Examples Of Dehumanization

During the Holocaust, people in the Nazi’s custody were treated as less than human. According to “Jakob’s Story”, the Nazi’s gave their prisoners little food and only one meal a day. Jakob writes “we ate one meal a day and it consisted of soup with potato peels; scraps of food from the SS” (Blankitny, paragraph 17). Here one can see that the Nazi’s looked down upon their prisoners and treated them as less than

There has been many stories on how cruel the victims of the Holocaust were treated, especially in the concentration camps. The Auschwitz concentration camps, out of many other camps is where this all occurred.The victims were abused and put through forced labor, it was physically and mentally hard for them to live in the camps knowing in the matter of days they will die. The prisoners in the camps were forced to work, the sick and disabled prisoners were killed as they were seen as “useless” since they were not capable of working. The labor consisted of digging ditches, leveling the ground, laying roads, and constructing new blocks and buildings for a tough 11-14 hours a day. During the tiring and inevitable hours of working, the prisoners had small rations of food.The meals were

They have been stripped from everything from material items to culture and humanity. In this section, it is shows how the Nazi’s are trying to strip everything away in a horrible mannerism that the concept is difficult to explain in any language and a new language is brought from the pain and suffering that is happening. Another exampling of the dehumanization in Auschwitz is prisoners being stripped from everything they had, including their identity. “I have learned that I am Haftling. My number is 174517”(pg 13). Haftling in German means prisoner. The final step has been acted on. Those in the prison are officially stripped from their identity and given a number. This not only shows how they are being seen, which is basically nothing since they are just a number now, but also this show the ultimate plan to dehumanize their prisoners. They have been taken away from families, culture and life. Once someone takes away your identity, does one really

Throughout the entire novel the theme of dehumanization is particularly evident in both the prisoner workers and the transport prisoners. The Nazi guards are said to have “beefy” (pg. 41) faces, while an S.S. officer is described as having a “rat-like smile” as she “sniffed around” (pg. 41) the ramp. Prisoners are referred to as “standing around like sheep” (pg. 48). Starving Greek prisoners are compared to “huge human insects” (pg. 35). Even the transport trucks are called “mad dogs” (pg. 41). Everyone is treated and processed like livestock. “Trucks drive around, loading up lumber, cement, people” (pg. 34), is yet another example of how a human life was lowered to that of a mere object. A corpse is simply a “mound of meat” (pg. 45), and dead babies are carried out of the transport “like chickens, several in each hand” (pg. 39). The poisonous compound Cyclone B used to kill the prisoners was “an effective killer of lice in clothing and of men in gas chambers” (pg. 29).

Dehumanization is the denial of human rights. Night by Elie Wiesel depicts the events that dehumanized the Jews during the holocaust. Hitler dehumanized the Jews by stripping them of their identities, treating them like animals and making them turn on one another.

The Jews had been starved while being detained in forced labor camp. Those who weren’t fit to work were killed and cremated. The most eye-opening description of the Jewish peoples’ state in the concentration camp came at the very end of the book. After being freed, Wiesel looked in a mirror for the first since his arrival at the camp. Wiesel described his reflection as a “corpse” and stated “the look in his eyes… has never left me.” (Wiesel 115). Not only had the Nazis carried out a brutal campaign on the Jews’ physical being, but they had also infiltrated deep into their psyche. Upon arrival at camps, all Jews’ were forced to hand over all of their clothes and wearing matching uniforms. After that, the prisoners’ were sent to the barber. Wiesel described the process, stating, “[The barbers’] clippers tore out our hair, shaved every hair on our bodies.” (Wiesel 35). After this process, every Jew was tattooed with a number. This process lead to the ego-death of every prisoner. They were no longer people: they were numbers. Nothing differentiated one Jew from another, besides the numbers tattooed on them. This horrendous act could only be classified as psychological torture, carried out by monsters who had lost control of their own

The concentration camps from World War II are part of a painful and tragic incident that we have learned about in school for many years. And while we are taught the facts, we may not fully understand the emotional impact it had upon the humans involved. Upon reading Night by Elie Wiesel, readers are given vivid descriptions of the gruesome and tragic behaviors that the Jews were forced to endure inside he treacherous concentration camps. Among all of the cruelties that the Jews were exposed to, a very significant form of the callous behaviors was the demoralization of the prisoners. Each inmate was given a tattoo of a number, and that tattoo became their new identity within the camp. Every prisoner was presented with tattered uniforms that became

