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Redeker And Hitler Comparison

Decent Essays

Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass.” Auschwitz. Mass genocide. These words can never be uttered without the mention of Adolf Hitler, perhaps the cruelest man ever to walk this earth. Even fiction characters in books and movies have difficulty matching his barbaric status. However, in World War Z, the author, Max Brooks, comes very close to creating a character as evil and cruel as Hitler. Brooks portrays Redeker as a fictitious Hitler, but the difference between Redeker and Hitler is that the people of South Africa needed Redeker’s twisted brilliance, while the people of Germany would have been far better off without Hitler’s psychotic ideas.
Redeker and Hitler’s perception among the people and their personal characteristics are strikingly …show more content…

Both plans have similarities, but the result of each is vastly different. Redeker condemned thousands, possibly millions, of people to death in order to save a select population. In his previous plan, Orange Eighty-Four, Redeker “had even gone so far as to calculate who should be ‘brought aboard’” (72), or who should be saved. Redeker took natural selection to the extreme, creating a group of people he thought would best be able to continue running and strengthening the country, while sacrificing the rest of the country to act as “’human bait’” (73) for the undead. Similarly, Hitler methodically exterminated groups of people he thought to be unfit and would not contribute to society. He was convinced Aryans were the master race, and were the ones who should rule the world. This idea was so firmly planted in Hitler’s mind that he went to war to accomplish this goal. Ultimately, he lost and it cost him his life. It cost his country much more: years of economic troubles with bigger reparations than after World War I, rebuilding the country physically and mentally, and a whole generation of young men almost nonexistent because of all the deaths in the war. Redeker’s plan had a slightly different ending. Although his plan was “insidiously dark,” it was also “genius” and according to the elder statesman, it would “’save our people’” (74). And ultimately, it

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