Griffin Secrets

A German boy in the time of Concentration Camps in WWII, Heinz was a homosexual who knew to conceal his secret. Heinz knew that he would be killed if anyone found out about his lifestyle, and told no one about his secret besides his mother. However, the Nazis eventually discovered a picture of Heinz with his lover, and sent him to a Concentration Camp to be killed. These individuals being forced to conceal their lifestyles is, in a way, forcing them to conceal who they truly are. Keeping secrets from others, in a way, means that they have not fully come to terms with who they are.

At the start of grade school, Hitler’s father, Alois, retired from his job at the Austrian Civil Service. Hitler’s environment at school was very stressful because his teachers were very strict. His environment at home was also stressful. His father was used to giving orders at work and having them obeyed and he did the same thing at home. In addition, money was very scarce because there were five people, his father, Alois, his mother, Maria, an older half brother, Alois Jr., a younger brother, Edmund, a younger sister, Paula, and himself; all living on his father’s pension. His home life was also unstable and he was made to feel like an outsider: 1) even though he had two parents, Alois was verbally and physically abusive to Hitler’s older brother, Alois Jr., practically ignoring Hitler, while his mother was so focused on the younger children, she neglected the older ones and 2) because money was scarce, they moved around frequently, so he changed schools often while his living spaces got smaller. After his brother ran away at the age of 14, Hitler’s father turned his abusive behavior on Hitler with beatings and constantly talking down to

Susan Griffin's "Our Secret" is a study in psychology. It is a look into the human mind to see what makes people do the things they do and in particular what makes people commit acts of violence. She isolates the first half of the twentieth century and in particular the era of the Second World War as a basis for her study. The essay discusses a number of people but they all tie in to Heinrich Himmler. He is the extreme case, he who can be linked directly to every single death in the concentration camps. Griffin seeks to examine Himmler because if she can discern a monster like Himmler than everyone else simply falls into place. The essay also tries to deduce why something like the Holocaust, although never mentioned directly, can

Lest we forget” Baker’s attitude leads his mother to question, “Does history remember more than memory?” Here, rhetorical questioning indicates the way in which private memories are often abandoned in favour of public representations of historical events. The public representation of the Indigenous history is the one written from the European perspective, whilst the private memories, from the Indigenous perspective, similarly to Genia’s, are often forgotten or not validated. However, Baker soon comes to realise that these memories of his mother are just as valuable, if not more, than those of his father. He acknowledges that; “Unlike my father, she could never show her children the scars on her arm; hers were invisible, numbered in the days and years of her stolen childhood”. Through metaphysical imagery, Baker, and ultimately the audience, recognise the eloquence and value of Genia’s memories in shaping a voice and persona that, although equally valid to those of other survivors, has not been publicly recognised.

What is the story, or narrative the scene presented? Explain what you see in the artwork.

Which is in the part where the little boy goes around asking if the man in the car was Himmler saying “are you Himmler”. What I thought was that the character was just Hitler with a different way like some authors do. But I was wrong just like you after a little research I found out that Himmler was Hitler’s right hand man. And he was the one to come up with the idea to put all the Jews in a ghetto. And to see if his plan was good for other places he would go and drive around them to see how it was doing. And that is where you get the seen in the book where he is in a

The perpetrators of the Holocaust are often generalized as direct products of ideological indoctrination into a stream of omnipresent German culture that is assumed to be supremely sadistic and motivated only by “evil” factors. However, it is impossible to label all of the perpetrators with one trait or name, when the Holocaust was the multi-causal. This means that there were several types of perpetrators, and therefor the Holocaust was the result of combined efforts by a diverse group, each with their own reasons for participating and fulfilling various roles throughout different stages of the time period. Mary Fulbrook illustrates the example of landrat Udo Klausa in her book A Small Town Near Auschwitz, which shows that many individuals were simply fulfilling responsibilities for their careers, and were “blind” to the severity and impact of their own role as perpetrators. In remembering these people, it is easy to forget that they were civilians first and foremost. Looking to Katharina von Kellenbach’s Mark of Cain, there is further evidence that a lack of transparency was a severe issue in the Hitler administration, trickling

When Reich was 14, he discovered his mother was having an affair with his tutor. After Reich reported this to his father, his mother committed suicide. Atwood and Stolorow (1977) have speculated that this tragedy may have contributed to Reich's most significant theories.

