The Purpose Of Torture In Genocide

Genocide is a mass killing of a group of people targeted because of their social class or ethnicity. The cause of genocide mainly happens during a great conflict within a country where the government targets a group of people making them appear as a threat to the nation. However, genocide is more than mass killings, these groups of people are normally tortured. The purpose of torture in genocide is to further dehumanize the persecuted, by grouping them all together as a unit. This is because once a person is no longer an individual, it makes it easier for normal citizens to torture and kill a considerable number of people. There are many ways people can be tortured such as starvation, beatings, humiliation, and enslavement to name a few.

Torture can also be used as an interrogation technique to get information or confession from people. In the course of certain instances such as Auschwitz, the camp for Bosnian Muslims, or in Tuol Sleng, the persecutors did not kill everyone immediately. They delayed the process, for an extended amount of time and in some cases there was a complete indifference for human life that, eventually led to death from slow deprivation and rough treatment. During the Holocaust, Nazi tortured millions of people through freezing, starvation, experimentation, and extracting confessions from their victims. If the victim did not confess they would still be killed. An example of this is in June 1942 a young man named Sosnowiec Jew named Harry Blumenfrucht endureed two weeks of Nazi torture, refusing to name his co-conspirators in a scheme to steal weapons. His suffering ends when he is hanged. Nazi Germany, was trying to completely destroy a sense of family and community, which is what

The target group was the Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats. Like the Nazi’s the Serbs thought that they were superior to the Muslims and Croats, and if you disagreed with their regime a person would probably be tortured or killed. Torture was used to humiliate these people a firsthand account of this is when,

A woman from north-west Bosnia who had been kept in a primary school and had been exchanged for a Serbian army officer trembled as she described how she had been hit in the face by guards and how they stamped on her feet “My husband was next to me, he shook like a reed as they did this to me. We thought they would execute us. You cannot imagine the fear. He was a teacher and many of the guards had been his pupils. Some of them got very bad marks so they made him wear a woman’s wig. They beat him every day.

These violent actions, where supposed to frighten the Muslim population into fleeing if not caught and killed. The Serbs also made Muslims inflict injuries to one another to further destroy every aspect of these people’s