ipl-logo

Examples Of Dehumanization During The Holocaust

578 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Atrocities of the holocaust

The Holocaust was one of the most terrifying events that had scared the history of the Jewish people and will forever leave a mark in history as well. During the Holocaust millions of Jewish people were sent to concentration camps or killing centers to be exterminated. At the camps Jews were beaten, called names, and were treated badly as well. Also, in the camps and killing centers the SS guards would use a stick, their hand, or their foot to brutally beat the Jews. The names the Germans usually called the Jews were fools, devils, and much more. Throughout the Holocaust the Jewish people were dehumanized by inhumane conditions and brutal treatment. For example, the Jews were dehumanized through violence. When the Jewish people were in the concentration camps or killing centers, they were constantly abused by the SS guards. “Count the blows. If you lose count- I’ll start again” (Spiegelman 57)! This proves that they were dehumanized through violence because the texts states that the guard will do to again. That shows that if the Jew lost count, he would keep on doing it until he got it right. Also, since the Jews were constantly abused they could start losing hope because they were always getting beaten and after a while the Jews could see what was coming and just give up because they …show more content…

They were dehumanized through violence because after constantly getting beaten it could make them lose hope of being saved. Next, when the SS guards constantly called them names which could cause them to lose their humanity or more. The last way the Jews were dehumanized was through being treated like cargo because this caused the Jews to feel helpless and start to make them lose hope. In the time of the Holocaust the Jewish people were abused, call the names, and were treated badly. These three conditions had caused the Jews to be dehumanized in the time of the

Show More
Related
1208 Words | 5 Pages

Outside the concentration camps, the Nazis were still doing whatever they could to dehumanize Jews in Germany. They still viewed the Jews as a threat, so they “purged Jewish cultural organizations,” throughout Germany, by way of burning books (Book Burning). Nazi German authorities went around Germany and burned countless books that they thought had Jewish ties or anti-Nazi ideologies. The Jews in the concentration camps had no clue that their identity, history, and culture was being destroyed massively, which is a clear example of dehumanization. The systematic genocide of countless Jews, as well as many other factors, contributes to the understanding and significance of dehumanization for a military or

Read More
513 Words | 3 Pages

The Nazis believed the Germans were “racially superior” and the Jews were inferior (The Holocaust). Over 6 million Jews lost their lives during the Holocaust (The Holocaust). The main targets were Jews, disabled, Gypsies, and slavic people (The Holocaust). If they did not match the “social norms”, they were killed (The Holocaust). Between the years 1941 and 1944, Jews were deported to concentration camps where they were then killed (The Holocaust).

Read More
845 Words | 4 Pages

Dehumanization is the process of depriving a person or a group of positive human qualities. This process was widely used across concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Hitler used this tactic to gain power over the people he imprisoned. Dehumanization is a disturbing process that nobody should have to endure and its terrible that so many innocent people had to experience it. Dehumanization makes people lose the will to live and made it easier for the Nazi’s to exterminate the Jews.

Read More
892 Words | 4 Pages

and he also saw how his father and peers were treated less humanely. The dehumanization of jews began because of their belief, they did not believe in the same things that the Nazis did. The nazis thought they were impure souls because they were not like the them. It all began from the point the SS officers barged into their homes and told them they would be leaving their homes and going to the ghetto.

Read More
1093 Words | 5 Pages

From then on the Nazi’s treated their prisoners like objects rather than people. They dehumanized and desensitized them, thinking of them as machines that could only complete simple tasks and required a small bowl of broth with a single slice of bread to function. The Nazi’s took the victims of the Holocaust and stripped them of their identities, violated them beyond their breaking point, and wiped them clean of all emotion. First of all, the SS dehumanized the prisoners of the concentration camps by stripping them of their identities. The Nazi’s infringed upon people’s everyday lives and deprived them of their originality.

Read More
855 Words | 4 Pages

They thrived, then cried, and died. They were dehumanized, and so was society. Between 1941 and 1945, the Nazis attempted to annihilate all European Jews. This systematic and planned attempt to murder European Jewry is known as the Holocaust. There were actions taken at the time to show that people were anti-Semitic; hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.

Read More
215 Words | 1 Pages

Dehumanization During World War II, countless races were discarded as nugatory content to the Nazis. They aimed their spite mostly at Jews, who were handled like savages and brutes. In concentration camps where many Jews were tortured and even burned to death, they were forced to sleep in taut spaces and were barely

Read More
113 Words | 1 Pages

Dehumanizing is the taking away of human qualities. All of the Jews were dehumanized during the Holocaust. The Nazis dehumanized the Jews by loading them into cattle cars, tattooing them, and stripped them all naked. Eliezer and all of his fellow Jews were loaded into cattle cars like animals (98). They were loaded into car by the hundred.

Read More
517 Words | 3 Pages

They started to only focus on themselves by fighting their loved ones for food and hurting others for money. Dehumanization really struck throughout the Holocaust, from when the SS officers started tattooing numbers and letters on the Jews used as identification methods, this is very similar to branding, which is a process performed on cows. The Jews weren’t being treated like humans by the SS officers, which just added to the dehumanization process. Then soon after, the Jews started hurting each other and turning on each other to fend for themselves as if they were animals in the wild. Normally humans would look for some sort of revenge in times like this, but like Elie said, they had no thought of revenge when they were free, instead they chose to let the moment rest and stay as a time of remembrance for future generations.

Read More
903 Words | 4 Pages

They were systematically dehumanized, captures, and slaughtered. Many survivors have written about their time in the concentration camps, including Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel. His book, Night, has many examples of the dehumanization and discrimination that Jews faced. Upon first arriving to Auschwitz, the Nazis separated the Jews by gender. As soon as they stepped of the train, there were SS men saying “Men to the left!

Read More
1292 Words | 6 Pages

The Holocaust was a horrific tragedy which started in January of 1933 and ended in May of 1945, the Holocaust was the mass murder of millions of people. The word was derived from the Greek word that meant Sacrifice to the Gods (Steele 7), also called the Shoan which is the Hebrew word for catastrophe (Steele 7). So many countries took place in this 12-year genocide, including, “Germany, Italy, Japan, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, which were also known as the Axis Powers” (Steele 34). But, although there were all those countries they were all part of one larger group called the Nazis, were the ones who were killing all the different denominations of people. (Bachrach 58).

Read More
861 Words | 4 Pages

This played a large role in the dehumanization role because by taking away the beliefs of the Jews, which is a big part of their identity, they were reduced to shells of the people they

Read More
714 Words | 3 Pages

In Night one of the ways that the Jews were dehumanized was by abuse. There were beatings, “I never felt anything except the lashes of the whip... Only the first really hurt.” (Wiesel, 57) “They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs.

Read More
622 Words | 3 Pages

In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, courage is demonstrated throughout the novel by various characters. To begin, courage was shown when Elie’s father was too weak to continue working and was selected to be killed, so Elie ran after his father, determined not to lose him. Courageously he chased after his father, “... Several SS men rushed to find me, creating such a confusion that a number of people were able to switch over to the right-among them my father and I. Still, there were gunshots and some dead” (Wiesel 96).

Read More
600 Words | 3 Pages

In many ways, Nazis had physically, mentally, and emotionally dehumanized their victims. The Jews were treated so badly by the Nazis that they felt as if they weren’t even humans; they felt like animals. For example, the Jewish prisoners were always being yelled at with harsh tones. Eliezer only remembers one time when a Polish

Read More

More about Examples Of Dehumanization During The Holocaust

Related Topics

Open Document