History shows the mistakes human beings have made over the different time periods. But, because of the many mistakes, history will not repeats its error. In the fictional selections, Of mice and men, Fences, Things they carried and Night, the authors use fiction to fill in the gaps that history cannot capture. These fictional stories have showed the different time periods were history has committed mistakes. The authors creates the selections to develop the theme of learn from your mistakes and do not repeat them.

The text is noted for its sharp criticism of the tactics used to embody the whole of the Nazi party's crimes in the form of one seemingly meek bureaucrat. However, the text is also the subject of considerable criticism itself for a tone that seems both to minimize the Jewish suffering in the Holocaust and to purposively gloss over the truly determinant role played by Eichmann in the implementation of the Final Solution.

History that has been “lost” can be recollected through family pictures and helps recreate the memory. Felix’s faith in the clear and unalterable history is constantly jeopardized by the repeated images of a broken and commercialized culture. His self-consciousness about ambitions and worry prompt the need for the of fragmented recounted memories. Felix’s is continually paying homage to an absent past hoping to fix it as the only “gesture that includes the future”, this pattern continues through the novel as each character remembers pictures as their own experience: "Oh, God when I think back to my past...my mother, with hair… as red as a fire kicked over in spring.... She had a hat on her as big as the top of a table, and everything on it but running water...and my father sitting up beside

On his writing, Browning shows how “ordinary” men can change their beliefs and their common sense because of the influence of others. In this book, soldiers of the WWII were influenced by the government of Hitler. Browning called it "atrocity by policy” because the damage caused by soldiers wasn’t spontaneous but indeed planned methodically by the government, they had calculations and plans. In addition, Browning explains how members of the police battalion (a Nazi paramilitary formation) slowly started enjoying the idea of murder and torture innocent people. “As in combat, the horrors of the initial encounter eventually became routine” (Browning 1992, p. 161).

The novel's reliance on external documentation and expert testimony, as previously noted, reinforces the illusion of documentary realism. Long passages are quoted verbatim from confessions, letters, psychiatric evaluations, and transcriptions of court proceedings, thus providing further evidence that the novel is reporting rather than interpreting or creating. (Guest

American journalist, Harold Burson asserts that that Fyfe’s skill and knowledge was the crux of the successful attempts in frustrating and finally overcoming the challenging and tough-to-defeat defendant that Goering was (Burson, “Nuremberg Scripts”). This perspective contradicts that of Telford Taylor, who claims that the results of Fyfe’s more stringent interrogations show that the weakness in Goering’s defense was the primary reason for his indictment; as it inferred that his argument, after the bombast, could not stand with any substance (Taylor, 378). However, whilst the defendant’s defense may have been lacking in areas, ultimately, it was the strength in Maxwell-Fyfe’s tactic and his crafty use of evidence that weakened Goering’s defense. It enabled the people to finally see the truth of the behaviors and activities surrounding the war, and brought about the necessary contradictions to his consistent claims (Nazis on

In “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Hannah Arendt analyzes Adolph Eichmann while he is on trial in Jerusalem for the crimes that he committed while being a Lieutenant Colonel in the SS during the Nazi Regime. In the book Arendt talks about how Eichmann’s actions were “banal” in the sense that he seemed to be an ordinary person who just committed acts that were evil. Italian-Jewish Writer Primo Levi, a Holocaust Survivor, states that SS officers like Eichmann lived in their own self-deception that made them believe that their actions were caused by just following their orders in the SS. In this paper, I will analyze the views that both Arendt and Levi had about the Eichmann trial and then compare and state the differences of their views. I will then explain the reasons why both Hannah Arendt’s and Primo Levi’s analysis of Adolph Eichmann that show that the actions that he committed were all truly evil actions.