasters" due to the impact on food availability and the rest of society. Humans have often tried to explain droughts as either a natural disaster, caused by humans, or the result of supernatural forces. It is among the earliest documented climatic events, present in the Epic of Gilgamesh and tied to the Biblical story of Joseph's arrival in and the later Exodus from ancient Egypt. Hunter-gatherer migrations in 9,500 BC Chile have been linked to the phenomenon, as has the exodus of early humans out of Africa and into the rest of the world around 135,000 years ago. Rituals exist to prevent or avert drought, rainmaking could go from dances to scapegoating to human sacrifices. Nowadays, those ancient practices are for the most part relegated to folklore and replaced by more rational water management.


title: Denazification

text: Denazification () was an Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of the Nazi ideology following the Second World War. It was carried out by removing those who had been Nazi Party or SS members from positions of power and influence, by disbanding or rendering impotent the organizations associated with Nazism, and by trying prominent Nazis for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials of 1946. The program of denazification was launched after the end of the war and was solidified by the Potsdam Agreement in August 1945. The term "denazification" was first coined as a legal term in 1943 by the U.S. Pentagon, intended to be applied in a narrow sense with reference to the post-war German legal system. However, it later took on a broader meaning.


title: Denazification

text: In late 1945 and early 1946, the emergence of the Cold War and the economic importance of Germany caused the United States in particular to lose interest in the program, somewhat mirroring the Reverse Course in American-occupied Japan. The British handed over denazification panels to the Germans in January 1946, while the Americans did likewise in March 1946. The French ran the mildest denazification effort. Denazification was carried out in an increasingly lenient and lukewarm way until being officially abolished in 1951. Additionally, the program was hugely unpopular in West Germany, where many Nazis maintained positions of power. Denazification was opposed by the new West German government of Konrad Adenauer, who declared that ending the process was necessary for West German rearmament. On the other hand, denazification in East Germany was considered a critical element of the transformation into a socialist society and was far stricter in opposing Nazism than its counterpart. However, not all former Nazis faced harsh judgment; doing special tasks for the government protected a few from prosecution.


title: Denazification

text: About 8 million Germans, or 10% of the population, had been members of the Nazi Party. Nazi-related organizations also had huge memberships, such as the German Labor Front (25 million), the National Socialist People's Welfare organization (17 million), the League of German Women, and others. It was through the Party and these organizations that the Nazi state was run, involving as many as 45 million Germans in total. In addition, Nazism found significant support among industrialists, who produced weapons or used slave labor, and large landowners, especially the Junkers in Prussia. Denazification after the surrender of Germany was thus an enormous undertaking, fraught with many difficulties.


title: Denazification

text: The first difficulty was the enormous number of Germans who might have to be first investigated, then penalized if found to have supported the Nazi state to an unacceptable degree. In the early months of denazification there was a great desire to be utterly thorough, to investigate every suspect and hold every supporter of Nazism accountable; however, it was decided that the numbers simply made this goal impractical. The Morgenthau Plan had recommended that the Allies create a post-war Germany with all its industrial capacity destroyed, reduced to a level of subsistence farming; however, that plan was soon abandoned as unrealistic and, because of its excessive punitive measures, liable to give rise to German anger and aggressiveness. As time went on, another consideration that moderated the denazification effort in the West was the concern to keep enough good will of the German population to prevent the growth of communism.


title: Denazification

text: The denazification process was often completely disregarded by both the Soviets and the Western powers for German rocket scientists and other technical experts, who were taken out of Germany to work on projects in the victors' own countries or simply seized in order to prevent the other side from taking them. The US took 785 scientists and engineers from Germany to the United States, some of whom formed the backbone of the US space program (see Operation Paperclip).


title: Denazification

text: In the case of the top-ranking Nazis, such as Göring, Hess, von Ribbentrop, Streicher, and Speer, the initial proposal by the British was to simply arrest them and shoot them, but that course of action was replaced by putting them on trial for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials in order to publicize their crimes while demonstrating that the trials and the sentences were just, especially to the German people. However, the legal foundations of the trials were questioned, and many Germans were not convinced that the trials were anything more than "victors' justice".


title: Denazification

text: Many refugees from Nazism were Germans and Austrians, and some had fought for Britain in the Second World War. Some were transferred into the Intelligence Corps and sent back to Germany and Austria in British uniform. However, German-speakers were small in number in the British zone, which was hampered by the language deficit. Due to its large German-American population, the US authorities were able to bring a larger number of German-speakers to the task of working in the Allied Military Government, although many were poorly trained. They were assigned to all aspects of military administration, the interrogation of POWs, collecting evidence for the War Crimes Investigation Unit and the search for war criminals.


title: Denazification

text: The Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067 directed US Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower's policy of denazification. A report of the Institute on Re-education of the Axis Countries in June 1945 recommended: "Only an inflexible long-term occupation authority will be able to lead the Germans to a fundamental revision of their recent political philosophy." The United States military pursued denazification in a zealous and bureaucratic fashion, especially during the first months of the occupation. It had been agreed among the Allies that denazification would begin by requiring Germans to fill in a questionnaire () about their activities and memberships during Nazi rule. Five categories were established: "Major Offenders", "Offenders", "Lesser Offenders", "Followers", and "Exonerated Persons". The Americans, unlike the British, French, and Soviets, interpreted this to apply to every German over the age of eighteen in their zone. Eisenhower initially estimated that the denazification process would take 50 years.


title: Denazification

text: When the nearly complete list of Nazi Party memberships was turned over to the Allies (by a German anti-Nazi who had rescued it from destruction in April 1945 as American troops advanced on Munich), it became possible to verify claims about participation or non-participation in the Party. The 1.5 million Germans who had joined before Hitler came to power were deemed to be hard-core Nazis.


title: Denazification

text: Progress was slowed by the overwhelming numbers of Germans to be processed, but also by difficulties such as incompatible power systems and power outages, as with the Hollerith IBM data machine that held the American vetting list in Paris. As many as 40,000 forms could arrive in a single day to await processing. By December 1945, even though a full 500,000 forms had been processed, there remained a backlog of 4,000,000 forms from POWs and a potential case load of 7,000,000. The "Fragebögen" were, of course, filled out in German. The number of Americans working on denazification was inadequate to handle the workload, partly as a result of the demand in the US by families to have soldiers returned home. Replacements were mostly unskilled and poorly trained. In addition, there was too much work to be done to complete the process of denazification by 1947, the year American troops were expected to be completely withdrawn from Europe.


title: Denazification

text: Pressure also came from the need to find Germans to run their own country. In January 1946 a directive came from the Control Council entitled "Removal from Office and from Positions of Responsibility of Nazis and Persons Hostile to Allied Purposes". One of the punishments for Nazi involvement was to be barred from public office and/or restricted to manual labor or "simple work". At the end of 1945, 3.5 million former Nazis awaited classification, many of them barred from work in the meantime. By the end of the winter of 1945–1946, 42% of public officials had been dismissed. Malnutrition was widespread, and the economy needed leaders and workers to help clear away debris, rebuild infrastructure, and get foreign exchange to buy food and other essential resources.


