Psychology explains the Holocaust
During the 1930s-1940s, Jewish people all over Europe suffered through the Holocaust. The SS officers and German soldiers, captured millions of families and placed them into concentration camps where death awaited them. There were several steps that lead to the annihilation of the Jewish population. The Nazis used a variety of effective psychological techniques against the Jewish communities from beginning to the end of the massacre. The psychological techniques used during the beginning of the Holocaust were much more impactful than those used at the end.
In the early 1930s, the Nazis used propaganda methods along with conformity/obedience techniques to convince the German race to contribute to the Jewish extermination. The Nazi party slowly convinced the
…show more content…
The Nazis may have not reached their goal of killing each and every Jew, but they canceled out the majority of the population and scarred those who did survive through the Holocaust. Their psychological manipulations succeeded in the sense that a Jewish individual, although not physically dead, was mentally drained. In the article, “Holocaust Survivors Had Skills to Prosper,” most of the Jews who survived suffered from PTSD. Goleman writes, “Close to two-thirds of the survivors said they got upset easily, more than half said they worried so much they had trouble sleeping, and a third said they felt afraid of many things.” These symptoms, prove that the psychological techniques used on the Jews heavily impacted their lives. Though it may have not killed some of the Jews, these techniques still affected them and had most Jews feeling as if they were already “dead”. The probability of a Jew who would fully forget their experience in the camps, was slim to