But Blume insisted the switch in itself was “an important symbolic gesture”. It will probably only be in use until autumn 2022, by which time an updated version is expected to be registered with DIN that will probably rely on city names. The eradication of Jewish names was a warning to anyone paying attention of the intent to eradicate millions of Jewish lives just a few years on.īlume has advocated switching back to the pre-1934 version, the so-called Weimar table. Historians have said the Nazi move to edit the spelling table, initially a seemingly minimal bureaucratic change in German life, holds an important lesson. While some words were officially changed back in the late 1940s – Siegfried was switched back to Samuel, for example – the Nazi version has remained the dominant one that most people have continued to use. In the Nazi’s pseudoscientific ideology, the north pole was seen as the original home of the Aryans. “Just in that one name change, Nathan to Nordpol, which we still use today, you can see how deeply into our language and our thinking this Nazi idea has seeped, with no one really questioning it,” he told the broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. The fact it had stayed in place for so long, he said, was proof in itself of a “deep-seated antisemitic and racist mindset” in Germany. Michael Blume, the ombudsman for antisemitism in the state of Baden-Württemberg – a post recently introduced in 13 states across the country to tackle growing attacks against Jews in Germany – has been leading a quiet campaign to get rid of the Nazi version of the system. The list is officially registered with the German Institute for Standardisation (DIN), which regulates everything from the size of chairs to paperclips, under the DIN or norm number 5009. While that uses the words Alpha, Bravo, Charlie etc to help make spelling out words easier, the German equivalent uses Anton, Berta, Cäsar. The international equivalent is the Nato phonetic alphabet. The preference was for Nordic names to replace Jewish ones, and where no suitable ones could be found, such as N (originally “Nathan”), an object or placename, such as “Nordpol” (north pole), was chosen instead. “Samuel” was replaced by “Siegfried” to represent the letter S, “Zacharias” became “Zeppelin” for Z, and “David” was switched to “Dora”.
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