title: Denazification

text: Another concern leading to the Americans relinquishing responsibility for denazification and handing it over to the Germans arose from the fact that many of the American denazifiers were German Jews, former refugees returning to administer justice against the tormentors and killers of their relatives. It was felt, both among Germans and top American officials, that their objectivity might be contaminated by a desire for revenge.


title: Denazification

text: As a result of these various pressures, and following a January 15, 1946, report of the Military Government decrying the efficiency of denazification, saying, "The present procedure fails in practice to reach a substantial number of persons who supported or assisted the Nazis", it was decided to involve Germans in the process. In March 1946 the Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism () came into effect, turning over responsibility for denazification to the Germans. Each zone had a Minister of Denazification. On April 1, 1946, a special law established 545 civilian tribunals under German administration (), with a staff of 22,000 of mostly lay judges, enough, perhaps, to start to work but too many for all the staff themselves to be thoroughly investigated and cleared. They had a case load of 900,000. Several new regulations came into effect in the setting up of the German-run tribunals, including the idea that the aim of denazification was now rehabilitation rather than merely punishment, and that someone whose guilt might meet the formal criteria could also have their specific actions taken into consideration for mitigation. Efficiency thus improved, while rigor declined.


title: Denazification

text: Many people had to fill in a new background form, called a "Meldebogen" (replacing the widely disliked "Fragebogen"), and were given over to justice under a "Spruchkammer", which assigned them to one of five categories:


title: Denazification

text: Again because the caseload was impossibly large, the German tribunals began to look for ways to speed up the process. Unless their crimes were serious, members of the Nazi Party born after 1919 were exempted on the grounds that they had been brainwashed. Disabled veterans were also exempted. To avoid the necessity of a slow trial in open court, which was required for those belonging to the most serious categories, more than 90% of cases were judged not to belong to the serious categories and therefore were dealt with more quickly. More "efficiencies" followed. The tribunals accepted statements from other people regarding the accused's involvement in Nazism. These statements earned the nickname of "Persilscheine", after advertisements for the laundry and whitening detergent Persil. There was corruption in the system, with Nazis buying and selling denazification certificates on the black market. Nazis who were found guilty were often punished with fines assessed in Reichsmarks, which had become nearly worthless. In Bavaria the Denazification Minister, Anton Pfeiffer, bridled under the "victor's justice", and presided over a system that reinstated 75% of officials the Americans had dismissed and reclassified 60% of senior Nazis. The denazification process lost a great deal of credibility, and there was often local hostility against Germans who helped administer the tribunals.


title: Denazification

text: By early 1947, the Allies held 90,000 Nazis in detention; another 1,900,000 were forbidden to work as anything but manual laborers. From 1945 to 1950, the Allied powers detained over 400,000 Germans in internment camps in the name of denazification.


title: Denazification

text: By 1948, the Cold War was clearly in progress and the US began to worry more about a threat from the Eastern Bloc rather than the latent Nazism within occupied Germany.


title: Denazification

text: The delicate task of distinguishing those truly complicit in or responsible for Nazi activities from mere "followers" made the work of the courts yet more difficult. US President Harry S. Truman alluded to this problem: "though all Germans might not be guilty for the war, it would be too difficult to try to single out for better treatment those who had nothing to do with the Nazi regime and its crimes." Denazification was from then on supervised by special German ministers, like the Social Democrat Gottlob Kamm in Baden-Württemberg, with the support of the US occupation forces.


title: Denazification

text: Contemporary American critics of denazification denounced it as a "counterproductive witch hunt" and a failure; in 1951 the provisional West German government granted amnesties to lesser offenders and ended the program.


title: Denazification

text: While judicial efforts were handed over to German authorities, the US Army continued its efforts to denazify Germany through control of German media. The Information Control Division of the US Army had by July 1946 taken control of 37 German newspapers, six radio stations, 314 theaters, 642 cinemas, 101 magazines, 237 book publishers, and 7,384 book dealers and printers. Its main mission was democratization but part of the agenda was also the prohibition of any criticism of the Allied occupation forces. In addition, on May 13, 1946, the Allied Control Council issued a directive for the confiscation of all media that could contribute to Nazism or militarism. As a consequence a list was drawn up of over 30,000 book titles, ranging from school textbooks to poetry, which were then banned. All copies of books on the list were confiscated and destroyed; the possession of a book on the list was made a punishable offense. All the millions of copies of these books were to be confiscated and destroyed. The representative of the Military Directorate admitted that the order was in principle no different from the Nazi book burnings.


title: Denazification

text: The censorship in the US zone was regulated by the occupation directive JCS 1067 (valid until July 1947) and in the May 1946 order valid for all zones (rescinded in 1950), Allied Control Authority Order No. 4, "No. 4 – Confiscation of Literature and Material of a Nazi and Militarist Nature". All confiscated literature was reduced to pulp instead of burning. It was also directed by Directive No. 30, "Liquidation of German Military and Nazi Memorials and Museums". An exception was made for tombstones "erected at the places where members of regular formations died on the field of battle".


title: Denazification

text: Artworks were under the same censorship as other media: "all collections of works of art related or dedicated to the perpetuation of German militarism or Nazism will be closed permanently and taken into custody." The directives were very broadly interpreted, leading to the destruction of thousands of paintings and thousands more were shipped to deposits in the US. Those confiscated paintings still surviving in US custody include for example a painting "depicting a couple of middle aged women talking in a sunlit street in a small town". Artists were also restricted in which new art they were allowed to create; "OMGUS was setting explicit political limits on art and representation".


title: Denazification

text: The publication "Der Ruf" ("The Call") was a popular literary magazine first published in 1945 by Alfred Andersch and edited by Hans Werner Richter. "Der Ruf", also called "Independent Pages of the New Generation", claimed to have the aim of educating the German people about democracy. In 1947 its publication was blocked by the American forces for being overly critical of occupational government. Richter attempted to print many of the controversial pieces in a volume entitled "Der Skorpion" ("The Scorpion"). The occupational government blocked publication of "Der Skorpion" before it began, saying that the volume was too "nihilistic".


title: Denazification

text: Publication of "Der Ruf" resumed in 1948 under a new publisher, but "Der Skorpion" was blocked and not widely distributed. Unable to publish his works, Richter founded Group 47.


title: Denazification

text: The Allied costs for occupation were charged to the German people. A newspaper which revealed the charges (including, among other things, thirty thousand bras) was banned by the occupation authorities for revealing this information.


