How Were The Jews Dehumanized By The Nazis?

    One of the biggest examples of dehumanization in WWII was Hitler himself. Essentially everything that Hitler did while he was in power, dehumanized the Jews. To begin, Hitler started out making the Jewish people wear star badges that alienated them from normal society. “Three days later, a new decree: every Jew had to wear a yellow star.” (Wiesel 11). This quote is from the novel and explains that the Jews started to wear the badges. The novel continues to tell how the Jewish people were very afraid of this change, and they should have been because then came the ghettos. “Two ghettos were created in Sighet.” “The barbed wire that encircled us like a wall did not fill us with real fear.” (Wiesel 11). This illustrates the unsettling situation the Jewish people were in because they were being caged in like animals. They were not even afraid of the barbed wire around their small community. The

Dehumanization is when one people group is viewed as subhuman to another people group. The Nazis did everything they could to degrade and dehumanize the Jewish people. When the Jewish people were deported, they were shoved into cattle cars for days long trips with little food, air, or water. All of their personal belongings were stripped from them. The prisoners were shaved bald and referred to only by their assigned numbers, never their real name (Wiesel 22-42). This was all an attempt to dehumanize the Jewish people, making them nothing but a number. On the other hand, the Ukrainians were considered traitors to the Soviet Union and placed below the people of Russia. The blame was placed on the Ukrainian peasants’ shoulders when there was a shortage of grain. Vladimir Lenin, the predecessor of Joseph Stalin wrote a tirade against the kulaks, calling them “bloodsuckers” and “plunderers” (source 1). Although both the Jews and the Kulaks were dehumanized and not seen as citizens of the country they lived in, the dehumanization process was different for

Another way the Germans dehumanized the Jews was by taking away all of their belongings. Some of these items they could live without, but they definitely did not realize how much they took them for granted. Lastly, the Jews were given numbers instead of their names. As the novel claimed, “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). This act of taking away the Jews names and replacing them with numbers is an inhumane act which is dehumanizing towards them. People do not realize that something as simple as a name can have so much meaning until it is taken away. Therefore, the Germans stripped the Jews of everything that resembled a past life, which was dehumanizing.

The Holocaust which was one of many of the controversial events that have happened in the history of our world demonstrated a significant amount of cruelty and dehumanization. Because of such a controversial event, many have suffered through physical and unfortunately psychological upheaval and distress. With previous knowledge and novels’ read on the Holocaust, it came to be known that the event was triggered through obedience and conformity due to the not specifically the Germans’ beliefs of anti-Semitic and propaganda, but more of leader Adolf Hitler. The time of the Holocaust was used to dehumanize which enhanced the understanding of mental health and human psychology. During the Holocaust, many psychological principles affected individuals forever. The principles include groupthink and of course knowing the outcome of the event. Such principles sooner explain the reality of life because it stresses how individuals react due to their past experiences like the Holocaust and most importantly how traumatic events build them as who they are today.  Innocent Jews went through starvation, terrible working conditions, and the elimination of race through torture such as gas chambers. Furthermore, the history of this controversial event is now being used to be alert of the health and wellness of those who have gone through such events that sooner change their behavior and mentality for the better or even worse.

In the passage above there were a couple of examples that Elie, and the other Jews were being dehumanized and just treated so poorly that it left a horrible image in Elie's head replaying over and

The Jews were starved to death, shot down for the most pointless reasons, were put through all different kinds of torture. Those who survived were forced to work in labor camps, all because Adolf Hitler had a bone to pick with Jews. Adolf Hitler was a dictator who had 850,000 Nazis under his hand. He despised Jews, and used his forces to take Jews hostage and force them to work in concentration camps. Ironically enough, it is believed that Hitler may have had Jewish ancestry. He wanted to rid the world of Jews, creating what he believed to be a perfect civilization.

One of the methods of dehumanization was separating families.”Men to the left, women to the right”(29). Hitler didn’t care about how the Jews felt. Jews were treated like force breeding farms for animals. They did not have a lot of food and bad living conditions. “The beloved objects that we had carried with us from place to place were now left behind in the wagon and, with them, finally, our illusions”(29). Jews weren’t considered humans and so they didn’t get to have human like possessions. Everything they owned was just taken away from them and they never got to see it again.

Dehumanization can be broken down quite simple, ironically. The Nazi’s tore down people by taking away their unwritten rights as people. People tend to identify themselves in many ways, such as “that who they are”. The Nazi’s were able to take this part away the fastest. As soon as the prisoners got taken to the concentration camps, they were given a shower, stripped of their clothing, given ill-fitting, worn down clothes, shaved their heads, took their

The Jews were treated as objects. Often times in the book, they would be referred to as dogs. For example, a guard says, “...if anyone of you goes missing, you will be shot, like dogs.” This is labeling the Jews as inferior and not important to the world. Everything is taken from the Jews to where they are basically no more important than a dog. Another example that shows how badly they were dehumanized and mistreated is something Elie said, “ ...all that mattered to me was my daily bowl of soup, my crust of stale bread.” This shows that he was to the point that he didn’t care about anything else but survival. This is sort of like the mindset of an animal, they only care about the necessities.

During the Holocaust, German Nazis slaughtered Jewish people and held them prisoner as well. While they were held captive, the Jewish people were often dehumanized. Dehumanization is defined as the process of depriving a person or group of human qualities. Throughout the book Night by Elie Wiesel, there is many examples of dehumanization, like taking away personal identities, starvation, and being forced to watch others be murdered that helped Adolf Hitler achieve his ends.

Dehumanization, however, did not happen right at the beginning of the war, it was a process that turned people into killing machines. As Christopher Browning mentioned in the very beginning of Ordinary Men, not every German came into Reserve Police Battalion 101 to participate in the holocaust. In fact, “most people were middle-aged family men of working- and lower-middle-class background from Hamburg…Most were raw recruit with no previous experience in German-occupied territory” (1). Same with the American and Japanese soldiers, before the war began, they were all ordinary people with no military experience most

Dehumanization is the process by which the Nazis gradually reduced the Jews to little more than "things" which were a nuisance to them. Discuss at least three specific examples of events that occurred which dehumanized Eliezer, his father, or his fellow Jews.

Dehumanization played a big role in the holocaust the Nazis reduced the Jews from living human beings to objects and numbers. “Night” by Elie Wiesel published in 1958. In the novel “Night” is about Elie and his time in a concentration camp and how he survived the holocaust. Being separated from his mother and sisters and only left with his father.Dehumanization the process in which the Nazis reduced the Jews from people to objects and numbers.

Throughout Night, dehumanization consistently took place as the tyrant Nazis oppressed the Jewish citizens. The Nazis targeted the Jews' humanity, and slowly dissolved their feeling of being human. This loss of humanity led to a weakened will in the Holocaust victims, and essentially led to death in many. The Nazis had an abundance of practices to dehumanize the Jews including beatings, starvation, theft of possessions, separation of families, crude murders, forced labor, and much more. There is no greater loss than that of humanity, so one can never truly relate to the horrors of dehumanization the Jews faced. In the list below, I will compile various examples that correlate to this theme of dehumanization.

Victims of the Nazism was every people who were sent to Camps or were killed by a Nazi. These people were disabled people, Jews, Romani, Slavs, POW, Ukrainians, Poles, Soviet Slavs, Non-European, Gay and Lesbians, Political, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roman Catholics, Protestants, Freemasons. But the worst part was even their own people was killed for helping the Jews or anyone that tried to. It was just a big genocide that History will never