Germany to remove antisemitic Nazi-made changes to its phonetic alphabet

• Published date: 06 December 2020
• Date: 06 December 2020
• Author: SARAH CHEMLA
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

And to this end, mankind invented a specific alphabet for just this. The phonetic alphabet, which is known as the aviation or NATO alphabet, is understood across the world in every language, and uses a specific set of names and terms to represent letters. For instance, A = Alfa, B = Bravo, C = Charlie and so on.

But this is not the only version of a phonetic alphabet to have existed, with the first German version going back to the 1890 Berlin telephone book, in which every letter was assigned a number. In 1905, the numbers were replaced by names. While only five changes were made in the years of the Weimar Republic (Paul became Paula in 1926, and Isidor became Ida), more drastic changes were made during Nazi rule over Germany, according to German news outlet the Deutsche Welle.

Based on their antisemitic ideology and in order to eradicate all Jewish culture and connotation from Germany, the Nazis decided to get rid of first names from this alphabet that were seen as derived from Hebrew. In total, 14 names from this alphabet were changed.

Some of the Jewish names removed by the Nazis in 1934 were "Jacob" for the letter "J"; "Samuel" for "S"; "David" for "D"; "Albert" for "A"; and "Zacharias" for "Z," which became respectively "Julius," "Siegfried," "Dora," "Anton" and "Zeppelin."

The name Nathan was changed to Nordpol - North Pole - which stood for the Aryan master race, according to DW. Ypsilon - the German word for the letter "y" - was changed to Ypres, famously known as the battle where the Germans first used poison gas in World War One.

After World War II, Ypres was changed back to Ypsilon, but Nordpol is still in use in the German alphabet today, reported DW.

However, Michael Blume, in charge of...