title: Denazification

text: From the beginning, denazification in the Soviet zone was considered a critical element of the transformation into a socialist society and was quickly and effectively put into practice. Members of the Nazi Party and its organizations were arrested and interned. The NKVD was directly in charge of this process, and oversaw the camps. In 1948, the camps were placed under the same administration as the gulag in the Soviet government. According to official records, 122,600 people were interned. 34,700 of those interned in this process were considered to be Soviet citizens, with the rest being German. This process happened at the same time as the expropriation of large landowners and Junkers, who were also often former Nazi supporters.


title: Denazification

text: Because part of the intended goal of denazification in the Soviet zone was also the removal of anti-socialist sentiment, the committees in charge of the process were politically skewed. A typical panel would have one member from the Christian Democratic Union, one from the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany, three from the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, and three from political mass organizations (who were typically also supportive of the Socialist Unity Party).


title: Denazification

text: Former Nazi officials quickly realized that they would face fewer obstacles and investigations in the zones controlled by the Western Allies. Many of them saw a chance to defect to the West on the pretext of anti-communism. Conditions in the internment camps were terrible, and between 42,000 and 80,000 prisoners died. When the camps were closed in 1950, prisoners were handed over to the East German government.


title: Denazification

text: Because many of the functionaries of the Soviet occupation zone were themselves formerly prosecuted by the Nazi regime, mere former membership in the NSDAP was judged as a crime.


title: Denazification

text: Even before denazification was officially abandoned in West Germany, East German propaganda frequently portrayed itself as the only true anti-fascist state, and argued that the West German state was simply a continuation of the Nazi regime, employing the same officials that had administered the government during the Nazi dictatorship. From the 1950s, reasoning for these accusations focused on the fact that many former functionaries of Nazi regime were employed in positions in the West German government. However, East German propaganda also attempted to denounce as Nazis even politicians such as Kurt Schumacher, who had been imprisoned by the Nazi regime himself. Such allegations appeared frequently in the official Socialist Unity Party of Germany newspaper, the "Neues Deutschland". The East German uprising of 1953 in Berlin was officially blamed on Nazi "agents provocateurs" from West Berlin, who the "Neues Deutschland" alleged were then working in collaboration with the Western government with the ultimate aim of restoring Nazi rule throughout Germany. The Berlin Wall was officially called the Anti-Fascist Security Wall () by the East German government. As part of the propagandistic campaign against West Germany, Theodor Oberländer and Hans Globke were among the first federal politicians to be denounced in the GDR. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia by the GDR in show trials in April 1960, and in July 1963. The president of West Germany Heinrich Lübke, in particular, was denounced during the official commemorations of the liberation of the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen held at the GDR's National Memorials.


title: Denazification

text: Not all former Nazis faced judgment. Doing special tasks for the Soviet government could protect Nazi members from prosecution, enabling them to continue working. Having special connections with the occupiers in order to have someone vouch for them could also shield a person from the denazification laws. In particular, the districts of Gera, Erfurt, and Suhl had significant amounts of former Nazi Party members in their government.


title: Denazification

text: The British prepared a plan from 1942 onwards, assigning a number of quite junior civil servants to head the administration of liberated territory in the rear of the Armies, with draconian powers to remove from their post, in both public and private domains, anyone suspected, usually on behavioral grounds, of harboring Nazi sympathies. For the British government, the rebuilding of German economic power was more important than the imprisonment of Nazi criminals. Economically hard pressed at home after the war, they did not want the burden of feeding and otherwise administering Germany.


title: Denazification

text: In October 1945, in order to constitute a working legal system, and given that 90% of German lawyers had been members of the Nazi Party, the British decided that 50% of the German Legal Civil Service could be staffed by "nominal" Nazis. Similar pressures caused them to relax the restriction even further in April 1946. In industry, especially in the economically crucial Ruhr area, the British began by being lenient about who owned or operated businesses, turning stricter by autumn of 1945. To reduce the power of industrialists, the British expanded the role of trade unions, giving them some decision-making powers.


title: Denazification

text: They were, however, especially zealous during the early months of occupation in bringing to justice anyone, soldiers or civilians, who had committed war crimes against POWs or captured Allied aircrew. In June 1945 an interrogation center at Bad Nenndorf was opened, where detainees were allegedly tortured via buckets of cold water, beatings, being burnt with lit cigarettes, etc. A public scandal ensued, with the center eventually being closed down.


title: Denazification

text: The British to some extent avoided being overwhelmed by the potential numbers of denazification investigations by requiring that no one need fill in the "Fragebogen" unless they were applying for an official or responsible position. This difference between American and British policy was decried by the Americans and caused some Nazis to seek shelter in the British zone.


title: Denazification

text: The French were less vigorous, for a number of reasons, than the other Western powers, not even using the term "denazification", instead calling it "épuration" (purification). At the same time, some French occupational commanders had served in the collaborationist Vichy regime during the war where they had formed friendly relationships with Germans. As a result, in the French zone mere membership in the Nazi party was much less important than in the other zones.


title: Denazification

text: Because teachers had been strongly Nazified, the French began by removing three-quarters of all teachers from their jobs. However, finding that the schools could not be run without them, they were soon rehired, although subject to easy dismissal. A similar process governed technical experts. The French were the first to turn over the vetting process to Germans, while maintaining French power to reverse any German decision. Overall, the business of denazification in the French zone was considered a "golden mean between an excessive degree of severity and an inadequate standard of leniency", laying the groundwork for an enduring reconciliation between France and Germany. In the French zone only thirteen Germans were categorized as "major offenders".


title: Denazification

text: In 1965, the National Front of the German Democratic Republic published what became known as the "Braunbuch" ("Brown Book: War and Nazi Criminals in West Germany: State, Economy, Administration, Army, Justice, Science"). As the title would indicate, the book focused exclusively on West Germany and did not cover the presence of former Gestapo members in the "Volkspolizei" or ex-Nazis in East Germany in general. The book, among other things, mentioned 1,800 names of former Nazis who held positions of authority in West Germany. These included 15 ministers and deputy ministers, 100 generals and admirals of the armed forces, 828 senior judges and prosecutors, 245 leading members of the Foreign Ministry, embassies and consulates officials, and 297 senior police officers and Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution officials. The listing was inaccurate; many of the military names had not been Party members, as the armed forces did not permit its officers to join, while many low level Party members in other groups were overlooked altogether. As revealed by BKA official Dieter Senk in 1989, "today we know that [the] Brown Book didn't contain even approximately all the relevant names ... For example it mentions only 3 names from the BKA". The book had a controversial impact in West Germany. Reflecting this, a judge ordered the seizure of the volume from the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1967.


title: Denazification

text: In addition to the "Braunbuch" the educational booklet "Das ganze System ist braun" ("The whole system is brown") was published in the GDR.


title: Denazification

text: The end of denazification saw the "ad hoc" creation initially of the Western Union which would be institutionalised as the Western European Union in 1947 and 1955, with a broad socio-economic remit actually implemented in the strict domain of arms control.


