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The Causes Of Dehumanization : The History Of The Holocaust?

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It’s highly debated if revenge is a basic human trait or not, some say that to not want revenge is against human nature. Yet, after being tortured, starved, brutalized and massacred, after witnessing the death of millions and being stripped of their modern urges, those who survived didn’t care for revenge in the slightest. When the Jewish men and women who survived Nazi death camps and the slaughter of the holocaust were freed, they had been reduced to less than human. Their minds were numbed, and their focus remained only on what their basic survival instincts told them: food, water, sex, shelter. No revenge, remembrance, celebration, just survival. As awful as Nazis are, they were incredibly intelligent in WWII. For years, they looked into the psychology of humans and figured out how to make the Jewish “race” exactly what they thought Jews already were; subhuman. Dehumanization was a vicious process used in WWII to make Jewish laborers into the three-quarters human beings that Hitler thought they were. Dehumanization is a way to keep prisoners from wanting to will themselves forward. It’s only four step process, definition, scapegoating, discrimination, persecution. The first two steps in the process, definition and scapegoating, were the most subtle stages. The Jewish population in europe were forced to identify themselves with a yellow star of david visibly sewn into all of their clothes in 1939 until the end of the war. This took away the individuality from anybody

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