The Victims: Did the Nazi T–4 Euthanasia Program Discriminate among Victims in the Targeted Groups?

Nancy C. Unger and J. Michael Butler take up the question of the targeting of Jews for elimination in the Holocaust. Was this emphasis a special case or part of a broader spectrum of elimination policies designed to rid Germany of all groups designated as undesirable by Nazi ideology— including homosexuals, Gypsies, and the mentally ill? Unger argues for the specificity of the targeting of the Jewish population for extermination by comparing it to the case of homosexuals. Homosexual men were incarcerated in the death camps, and many were killed in the course of the Holocaust, but, Unger argues, their targeting was quite different and far more selective than that of Jews. As she notes, not all homosexual men were incarcerated, and their treatment in the camps was substantially different from that of Jews. This difference in treatment does not minimize the brutality or depravity of the victimization of male homosexuals but marks it as a specific case, not to be identified simply with the assault on European Jewry that was the central feature of German exterminationist policy. Unger’s article suggests that each target of the Holocaust was special and that to imagine otherwise is a simplification that does not do full justice to the victims of the death camps. Butler argues that though the final structure of the extermination camps was centrally focused on the Jewish population, the techniques and practices that camp directors employed derived from a more conceptually broad eugenic euthanasia program initiated in 1939. Looking back to nineteenth-century German race theory, Butler suggests that an intellectual climate increasingly friendly toward the goal of a spurious racial purity in Germany enabled a euthanasia program to begin that initially targeted disabled children, the chronically ill, and the aged. Jews became a target as the program became more successful, as Germany expanded, and as public outcry about the initial targets of the T–4 program (collective euthanasia programs headquartered in a Berlin villa at Tiergarten Street Number 4) grew. Carefully describing the tools developed by the T–4 program, Butler asserts that the Holocaust was a more successful and larger-scale version of extermination programs that were already under way in Germany. Is the Holocaust different from other genocidal assaults? Or, are there common features in all genocides? These are among the questions raised in this section—questions that remain vital as contemporary society grapples with the aftermaths of genocides in many different places. Questions about history and debates about answers are crucial in understanding not only the past but also the present as well

Lexical pragmatics and types of linguistic encoding: evidence from pre- and postpositions in Behdini-Kurdish

Lexical pragmatics starts from the assumption that the meaning communicated by a word is underdetermined by its semantics, and lexical pragmatists usually study the processes involved in bridging the gap between the encoded and the communicated meaning of words. This paper studies a different but related question: wether different types of linguistic encoding can play empirically distinguishable roles in lexical pragmatics. Carston (2002) suggests that some words may encode templates for concept formation whereas others encode fully-fledged concepts that provide inputs to pragmatic processes. Blakemore (1987) argued that some words encode constraints on inferential processes rather than concepts. But if some words might encode nothing more than concept-formation templates, and others procedural constraints, then both types of words appear to be highly context dependent and their linguistic semantics rather abstract in nature. Is it possible to distinguish these different types of encoding empirically? In this paper I want to argue that the answer to this question is positive. In Behdini-Kurdish, there is a class of four fundamental prepositions *di* 'in', *li* 'at', *ji* 'from', *bi* 'with'. Furthermore, there is a larger class of simple prepositions such as *ser* 'on', *nav* 'within', *ber* 'in front'. These simple prepositions can be added to one of the fundamental prepositions to form compound ones: *diser* 'on top of', *dinav* 'inside', *diber* 'in front of, in sight of'. Any fundamental, simple or compound preposition can be used together with one of three postpositions *da*, *ra* and *ve*. Postpositions are morphologically and syntactically simple, in contrast to prepositions. Though overlapping in meaning with prepositions, they are not redundant. Fundamental prepositions have a wider range of meaning than simple prepositions and compound prepositions. Finally, there are grammaticalisation paths from nouns through compound preposition to simple prepositions, but none involving the postpositions. My thesis is that these properties of the Behdini-Kurdish system of pre-and postpositions can be explained on the assumptions that the class of fundamental prepositions encodes templates for ad-hoc concept construction, the class of simple prepositions encodes concepts that allow the construction of ad-hoc concepts, and that the class of postpositions encode procedures constraining ad-hoc concept construction. This thesis gets additional support from German prepositional phrases. I conclude that the different types of linguistic encoding discussed do indeed lead to distinct effects in lexical pragmatics and are therefore empirically distinguishable. Thus, while there is reason to think that a unified account of the pragmatic processes involved in lexical pragmatics is possible (Wilson, to appear), the different types of inputs to these processes need to be recognised

The extremal algebra on two hermitians with square 1

Let Ea(u,v) be the extremal algebra determined by two hermitians u and v with u2 = v2 = 1. We show that: Ea(u,v) = {f=gu:f,g ε C(T)}, where T is the unit circle; Ea(u,v) is C*-equivelant to C*(G), where G is the infinite dihedral group; most of the hermitian elements k od Ea(u,v) have the property that kn is hermitian for all odd n but for no even n; any two hermitian words in G generate an isometric copy of Ea(u,v) in Ea(u,v)

Перші знахідки іржастих грибів (порядок Uredinales) в Ічнянському національному природному парку

В ходе микологического обследования Ичнянского национального природного парка в 2006 г. получены первые сведения о ржавчинных грибах данной территории. Выявлено 33 вида из 8 родов ржавчинных грибов, паразитирующих на 39 видах 19 семейств цветковых растений. Наибольшее число видов (19) принадлежит к роду Puccinia Pers. Род Phragmidium Link представлен четырьмя видами, роды Melampsora Castagne и Uromyces (Link) Unger — тремя, а роды Coleosporium Lйv., Cronartium Fr. Gymnosporangium R. Hedw. ex DC. и Pucciniastrum G.H. Otth — одним видом каждый.33 species of the order Uredinales were recorded for the Ichniansky National Nature Park in 2006. Nineteen species belong to the genus Puccinia Pers, Phragmidium Link is represented by four species, Melampsora Castagne and Uromyces (Link) Unger — by three each, Coleosporium Lev., Cronartium Fr, Gymnosporangium R. Hedw. ex DC. and Pucciniastrum G.H. Otth — by one species each

Book Review: Ute Eitzenhöfer Schmuck Jewellery

Book review: Ute Eitzenhöfer Schmuck Jewellery by Cornelie Holzach, Wilhelm Lindemann, Marjan Unger. Arnoldsche. ISBN 978-3-89790-406-

The non-linearity between <ln A> and <Xmax> induced by the acceptance of fluorescence telescopes

The measurement of the average depth of the shower maximum is the most commonly used observable for the possible inference of the primary cosmic-ray mass composition. Currently, different experimental Collaborations process and present their data not in the same way, leading to problems in the comparability and interpretation of the results. Whereas is expected to be proportional to in ideal conditions, we demonstrate that the finite field-of-view of fluorescence telescopes plus the attenuation in the atmosphere can introduce a non-linearity into this relation, which is specific for each particular detector setup