The images and the entire text used on this and all other USMBOOKS web pages are the copyrighted property of USM Inc.  Those images and the text may be used by others ONLY AFTER completion of a formal international licensing agreement and payment of a licensing fee! It is therefore, illegal for anyone to take any of the material found on USMBOOKS.com and use it for their own purposes without our written permission, irrespective of any excuse they may feel they have for doing so.

This Nazi picture dictionary was printed in 1943 in Germany by Verlag Sebastian Lux principally for the use of members of the German military who might encounter any of the 23 languages listed in their travels throughout Europe.

Europa in 23 Sprachen, 1000 Wörter Bildhaft dargestellt (Europe in 23 Languages, 1000 Words Depicted and Translated) measures 4-7/8 x 6-3/4 inch (123 x 169 mm) by about ½ inch thick and contains 232 extremely well-illustrated pages, each containing four color illustrations about 1-¼ inches square. In a box next to the numbered illustration are the words used in 23 other European languages to describe the item shown.

The languages next to each illustration is the German word for the item shown and the translation of the German word in Bulgarian, Danish, English, Finnish, French, Greek, Rumanian, Russian, Swedish, Serbian, Slovakian, Spanish, Czech, Turkish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Italian, Croatian, Dutch, Polish, and Swiss.

You can imagine how handy this would be for a soldier who suddenly found himself in Eastern Europe and needed to know the Bulgarian word for the German word Brille (eyeglasses or spectacles in English). The Bulgarian word is shown in Bulgarian lettering (similar to but slightly different from Russian Cyrillic letters) and translated into an easily pronounceable word for any German = otschila. The Russian equivalent for Brille is atschki, the French is lunettes, Croatian is naocari, while Greek is ta jialia, for example.

At the front of the book there is a pronunciation guide to show how a German should pronounce the letters of the alphabet and syllable combinations, abbreviations for the languages, an index and the categories of the words in this dictionary. Examples of the categories are military words, time, humans, clothing, food, numbers, geographical features, musical instruments, trees, animals, colors, as well as words used in the post office, railway station, hotel, sports, hospitals, etc., etc.

With a minimum of study, there is almost no normal circumstance where a German soldier would not be able to communicate very basic information in any of the 23 languages at a glance.

Published by Sebastian Lux of Munich in 1943 with assistance by the Goethe Institute and the German Academy in Munich.  This 80 year old example of Europa in 23 Sprachen is complete and in very nice used condition, with minor wear to the covers. The interior pages are in wonderful condition and the spine is tight. It even has the original correction slip for page 160! No odor.