title: Denazification

text: The ideas of collective guilt and collective punishment originated not with the US and British people, but on higher policy levels. Not until late in the war did the US public assign collective responsibility to the German people. The most notable policy document containing elements of collective guilt and collective punishment is JCS 1067 from early 1945. Eventually horrific footage from the concentration camps would serve to harden public opinion and bring it more in line with that of policymakers.


title: Denazification

text: Already in 1944, prominent US opinion makers had initiated a domestic propaganda campaign (which was to continue until 1948) arguing for a harsh peace for Germany, with a particular aim to end the apparent habit in the US of viewing the Nazis and the German people as separate entities.


title: Denazification

text: Statements made by the British and US governments, both before and immediately after Germany's surrender, indicate that the German nation as a whole was to be held responsible for the actions of the Nazi regime, often using the terms "collective guilt" and "collective responsibility".


title: Denazification

text: To that end, as the Allies began their post-war denazification efforts, the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force undertook a psychological propaganda campaign for the purpose of developing a German sense of collective responsibility.


title: Denazification

text: The Public Relations and Information Services Control Group of the British Element (CCG/BE) of the Allied Control Commission for Germany began in 1945 to issue directives to officers in charge of producing newspapers and radio broadcasts for the German population to emphasize "the moral responsibility of all Germans for Nazi crimes". Similarly, among US authorities, such a sense of collective guilt was "considered a prerequisite to any long-term education of the German people".


title: Denazification

text: Using the German press, which was under Allied control, as well as posters and pamphlets, a program was conducted to acquaint ordinary Germans with what had taken place in the concentration camps. For example, using posters with images of concentration camp victims coupled to text such as "YOU ARE GUILTY OF THIS!" or "These atrocities: your fault!"


title: Denazification

text: The introduction text of one pamphlet published in 1945 by the American War Information Unit (Amerikanischen Kriegsinformationsamt) entitled "Bildbericht aus fünf Konzentrationslagern" ("Photo Report from Five Concentration Camps") contained this explanation of the pamphlet's purpose:


title: Denazification

text: A number of films showing the concentration camps were made and screened to the German public, such as "Die Todesmühlen", released in the US zone in January 1946, and "Welt im Film No. 5" in June 1945. A film that was never finished due partly to delays and the existence of the other films was "Memory of the Camps". According to Sidney Bernstein, chief of Psychological Warfare Division, the objective of the film was:


title: Denazification

text: Delays led to the decision that the approach to the film was not as good as other extant films, and the footage and unread script were shelved.


title: Denazification

text: Part of the reason the film was scrapped was that the harsh attitudes toward Germans had changed. Initially denazification had a more harsh goal. English writer James Stern recounted an example in a German town soon after the German surrender.


title: Denazification

text: Immediately upon the liberation of the concentration camps, many German civilians were forced to see the conditions in the camps, bury rotting corpses and exhume mass graves. In some instances, civilians were also made to provide items for former concentration camp inmates.


title: Denazification

text: The US conducted opinion surveys in the American zone of occupied Germany. Tony Judt, in his book "", extracted and used some of them.


title: Denazification

text: British historian Ian Kershaw in his book "" writes about the various surveys carried out at the German population:


title: Denazification

text: However, in "Hitler, Germans, and the "Jewish Question"", Sarah Ann Gordon notes the difficulty of drawing conclusions from the surveys. For example, respondents were given three alternatives from which to choose, as in question 1:


title: Denazification

text: To the question of whether an Aryan who marries a Jew should be condemned, 91% responded "No". To the question of whether "All those who ordered the murder of civilians or participated in the murdering should be made to stand trial", 94% responded "Yes".


title: Denazification

text: Gordon singles out the question "Extermination of the Jews and Poles and other non-Aryans was not necessary for the security of the Germans", which included an implicit double negative to which the response was either yes or no. She concludes that this question was confusingly phrased (given that in the German language the affirmative answer to a question containing a negative statement is "no"): "Some interviewees may have responded 'no' they did not agree with the statement, when they actually did agree that the extermination was not necessary." She further highlights the discrepancy between the antisemitic implications of the survey results (such as those later identified by Judt) with the 77% percent of interviewees who responded that actions against Jews were in no way justified.


title: Denazification

text: Gordon states that if the 77 percent result is to be believed then an "overwhelming majority" of Germans disapproved of extermination, and if the 37 percent result is believed to be correct then over one third of Germans were willing to exterminate Poles and Jews and others for German security. She concludes that the phrasing of the question on German security lowers the confidence in the latter interpretation.


title: Denazification

text: Gordon follows this with another survey where interviewees were asked if Nazism was good or bad (53% chose bad) and reasons for their answer. Among the nine possible choices on why it was bad, 21% chose the effects on the German people before the war, while 3–4 percent chose the answer "race policy, atrocities, pogroms". However, Gordon highlights the issue that it is difficult to pin down at which point in time respondents became aware of the exterminations, before or after they were interviewed: questionnaire reports indicate that a significant minority claimed they had had no knowledge until the Nuremberg trials.


title: Denazification

text: She also notes that when confronted with the exterminations there was an element of denial, disbelief, and confusion. Asked about concentration camps, very few Germans associated them with the Jews, leading to the conclusion that they did not understand how they had been used against the Jews during the war and instead continued to think of them as they were before the war, the place where political opponents to the Nazis were kept. "This naivete is only understandable if large numbers of Germans were truly ignorant of the existence of these camps". A British study on the same attitudes concluded that


title: Denazification

text: Those who said National Socialism was a good idea pointed to social welfare plans, the lack of unemployment, the great construction plans of the Nazis ... Nearly all those who thought it a good idea nevertheless rejected Nazi racial theories and disagreed with the inhumanity of the concentration camps and the 'SS'.


title: Denazification

text: Sarah Gordon writes that a majority of Germans appeared to approve of nonviolent removal of Jews from civil service and professions and German life. The German public also accepted the Nuremberg laws because they thought they would act as stabilizers and end violence against Jews. The German public had as a result of the Nazi antisemitic propaganda hardened their attitudes between 1935 and 1938 from the originally favorable stance. By 1938, the propaganda had taken effect and antisemitic policies were accepted, provided no violence was involved. Kristallnacht caused German opposition to antisemitism to peak, with the vast majority of Germans, including Nazis, rejecting the violence and destruction, and many Germans aiding the Jews.


title: Denazification

text: The Nazis responded by intimidation in order to discourage opposition, those aiding Jews being victims of large-scale arrests and intimidation. With the start of the war the antisemitic minority that approved of restrictions on Jewish domestic activities was growing, but there is no evidence that the general public had any acceptance for labor camps or extermination. As the number of antisemites grew, so too did the number of Germans opposed to racial persecution, and rumors of deportations and shootings in the east led to snowballing criticism of the Nazis. Gordon states that "one can probably conclude that labor camps, concentration camps, and extermination were opposed by a majority of Germans".


