The German Occupiers Is The Collection Of Short Stories

Recalling his devoted years to the Hitler Youth program, author Alfons Heck states “I have never once during the Hitler years thought of myself as anything but a decent, honorable young German, blessed with a glorious future” (206). This honesty conveyed by Heck elucidates the selfish ideals of those in the Hitler Youth, a theme apparent in the novel A Child of Hitler. Although Heck’s thoughts are self-conceited, they convey the opinions of those decieved by the Hitler Youth principles. As politically incorrect as these principles were, A Child of Hitler portrays them differently than other literature reporting on the subject. Through his descriptions of daily activities, Heck describes the pressure that children faced as Hitler Youth.

Soon, people around the world saw Hitler as a substantial menace as well as a vicious monster, however, people of Germany looked up to him and didn’t want to disappoint him, which made them work even harder and smarter. The terror of disappointment, loneliness, tragedy, and loss clouded their judgement. However, the most important part of this reading was the horror of what would happen if you’d get caught listening to the radio or sending something that shouldn’t be sent. All of the characters in this novel have changed for the better or worse. Fear changes people, and it significantly changed the characters in this

Maxine Kumin?s, Woodchucks provides an interesting and creative perspective into the mind state of those influenced by nazi warfare. What begins as a seemingly humorous cat and mouse hunt, reminiscent of such movie classics as Caddyshack, soon develops into an insatiable lust for blood. Kumin?s descriptive language provides the reader with the insight necessary to understand to the speaker?s psychology as they are driven beyond the boundaries of pacifism.

The events which have become to be known as The Holocaust have caused much debate and dispute among historians. Central to this varied dispute is the intentions and motives of the perpetrators, with a wide range of theories as to why such horrific events took place. The publication of Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial but bestselling book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” in many ways saw the reigniting of the debate and a flurry of scholarly and public interest. Central to Goldhagen’s disputed argument is the presentation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust as ordinary Germans who largely, willingly took part in the atrocities because of deeply held and violently strong anti-Semitic beliefs. This in many

Synopsis – Hitler’s Willing Executioners is a work that may change our understanding of the Holocaust and of Germany during the Nazi period. Daniel Goldhagen has revisited a question that history has come to treat as settled, and his researches have led him to the inescapable conclusion that none of the established answers holds true. Drawing on materials either unexplored or neglected by previous scholars, Goldhagen presents new evidence to show that many beliefs about the killers are fallacies. They were not primarily SS men or Nazi Party members, but perfectly ordinary Germans from all walks of life, men who brutalized and murdered Jews both willingly and zealously. “They acted as they did because of

Within Germany, a country torn between the rise of a totalitarian party that determined a superior race, Nazism, and the survival of the oppressed, young Germans face a test between a sense of self and society. Individuality would be suppressed within this new type of society, and being different would be the deadliest obstruction to life. The violations of the rights to life, religion, and speech are relived through the stories of the German youth that lived through this haunting time, whose name would be tarnished in their struggle to survive. In their fight, their morals would be challenged and influenced until the Nazi regime ended, and the violation of human dignity would leave them wondering if life was worth living after all. The Nazi Party grew under its leader, Adolf Hitler, which struggled not to use violence against those that disagreed with their views, starting with armed groups known as the Strum Abteilung, who pledged to be ready to sacrifice their life in the aims of the Nazi Party and absolute loyalty to their leader. Their cruel intolerance began by their strong nationalism and their hatred of democracy and communism, and they gained power through the economic depressions around the world, controlling the media by instilling fear and propaganda that influenced a strong belief in their leaders. This belief in the leaders would soon seem to override Church influence when the official body of the Church failed to do anything significant

The Holocaust can be seen as one of the most devastating genocide that occurred in history and that is well known in many places worldwide. One may assume that those who played a part in the acts done by the Nazis in Germany may have been mentally disturbed and/or sick, evil people. However, the novel Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning provides another alternative to this statement. Browning provides the reader with the idea that anyone is capable of becoming a murderer, especially when the opportunity presents itself. In his book he attempts to prove this statement through multiple ideas and theories and also provides events which took place to analyze some of those ideas.

It is obvious from the opening chapter that this novel will center on the war and the effects it has on a young group of soldiers, none of them more than twenty years of age. They are all friends and former classmates of Paul Baumer, the narrator and protagonist of the book; they have enlisted in the German infantry because their teacher, Kantorek, had painted for them a glorious picture of fighting and saving the homeland from destruction during World War I. In this first chapter, Baumer and his friends are away from the front lines, relaxing a bit after two weeks of fierce fighting. As each of the young men is introduced, it is apparent that they are tired, hungry, angry, and disillusioned over the war.