Everyone who has taken a history course that goes through the 20th century knows about the atrocities performed in Nazi Germany; 11 million people exterminated and countless others put into concentration camps with unimaginable conditions. But most people do not try to explain how the German soldiers could do these things to other human beings. Primo Levi in his book Survival in Auschwitz attempts to answer this question. He begins by explaining the physical and psychological transformation of the prisoners and how that enabled the Germans to see the prisoners as inhuman and therefore oppress-able. Levi believes that the Germans treated the Jewish prisoners horrendously because of the prisoner’s

The Germans decided not just to kill all the Jews but dehumanizing them instead, what impact did this have on the inmates of the concentration camps? The humanity of people is fragile and can be stripped away leading to a demeaned human nature.

Dehumanization is understood as the process of humans being deprived of what makes them human, but the Nazis took it a step further to encourage mistreatment between the prisoners . The Holocaust is a ghastly event in the history of the world, that killed around 6 million Jewish people, but the horrors don’t stop there. The way the prisoners were treated in the concentration camps left lasting effects on the survivors. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, he recounts the horrific actions of the Nazi party against the Jewish people . The lasting effects of dehumanization do not take long to show, and the effects are only worsened through the numerous reminders from the Nazis that they aren’t worth anything.

This is one of the first situations in the book that exemplifies going through a hard time. In this case the concentration camps, can change who you are as a person even after you have already developed your own

This passage analyzes just how shameful it was for the jews to enter the camp, they were immediately exposed in front of everybody they knew and strangers far and wide. They had been stripped of their dignity and dehumanized in the process of their long journey. Wiesel recalls in his book Night, “The three “veteran” prisoners, needles in hand, tattooed numbers on our left arms. I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name” (Wiesel, 42). The text aboves emphasizes how the jews at the camp had been seen as prisoners and nothing more, and in most instances they were treated like animals. Given a branded number, herded hundreds of miles across Europe, and fed very little. The people of jewish culture had been stripped of their remaining recognition, their names. As the book continues on, treatment of the prisoners gets worse and worse, to the point where they are barely fed and given water. Wiesel continues on in his book Night, “Hunger was tormenting us; we had not eaten for nearly six days except for a few stalks of grass and some potato peels found on the grounds of the kitchen” (Wiesel, 115). By taking away food and water from the prisoners of the camp, the jews became skinnier and skinnier, everyday they became more unhealthy as they

How much longer could the Jews of Sighet withstand fighting for their lives, facing unbearable hunger, and striving to push forward as insignificant people? In the memoir Night, dehumanization was when the barbarous Nazis mistreated the Jewish citizens. The Nazis made the Jews feel as if they were not human. The Nazis had a profusion of starving, humiliation, brainwashing, severe labor, and painful murders of innocent Jewish citizens. There was no feeling stronger than the loss of humanity the horrific events that the Jewish population faced.

Primo Levi, in his novel Survival in Auschwitz (2008), illustrates the atrocities inflicted upon the prisoners of the concentration camp by the Schutzstaffel, through dehumanization. Levi describes “the denial of humanness” constantly forced upon the prisoners through similes, metaphors, and imagery of animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization (“Dehumanization”). He makes his readers aware of the cruel reality in the concentration camp in order to help them examine the psychological effects dehumanization has not only on those dehumanized, but also on those who dehumanize. He establishes an earnest and reflective tone with his audience yearning to grasp the reality of genocide.

Eighteen million Europeans went through the Nazi concentration camps. Eleven million of them died, almost half of them at Auschwitz alone.1 Concentration camps are a revolting and embarrassing part of the world’s history. There is no doubt that concentration camps are a dark and depressing topic. Despite this, it is a subject that needs to be brought out into the open. The world needs to be educated on the tragedies of the concentration camps to prevent the reoccurrence of the Holocaust. Hitler’s camps imprisoned, tortured, and killed millions of Jews for over five years. Life in the Nazi concentration camps was full of terror and death for its individual prisoners as well as the entire Jewish