title: Denazification

text: Gordon concludes in her analysis on German public opinion based German SD-reports during the war and the Allied questionnaires during the occupation:


title: Denazification

text: it would appear that a majority of Germans supported elimination of Jews from the civil service; quotas on Jews in professions, academic institutions, and commercial fields; restrictions on intermarriage; and voluntary emigration of Jews. However, the rabid antisemites' demands for violent boycotts, illegal expropriation, destruction of Jewish property, pogroms, deportation, and extermination were probably rejected by a majority of Germans. They apparently wanted to restrict Jewish rights substantially, but not to annihilate Jews.


title: Denazification

text: The West German political system, as it emerged from the occupation, was increasingly opposed to the Allied denazification policy. As denazification was deemed ineffective and counterproductive by the Americans, they did not oppose the plans of the West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, to end the denazification efforts. Adenauer's intention was to switch government policy to reparations and compensation for the victims of Nazi rule ("Wiedergutmachung"), stating that the main culprits had been prosecuted. In 1951 several laws were passed, ending the denazification. Officials were allowed to retake jobs in the civil service, with the exception of people assigned to Group I (Major Offenders) and II (Offenders) during the denazification review process.


title: Denazification

text: Several amnesty laws were also passed which affected an estimated 792,176 people. Those pardoned included people with six-month sentences, 35,000 people with sentences of up to one year and include more than 3,000 functionaries of the SA, the SS, and the Nazi Party who participated in dragging victims to jails and camps; 20,000 other Nazis sentenced for "deeds against life" (presumably murder); 30,000 sentenced for causing bodily injury, and 5,200 who committed "crimes and misdemeanors in office". As a result, many people with a former Nazi past ended up again in the political apparatus of West Germany. In 1957, 77% of the German Ministry of Justice's senior officials were former Nazi Party members.


title: Denazification

text: Membership in Nazi organizations is still not an open topic of discussion. German President Walter Scheel and Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger were both former members of the Nazi Party. In 1950, a major controversy broke out when it emerged that Konrad Adenauer's State Secretary Hans Globke had played a major role in drafting antisemitic Nuremberg Race Laws in Nazi Germany. In the 1980s former UN Secretary General and President of Austria Kurt Waldheim was confronted with allegations he had lied about his wartime record in the Balkans.


title: Denazification

text: It was not until 2006 that famous German writer Günter Grass, occasionally viewed as a spokesman of "the nation's moral conscience", spoke publicly about the fact that he had been a member of the Waffen-SShe was conscripted into the Waffen-SS while barely seventeen years old and his duties were military in nature. Statistically it is likely that there are many more Germans of Grass's generation (also called the "Flakhelfer-Generation") with biographies similar to his.


title: Denazification

text: Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), on the other hand, has been open about his membership at the age of fourteen of the Hitler Youth, when his church youth group was forced to merge with them.


title: Denazification

text: In practice, denazification was not limited to Germany and Austria. In several European countries with a vigorous Nazi or fascist party, measures of denazification were carried out. In France the process was called épuration légale ("legal cleansing"). Prisoners of war held in detention in Allied countries were also subject to denazification qualifications before being returned to their countries of origin.


title: Denazification

text: Denazification was also practiced in many countries which came under German occupation, including Belgium, Norway, Greece and Yugoslavia, because satellite regimes had been established in these countries with the support of local collaborators.


title: Denazification

text: In Greece, for instance, Special Courts of Collaborators were created after 1945 to try former collaborators. The three Greek "quisling" prime ministers were convicted and sentenced to death or life imprisonment. Other Greek collaborators after German withdrawal underwent repression and public humiliation, besides being tried (mostly on treason charges). In the context of the emerging Greek Civil War, however, most wartime figures from the civil service, the Greek Gendarmerie and the notorious Security Battalions were quickly integrated into the strongly anti-Communist postwar establishment.


title: Denazification

text: An attempt to ban the swastika across the EU in early 2005 failed after objections from the British government and others. In early 2007, while Germany held the European Union presidency, Berlin proposed that the European Union should follow German Criminal Law and criminalize the denial of the Holocaust and the display of Nazi symbols including the swastika, which is based on the Ban on the Symbols of Unconstitutional Organizations Act (Strafgesetzbuch section 86a). This led to an opposition campaign by Hindu groups across Europe against a ban on the swastika. They pointed out that the swastika has been around for 5,000 years as a symbol of peace. The proposal to ban the swastika was dropped by the German government from the proposed European Union wide anti-racism laws on January 29, 2007.


title: Denazification

text: On 24 February 2022, Vladimir Putin issued a "casus belli" in his speech "On conducting a special military operation". In the speech, Putin pointed to "denazification" as the objective of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, going on to describe modern-day Ukraine as a "neo-Nazi" state with an intent of the genocide of Russian speakers in the country. Putin has repeatedly described Ukraine as being governed by neo-Nazis and "Banderites". Media and members of Russian administration used these terms repeatedly in the ensuing conflict. Previously, Putin's statements of denazification were echoed in his essay "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" and in the speech "Address concerning the events in Ukraine", filmed three days prior to the invasion, wherein Putin accused Ukraine of "being infected with the virus of nationalism". The US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem condemned Putin's misuse of Holocaust history; Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish, with much of his family being victims of the Holocaust, and a native Russian speaker. The organisations described Ukraine as "democratic" and the Russian claims of Nazism and genocide as "imaginary".


title: Denazification

text: Usage of the term "denazification" in the Russian media spiked after 24 February, despite the term lacking any application in Russia's invasion of Ukraine or specific historical reference. Russian journalists and political commentators were surprised to find no actual Nazi symbols or parties present in Ukraine mainstream, which was described as confusing and a "PR disaster" undermining the whole justification for the war. Russian propagandist Margarita Simonyan later attempted to redefine the word "Nazi" as being a synonym of "Russophobe" or "anti-Russia". While Ukraine, like many countries, has a far-right fringe including the Svoboda party and the Azov Regiment, analysts have described Putin's rhetoric as greatly exaggerating the influence of far-right groups within Ukraine; there is no widespread support for the ideology in the government, military, or electorate. According to Ukrainian-American journalist Natalia Antonova, "Russia's present-day war of aggression is refashioned by propaganda into a direct continuation of the legacy of the millions of Russian soldiers who died to stop" Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War. The confusion was further worsened by reports of actual neo-Nazi military units "" and parts of Wagner Group taking part in the war on Russian side, as well as widespread presence of far-right, anti-Semitic and nationalist websites and literature in Russia.


