Nazi-era phonetic alphabet to be revised with Jewish names

D as in "Dora" — or "David"? The Nazis had eliminated Jewish names from the German spelling alphabet. The names are to return, at least symbolically.

It is a common situation during a phone call: the person on the other end misunderstands a word, or spelling out a name becomes necessary. To clarify or prevent such misunderstandings, mankind invented the phonetic alphabet.

The international version, in fact, is understood all over the world no matter the language spoken, and is known as the aviation or NATO alphabet. Every letter is assigned a name or term to clarify which letter is meant.

The first German version goes back to the 1890 Berlin telephone book — every letter was assigned a number. In 1905, the numbers were replaced by names. Only five changes were made in the years of the Weimar Republic: Paul became Paula in 1926, and Isidor became Ida.

The Nazis got rid of Hebrew names

Then the Nazis seized power, and they made radical changes, not to simplify the alphabet but to satisfy their anti-Semitic ideology: They abolished 14 terms, including popular German-Hebrew first names like David, Jacob, Nathan, Samuel and Zacharias.

Names were swapped out: Anton for Albert and Dora for David. Two new terms were introduced that were particularly cynical: the Nazis replaced Nathan with Nordpol (North Pole) and Ypsilon (the German word for the letter "y") with the word Ypres.

In Nazi ideology, North Pole stands for the Aryan master race, while Ypres is the name of the Belgian city where German troops introduced lethal mustard gas during the First World War. After World War II, the use of Ypres was replaced by the German name of the letter Y, Ypsilon, but the term Nordpol is still in use in the German alphabet today.

During research for his 2019 book Why anti-Semitism threatens us all, Michael Blume came across the Nazi background of some of the terms in the cur