In Elie Wiesel’s Night, the aloof foreigner Moishe the Beadle gets deported from the town Sighet with other foreign Jews. After escaping, Moishe recalls the horrific scene where the Jews were taken into the forest and, “Without passion or haste, [the Gestapo] shot their prisoners… Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns” (Wiesel 6). During the Holocaust, the Nazi belief that Jews were of an inferior and evil race brought forth little discrepancy on their liquidation and abuse. Anne Marie Hacht puts this notion into a broader context in “Oppression and Genocide” from Literary Themes for Students: War and Peace, pointing out that, “Analysis of literary works… reveals a common denominator of cause: governmental abuse of power that results in the manipulation or attempted extermination of a political or racial minority.” Hacht’s analysis especially applies to the case of Moishe, who witnessed first-hand the massacre of the Jewish minority. The way in which the Gestapo conducted these executions shows just how “normal” acts of genocide and dehumanization were. Ultimately, the elimination and degradation of certain racial, religious, or social subdivisions of society was a common method of

In the opening chapter, Paul Baumer, the narrator, recalls how schoolteachers, such as his own, persuaded their bright-eyed students to put on the German colors. Paul’s teacher, Kantorek, taught his students the importance of the war as he instilled in them the values of nationalism and patriotism. Everyday, he sprouted war propaganda at them in “long lectures” (Remarque 11). He glamorized the war telling his students that they were “the Iron Youth” (Remarque 18) and that “duty to one’s country is the greatest thing” (Remarque 13). Consequently, his students left class enlisted in the war one by one “until the whole of the class went” (Remarque 11). When the students left the comforts of home to volunteer for the war, they valued their country above all else and were prepared to face their own death as doing so lined up with what they believed in.

In Christopher Browning’s book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland tells the story of Battalion 101, a group of 500 policemen in their 30’s and 40’s who were sent into Poland to participate in a ‘special action’ without being told exactly what they are doing. Overtime they realized their mission is to Kill Jews and racially purify Europe. Most of the killing during this period of mass murder took place in Poland. Battalion 101 together with other Order Police battalions contributed to the manpower needed to carry out this enormous task. Browning comments that these men all went through their developmental period before the Nazis came into power. These were men who had known political standards and moral norms other than those of the Nazis. Most men came from Hamburg; one of the least ‘nazified’ cities in Germany and the majority came from a social class that had been anti-Nazi in its political culture. In seems this would not seem to have been a very promising group from which to recruit mass murderers on behalf on the Nazi vision of a racial utopia free of Jews. However, their actions helps us understand not only what they did to make the Holocaust happen, but also how they were transformed psychologically from the ordinary men into active participants in the most horrific offence in human history. In doing so, it aims on the human capacity for extreme evil and leaves this subject matter with the shock of knowledge and the

The horrible atrocities of the Holocaust remain an important subject in World history. Although very few people are alive from the Nazi era the horrors of the era still haunt Germany. Should the generations of German people be held collectively responsible for the Nazi crimes? If you were born in 1940 the start of the war, you would be 75 years old today. The younger generation of German’s look at that period of history differently than those alive post war. How the postwar Germans have dealt with the Nazi era of their country’s history has been a topic of controversy surrounding Gunter Grass. Gunter Grass for many years has accused German’s of not dealing with what happened in a realistic manner. He

They were this creature that fed on power and human flesh that left pits of despair whomever steps their path. The damage was so severe that it causes, in modern-day Germany, to have this conditioned idea that whenever someone is in military uniform, that they will give the cold shoulder. In today’s generation, the youth are in a conundrum to either forget about what happened or feel like they still are heavily responsible for a malicious act that was not even involved with. However, since the citizens sincerely feel that this is what the country is known for, then they seem to reflect on that, in a harsh way. Ever since they started enlightening the younger generation of the Holocaust, they could take that information in many ways; which cause the difference of how the solider are getting treated here rather in Germany. “There’s no real empathy in Germany toward the soldiers who risk life and limb every day,” (Robbes, 2009). This shows that Nazi Germany created so much damage that its dragging from generation to

In both books the Germans are portrayed in a neutral way and the words ‘soldiers’, ‘occupiers’, ‘occupation troops’, ‘foreigners’ and ‘enemies’ are amongst those employed by the authors to refer to the Germans. What differentiates Sfaelou’s and Skandalis’s narratives from those that have talked about so far, however, is that both writers make use of the term ‘Nazis’, while in one of Skandalis’s short stories the term ‘Third Reich’ also comes across. Nonetheless, none of the writers provide any further explanations, either in the narrative text or in the paratext, which would help the young reader to put the terms in question into their historical and ideopolitical context. Furthermore, none of the authors are concerned to distinguish between Germans as a national group and Nazis as a group of supporters of a certain ideological doctrine and in both texts the word ‘Nazi’ is used as an alternative word for ‘Germans’. Since no distinctions are made between Germans and Nazis, the switching between the two words renders them synonymous. In other words, the Germans are ‘Nazified’ and the Nazis are ‘Germanised’ while ‘Germanness’ and ‘Nazism’ are conflated in the identity of the enemy with whatever implications this might have to the young reader’s conceptualization of

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of war among a maturing nation of children, thereby creating a theme of Bildungsroman in the novel Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi. Bildungsroman, as defined by literarydevices.net: “a special kind of novel that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of its main character from his or her youth to adulthood.” Within this graphic novel, the author portrays the concept of aging during a period of civil/political crisis, perhaps a foreign topic for yourself, however, Satrapi recalls her childhood trauma in order for you to gain insight into a world previously unknown. Her tale, being divided as two separate graphic novels, chronicles her growth on more than a