title: Denazification

text: Statements of denazification continued to permeate throughout Russian media and justification for the war. On 1 March, a large number of diplomats at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva staged a walkout in protest of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov began his prepared remarks to the assembly via video from Moscow, in which he echoed the statements of denazification in Putin's speech: "The goal of our actions is to save people by fulfilling our allied obligations, as well as to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine so that such things never happen again." In a "RIA Novosti" op-ed published in early April, "What Russia should do with Ukraine", Timofey Sergeytsev argued strongly for the full destruction of Ukraine as a state and the Ukrainian national identity in the ambit of the denazification of the latter. The Ukrainian state was, according to Sergeytsev, to be renamed after the war. The op-ed attracted criticism from as far afield as Slavoj Žižek. In an analysis of the article, American historian Timothy Snyder pointed out that the use of words "Nazi" and "denazification" by the Russian regime was historically inaccurate. On 26 April, Secretary of the Security Council of Russia Nikolai Patrushev threatened that Ukraine would be Balkanized as a result of Russia's invasion.


title: Denazification

text: By early May, usage of the term in Russian media appeared to be on a decline, reportedly because it had not gained traction with the Russian public, although the term experienced a slight resurgence when United Russia party member Oleg Viktorovich Morozov called in the Duma for the denazification of Poland later that month. The Russian ambassador to Bulgaria, Eleonora Mitrofanova, has used the moniker "Nazi regime in Kyiv" to refer to the post-Revolution of Dignity administrations of Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.


title: Denazification

text: In May 2022, Aleksandr Dugin, frustrated by "strange and convoluted arguments" used by Lavrov to explain the Russian meaning of "denazification", proposed that it is necessary to simply "identify Ukrainian Nazism with Russophobia". Dugin argued that in the same way as Jews have a "monopoly" of definition of antisemitism, in this way Russia holds a "monopoly" on the definition of Russophobia and "Ukrainian Nazism".


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Gilbert Jay Arenas Jr. (; born January 6, 1982) is an American former professional basketball player. Arenas attended Grant High School in the Valley Glen district of Los Angeles, and accepted a scholarship offer to the University of Arizona late in his junior year. He was drafted by the Golden State Warriors with the 31st overall pick in the 2001 NBA draft.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Arenas is a three-time NBA All-Star, three-time member of the All-NBA Team, and was voted the NBA Most Improved Player in the 2002–03 season. Arenas was nicknamed "Agent Zero", due to his former jersey number and his late-game shot-making ability. Both names quickly became fan favorites during his time in the Washington, D.C. area. He has also been nicknamed "Gibby."


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Arenas was suspended for most of the 2009–10 NBA season because of handgun violations stemming from an episode on December 24, 2009, and for subsequent actions that appeared to make light of this episode.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: In late 2010, Arenas was traded to the Orlando Magic. After the 2011 NBA lockout, Arenas was the first NBA player to be waived under the "amnesty clause." He signed with the Memphis Grizzlies for the 2011–12 NBA season.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Arenas was born in Tampa, Florida. Arenas was raised in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles where he played basketball at Ulysses S. Grant High School. His #25 was retired by the school.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Arenas played basketball at the University of Arizona. One of his teammates, Richard Jefferson, would later join him in entering the 2001 NBA draft. In 2001, Arenas's sophomore year, he was named first-team All-Pac-10. He helped lead Arizona to the national championship game, where they lost to the Blue Devils, 82–72. Shortly after the tournament, Arenas announced that he was foregoing his last two years at college and would enter the 2001 NBA draft.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: After a productive college career, Arenas entered the 2001 NBA draft. Despite strong consideration from many teams in the first round, Arenas fell to the second round, being selected with the 31st overall pick by the Golden State Warriors. Arenas would wear the number 0 on his jersey to signify the number of minutes that experts predicted he would play coming from a small high school going to a college powerhouse in Arizona. Arenas started 30 games and averaged 10.9 points per game for the Warriors, who finished in last place in the Western Conference that season. In 2002–03, his sophomore season, Arenas received the NBA Most Improved Player Award and was named Most Valuable Player of the Rookie-Sophomore game during the NBA All-Star Weekend.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: After the 2002–2003 season, Arenas became a restricted free agent. He reportedly flipped a coin to decide among several teams seeking to sign him, including the Wizards, Warriors, and Los Angeles Clippers. The Washington Wizards offered him a six-year, $60 million contract. The Warriors were unable to match this offer because they were over the salary cap and because Arenas was a second-round pick. If Arenas had been drafted in the first round, the salary cap had exceptions that would have allowed the Warriors to match the offer sheet. The "Gilbert Arenas Rule" was later created to allow teams to re-sign restricted free agents who were not first-round picks. Arenas battled a strained abdominal muscle injury all season.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Arenas teamed up with shooting guard Larry Hughes (22.0 points per game) in 2004–05 to give the Wizards the highest-scoring backcourt duo in the NBA. Arenas was selected for his first NBA All-Star Game. He guided the team to a 45-win season and its first playoff berth since 1997. Arenas led the team in scoring with 25.5 ppg, finishing seventh in the league in that category. He also finished sixth in the league in steals per game in 2004–05 with 2.24 (Hughes led the league with 2.93 steals per game).


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: In the fifth game of the first round of the Eastern Conference playoffs in 2005, Arenas hit a 16-foot fadeaway as time expired to give the Wizards a 112–110 win over the Chicago Bulls. The Wizards eventually won the series, the franchise's first playoff series victory in more than two decades.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: In 2006, Wizards fansite Wizznutzz.com jokingly nicknamed him "Agent Zero", a nickname Arenas liked so much that it stuck.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Arenas averaged 29.3 points, which ranked fourth among the scoring leaders, two steals (also fourth), and 6.1 assists per game during the 2005–06 NBA season. However, he was not initially chosen for the 2006 All-Star Game. He was named as a replacement after Indiana Pacers forward–center Jermaine O'Neal was injured. He also participated in the Three-point Shootout, where he placed second, after Dirk Nowitzki. The Washington Wizards finished 42–40 and earned the fifth seed in the Eastern Conference.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: During the off-season, Arenas said that he was willing to take a pay cut in order to give the Wizards additional money with which to sign available free agents. He had expressed a desire to win a championship with the Wizards. One of Arenas' most memorable plays was a 40-foot jump shot in Round 1 of the 2006 NBA playoffs in which the Wizards were eliminated by the Cleveland Cavaliers in six games.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Arenas himself has noted that he withdrew from the United States national team for the 2006 FIBA World Championship because he felt that assistant coaches Mike D'Antoni and Nate McMillan had determined the roster even prior to tryouts. Afterward, he stated that he planned on averaging 50 points against their respective teams (Phoenix Suns and Portland Trail Blazers). He succeeded at his goal versus powerhouse Phoenix, scoring 54 points, including 21-of-37 from the field, 6-of-12 three-pointers (while reportedly eyeing in the direction of Suns chairman Jerry Colangelo), in a high-scoring 144–139 Wizards win over the Suns. However, on February 11 versus the Blazers, he was held to a lowly nine points, including tying the Wizards' franchise record for three-point futility, going 0-for-8 from behind the arc, in a 94–73 loss versus Portland.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: In an overtime game versus the Los Angeles Lakers on December 17, 2006, at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, Arenas scored a career-high 60 points, adding 8 rebounds and 8 assists in helping lead the Wizards over the Lakers, 147–141. Arenas holds the Wizards' franchise record for points scored in a game by an individual, a record he now shares with Bradley Beal. The previous record of 56 points was held by Earl Monroe, achieved in 1968, which was also an overtime game against the Lakers. Arenas' 16 points in the extra period also set an NBA record for most points in one overtime period, surpassing Earl Boykins' record by one point.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: On January 3, 2007, Arenas hit a 32-foot buzzer-beater to win the game against the Milwaukee Bucks, 108–105. Two weeks later on Martin Luther King Jr. Day he hit another buzzer-beating three-pointer to beat the Utah Jazz, 114–111, in a thriller at the Verizon Center. This same scenario has been added as a cut scene in the video game "NBA Live 2008". He also hit a game-winning layup as time expired to beat the Seattle SuperSonics on March 21, 2007.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: In February 2007, during the final days of All-Star voting, Arenas was voted as a first-time starter for the 2007 NBA All-Star game for the Eastern Conference, edging out Vince Carter by a slight margin, with 1,454,166 votes to Carter's 1,451,156. At the time he was averaging 29.7 points per game, and led all Eastern Conference point guards in scoring and was second in the league.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Towards the end of the season, Arenas tore his MCL during a game against the Charlotte Bobcats, when Gerald Wallace fell into his leg. The Wizards struggled to finish the season with Arenas and teammate Caron Butler both being injured. Washington earned a playoff berth, but was swept in the first round in a rematch with the Cleveland Cavaliers.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: During the offseason, Arenas told "The Washington Post" that he would "opt out" of his contract after the 2007–08 season, making him a free agent. He stated, "...if something happens where they don't want me or they're going in a different direction, I can look elsewhere. But my intentions are not to leave."


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Arenas only played eight games during the 2007–08 season, due to a knee injury, before he started practicing again in March, and returned to action on April 2, 2008, against the Milwaukee Bucks, scoring 17 points in a 110–109 home loss.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Ten days prior, Arenas stormed out of the locker room before a game against the Detroit Pistons. He had wanted to play, but his doctor did not give him clearance. Arenas made a surprise return on April 9, when he came out of the locker room with 5:30 left in the first quarter. He finished the game scoring 13 points and dishing out 3 assists in helping the Wizards beat the Boston Celtics 109–95. He came off the bench for the rest of the regular season as not to disrupt the chemistry the Wizards had built without him. Arenas got his wish when they matched up against the Cavaliers for the third straight year; however, it was apparent he was not 100% healthy. In games 1–3, he played limited minutes, citing soreness in his surgically repaired knee. A few minutes before game 4 of their first-round playoff appearance against the Cavaliers, Arenas announced he would sit out the rest of the playoffs.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: On June 9, 2008, Arenas officially opted out of the final year of his contract, but said that he would re-sign with the Wizards if they retained teammate Antawn Jamison, also a free agent. The Wizards did indeed sign Jamison to a contract. Arenas was offered a five-year contract worth more than $100 million by the Golden State Warriors and another max deal by the Wizards, a six-year deal worth $124 million.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Due to the lingering injuries from April 2007, Arenas would not make his season debut until March 28, 2009, scoring 15 points and dishing 10 assists in a 98–96 loss to the Detroit Pistons.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: He also played a second and final game against the number one seed Cleveland Cavaliers on April 2, in which both teams wore their respective throwback jerseys. Arenas dished out 10 assists and scored 11 points, in a win, and fans were excited to see Arenas, Brendan Haywood, Antawn Jamison, and Caron Butler re-uniting for the only time in the season. However, the Wizards finished poorly with a record of 19–63, the second-worst record in the NBA, tied with the Los Angeles Clippers, ending four years of consecutive playoff appearances.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Arenas opened the 2009–10 season on a hopeful note, scoring 29 points as the Wizards beat the Dallas Mavericks 102–91 in their season opener. However, Arenas' performance would be inconsistent in the weeks ahead; on November 11, he set a Wizards team record for turnovers in a game with 12. On December 12, Arenas netted his first triple-double in five-and-a-half years in a loss to the Pacers. Six days later Arenas had a season-best 45 points in a Wizards win over his former team, the Golden State Warriors.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: On December 24, 2009, it was reported that Arenas had admitted to storing unloaded firearms in his locker at Capital One Arena and had surrendered them to team security. In doing so, Arenas not only violated NBA rules against bringing firearms into an arena, but also violated D.C. ordinances as well. On January 1, 2010, it was also reported that Arenas and teammate Javaris Crittenton had unloaded guns in the Wizards' locker room during a Christmas Eve argument regarding gambling debts. The D.C. Metropolitan Police and the U.S. Attorney's office began investigating, and on January 14, 2010, Arenas was charged with carrying a pistol without a license, a violation of Washington, D.C.'s gun-control laws. Arenas pleaded guilty on January 15 to the felony of carrying an unlicensed pistol outside a home or business.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: On January 6, 2010, Arenas' 28th birthday, the NBA suspended him indefinitely without pay until its investigation was complete. By nearly all accounts, the league felt compelled to act when Arenas' teammates surrounded him during pregame introductions prior to a game with the Philadelphia 76ers, and he pretended to shoot them with guns made from his fingers. NBA Commissioner David Stern said in a statement that Arenas' behavior after the investigation started "has led me to conclude that he is not currently fit to take the court in an NBA game." He also said that Arenas was likely facing a lengthy suspension. The Wizards issued a statement of their own condemning the players' pregame stunt as "unacceptable". On January 27, 2010, Arenas and Crittenton were suspended for the rest of the season, after meeting with Stern. On February 2, 2010, Arenas wrote an open editorial in "The Washington Post", in which he apologized for his actions, particularly for failing to be a better role model to young fans and for "making light of a serious situation." On March 26, 2010, Arenas was convicted for his crimes and was sentenced to two years' probation and 30 days in a halfway house. Arenas started his sentence in the halfway house on April 9. He was released on May 7. The punishment for Arenas was significantly stiffer than for Crittenton, who received a year of unsupervised probation, or Delonte West, who had been driving around in a three-wheeled motorcycle in Prince George's County with several loaded guns including a shotgun in a violin case. For his crime, West received eight months of home detention, two months of unsupervised probation, and forty hours of community service.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Upon his return to the Wizards for the 2010–11 season, Arenas elected to change his number from 0 to 9, claiming he was trying to put the entire incident from the previous season behind him. (Arenas had worn #0 all the way from college through his time in the NBA as a constant reminder of the number of minutes his critics said he would play in the NBA.)


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: After the first 24 games of the season, although Arenas led the Wizards with an average of 17.3 points per game, they carried a poor 6–18 record.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: On December 18, 2010, Arenas was traded to the Orlando Magic for Rashard Lewis. Arenas chose to wear #1 on his jersey in honor of his favorite player, Penny Hardaway. He was the backup point guard, with Jameer Nelson at the starting role. The Magic finished 52–30 and clinched the fourth seed in the Eastern Conference and made the playoffs. However, Orlando lost to the Atlanta Hawks in six games in the opening round of the playoffs.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: On December 9, 2011, after the end of the 2011 NBA lockout, Arenas was waived by the Orlando Magic under the amnesty clause, being the first player to be waived under the newly established clause at the time of its inclusion. He cleared waivers and became a free agent. Due to the 2011 NBA lockout, the 2011–12 NBA season was reduced from its normal 82 games to 66 games.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: In the summer of 2011, Arenas acted with former Wizards teammate Etan Thomas in a dramatic production of "Our Town" by Thornton Wilder.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: On March 20, 2012, the Memphis Grizzlies signed Arenas. His primary role was again a backup point guard, this time to Mike Conley Jr. The Grizzlies finished 41–25 and clinched the fourth seed in the Western Conference. However, they lost in the first round to the Los Angeles Clippers in a full seven-game series. Arenas' final NBA game was played in Game 7 of the 2012 Western Conference First Round on May 13, 2012. Memphis would lose Game 7 72 - 82 (thus losing the series) to the Los Angeles Clippers with Arenas only playing for 3 minutes and recording no stats.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: On November 19, 2012, Arenas signed with the Shanghai Sharks of the Chinese Basketball Association. In his first season in the CBA, Arenas averaged 20.7 points per game, 7.3 rebounds per game, and 3.0 assists per game in 27.3 minutes per game. He played in 14 games and started in 8 of them. However, the Sharks finished at 10–22 and missed the playoffs.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Arenas hosted a daily sports show on Complex News' YouTube channel. He also has his own "No Chill Productions" podcast called The No Chill Podcast.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Arenas has four children with Laura Govan, whom he dated from 2002 until 2014. Arenas met Govan while he was playing for the Warriors. Govan worked with the Sacramento Kings' public relations department.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: One of Arenas' cousins is Javier Arenas, a professional football player who played for the NFL's Buffalo Bills. Another cousin, Armando Murillo, has played in the Canadian Football League.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Arenas donated $100 for every point he scored in each home game during the 2006–07 season to local D.C.-area schools, while Wizards team owner Abe Pollin matched that contribution for each away game. He has also mentored a D.C. boy who lost his family in a fire at age 10. Arenas got him a job as a ball boy for the Wizards.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Arenas has had his own shoe, the Adidas Gil Zero, as well as his own line of Adidas TS Lightswitch shoes. Arenas wears size 14 shoes. Following the gun incident in 2009, Adidas dropped their sponsorship of Arenas. Instead of signing another endorsement deal, he turned to his vast collection of shoes. For nearly every game of the season, Arenas wore a different pair of shoes, wearing a total of 77 different pairs.


title: Gilbert Arenas

text: Arenas admitted that he ran about 60 red lights in 4 months and got away with it by keeping his dealer plates on his vehicle.


title: Chivalry

text: Chivalry, or the chivalric code, is an informal and varying code of conduct developed in Europe between 1170 and 1220. It was associated with the medieval Christian institution of knighthood; knights' and gentlemen's behaviours were governed by chivalrous social codes. The ideals of chivalry were popularized in medieval literature, particularly the literary cycles known as the Matter of France, relating to the legendary companions of Charlemagne and his men-at-arms, the paladins, and the Matter of Britain, informed by Geoffrey of Monmouth's "Historia Regum Britanniae", written in the 1130s, which popularized the legend of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. All of these were taken as historically accurate until the beginnings of modern scholarship in the 19th century.


title: Chivalry

text: The code of chivalry that developed in medieval Europe had its roots in earlier centuries. It arose in the Carolingian Empire from the idealisation of the cavalryman—involving military bravery, individual training, and service to others—especially in Francia, among horse soldiers in Charlemagne's cavalry. The term "chivalry" derives from the Old French term "chevalerie", which can be translated as "horse soldiery". Originally, the term referred only to horse-mounted men, from the French word for horse, "cheval", but later it became associated with knightly ideals.


title: Chivalry

text: Over time, its meaning in Europe has been refined to emphasize more general social and moral virtues. The code of chivalry, as it stood by the Late Middle Ages, was a moral system which combined a warrior ethos, knightly piety, and courtly manners, all combining to establish a notion of honour and nobility.


title: Chivalry

text: In origin, the term "chivalry" means "horsemanship", formed in Old French, in the 11th century, from ' (horsemen, knights), itself from the Medieval Latin "caballarii", the nominative plural form of the term '. The French word "" originally meant "a man of aristocratic standing, and probably of noble ancestry, who is capable, if called upon, of equipping himself with a war horse and the arms of heavy cavalryman and who has been through certain rituals that make him what he is". Therefore, during the Middle Ages, the plural "chevalerie" (transformed in English into the word "chivalry") originally denoted the body of heavy cavalry upon formation in the field. In English, the term appears from 1292 (note that "cavalry" is from the Italian form of the same word).


title: Chivalry

text: The meaning of the term evolved over time into a broader sense, because in the Middle Ages the meaning of "chevalier" changed from the original concrete military meaning "status or fee associated with a military follower owning a war horse" or "a group of mounted knights" to the ideal of the Christian warrior ethos propagated in the romance genre, which was becoming popular during the 12th century, and the ideal of courtly love propagated in the contemporary Minnesang and related genres.


title: Chivalry

text: The ideas of chivalry are summarized in three medieval works: the anonymous poem "Ordene de chevalerie", which tells the story of how Hugh II of Tiberias was captured and released upon his agreement to show Saladin (1138–1193) the ritual of Christian knighthood; the "Libre del ordre de cavayleria", written by Ramon Llull (1232–1315), from Majorca, whose subject is knighthood; and the Livre de Chevalerie of Geoffroi de Charny (1300–1356), which examines the qualities of knighthood, emphasizing "prowess". None of the authors of these three texts knew the other two texts, and the three combine to depict a general concept of chivalry which is not precisely in harmony with any of them. To different degrees and with different details, they speak of chivalry as a way of life in which the military, the nobility, and religion combine.


title: Chivalry

text: The "code of chivalry" is thus a product of the Late Middle Ages, evolving after the end of the crusades partly from an idealization of the historical knights fighting in the Holy Land and from ideals of courtly love.


title: Chivalry

text: Supporters of chivalry have assumed since the late medieval period that there was a time in the past when chivalry was a living institution, when men acted chivalrically, when chivalry was alive and not dead, the imitation of which period would much improve the present.


title: Chivalry

text: With the birth of modern historical and literary research, scholars have found that however far back in time "The Age of Chivalry" is searched for, it is always further in the past, even back to the Roman Empire. From Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi: