The Holocaust Of The World War II

There are so many remarkable people who have gone before us and shaped the world into what it is today. With the passing of yet another Veterans Day, people were reminded of the extraordinary sacrifices made by ordinary men and women who were unfortunate enough to have lived during times when their nations were at war. Many ordinary citizens lost their lives as a result of the war, just as soldiers did. While some survivors simply lived out their post war lives, others survived and influenced the world. One person who survived the atrocities of the Holocaust during World War II and used his experiences to improve social, political, and religious conditions throughout the world, is Elie Wiesel. Through the words of Elie Wiesel, the public can witness the evils of war, keep these memories alive in the collective recall of future generations, and take action upon witnessing injustices of its kind.

When Dana returns from living as a slave in the Antebellum South, she identifies with accounts of survivors from the Holocaust during World War II. She compares the horrible acts of the Nazis to the behavior of slave holders who worked at every turn to demean enslaved people and lessen their humanity. While the monstrosities of the Holocaust may have been more intense over a shorter period of time, Butler points out that those who lived through slavery endured conditions just as horrible over a much longer duration. Yet while Americans are largely comfortable acknowledging the events of the Holocaust as the worst impulses of mankind, there is often more hesitancy to take responsibility for the degradations of enslaved people that took place

In his novel, Night, Elie Wiesel recounts the horrific experiences that he faced as a survivor of the Holocaust during World War II. The following passage presents the impossible struggle to maintain a decent quality of life in the face of war:

As we grow up our parents teach us how to be respectful and very well-mannered. They enforce the importance of saying, “Please, thank you, and excuse me,” when needed. Parents also insist we listen and respect our elders, because they have authority over the world since they have been here the longest. We were raised to comply with the demand of someone who had authority over us. According to Patricia Werhane (1), “In the early1960’s Stanley Milgram undertook his noteworthy study of human obedience to authority. Puzzled by the question of how otherwise decent people could knowingly contribute to the massive genocide of the Holocaust during World War II, Milgram designed an experiment that sought to cause a conflict between one’s willingness to obey authority and one’s personal conscience.”

The Holocaust is well known around the world, and many people do not realize the devastation and the technology that was used in that time. What we knew before was that the Holocaust resulted in the death of six million jews, and was controlled by the Nazi Regime. Adolf Hitler was the dictator of Germany and came up with the Final Solution, a plan to exterminate all the people of Jewish faith or race during World War II. This then brought in the concept of concentration camps. Concentration camps did not just hold Jews captive, they also targeted other groups such as Gypsies, African-Germans, Homosexuals, Atheists, and the physically and the mentally disabled. Now, it is common knowledge that that many people were killed in gas chambers or

Genocide is the destruction of an ethnic, racial, or religious group. The most famous genocide, conducted by the Germans, is the extermination of the Jewish population known as the Holocaust. There are other genocides such as the Armenian or Darfur genocide, but the Holocaust is the one talked about and studied the most around the world today. Museums exist in Washington D.C, Los Angeles, and parts of Europe that focus primarily on this dark time in history. Vast amounts of books, movies, and documents concentrate on the Holocaust. Why is this chapter, between 1939 and 1945, discussed and examined? The answer lies within people who experienced the Holocaust such as Elie Wiesel, Jay Frankston, and Franks Shatz. These men have gone through hell and back, but they believe in one thing. That is, the notion of never again. The goal is to educate future generations on what really happened, so history does not repeat itself. Never again should people of any race, religion, or ethnicity, go through the horrific past of the Holocaust. In their writing, Wiesel, Frankston, and Shatz do a great job using pathos, logos, and ethos to convey their message of never again for future generations.

During World War II and the Holocaust, many people wondered why Jewish people did not fight back against the Nazi’s. But what many people do not know is that about 30,000 Jewish people resisted and fought back against the Nazi command (Resistance). The Holocaust started in 1939 and ended in 1945. The Jews were forced into ghettos and were ostracized from the world by a wall or barbed wire fence. There were also concentration or death camps where after the war ended, almost no Jews survived. During the Holocaust, the Jewish people engaged in both armed and unarmed resistance in order to preserve their faith, morale, and humanity.

As Elie Wiesel was taken through the Holocaust as a result of being a Jew, he began to ask himself this: “Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because he caused thousands of children to burn in his mass graves...Praise be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar,” (45). As many enter into wars and horrific events stemming from wars, they begin with strong and unwavering faith. As the war continues and nothing is relieved, people begin to question their faith as they lose sight of all hope. This loss of faith results in a shift in one’s mindset and point of view. As danger and violence seem to increase in wars, so does the struggle to maintain faith. As people continue on in horrible conditions for so long, they eventually reach a breaking point, causing them to abandon all hope, pride, or spirituality they have; because if their world is falling apart, being shattered, and becoming what seems to be unamendable, why has a leadership or a higher being not intervened? As wars continue to be waged throughout history, is has become apparent that the struggle to maintain faith is a theme seen universally as a result of dancing with violence, unsafety, and death.

The Holocaust was one of the most horrible and dreaded events in history. Millions of Jews were killed, leaving many families devastated and hopeless. With the goal of racial purity, Adolf Hitler- along with many other Germans believed the Jews caused the defeat of their country, and led the Nazis to the elimination of Jews. For this reason, “Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures…as many as 12,000 Jews were killed every day” (The Holocaust). Later, Hitler organized concentration camps, where mass transports of Jews from ghettoes were brought and typically killed also. However, the fortunate Jews that were not killed still had many restrictions on their

“Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on whose stage of death and pain only remain standing the negotiating table that could and should have prevented it.” -Pope John Paul II. We always find ourselves seeing how others are fighting and often killing but we have never stopped to do something about it. I think we should take actions on what is going on the other side of our world it’s our fault we have not done anything to help people with hunger and or lunatics killing innocent people. I strongly agree to Wiesel saying that we as humans should protect each other not as allies or as political people but as human beings no matter the race, religion, or beliefs because at the end of the day we are all the same and nothing else should really matter.

From 1933-1945, it was a period of time when the Jews were targeted as an enemy. This period of time is called the “Holocaust.” This is when the Germans killed over 6 million Jews and it was a genocide. They also killed any Jew that they could recognize. The Germans during this time were called Nazis. Nazis were the people that controlled the concentration camps and liberated people. Concentration camps were the places where the Nazis took the Jews to be killed. In the concentration camps there were gas chambers. They were the places where they took the children and their moms for a “shower”. They thought it was a shower, but it was actually a place where they would end their lives. When all the jews went in the Nazis threw a chemical that burnt everything. The people who did that were the Holocaust war criminals. They were the Nazis that killed 1,000s of jews and didn’t care. The most dangerous war criminals were Alois Brunner,Beate Kunzel Klarsfeld, John Demjanjuk, Hans Lipschis, Hans Frank, Alfred Rosenberg, and Gerhard Sommer.

The Holocaust genocide lasted for approximately 4,482 days. There were nearly twelve years of planning and organizing the extermination of Jews in Europe. For most of those years, nearly all surrounding countries did not partake in assisting the survival of these Jews. Why? Why was there such insufficient help from countries around the world while the Holocaust had been occurring? Had other countries stepped in sooner to provide safety and rescue for the Jews, how different would history be?

Speculations about the grim events during the very horrific Holocaust are unfortunately being denied stating it was not as gruesome as many may have stated it was or did not even exist to begin with. This is not only outrageous but disrespectful to those who lost their lives during the gruesome time. History states that the Holocaust was a period in time where a very fascist dictator, Adolf Hitler, killed over six million European Jews who did not fit the criteria of genetically having blonde hair and blue eye or simply mentally ill. Hitler had various strategic ways of murdering a large group of civilians at a time, such as gas chambers. These gas chambers were large rooms that would deposit gases such as carbon monoxide killing those who

The Holocaust is one of the darkest times in human history. Millions of innocent people were killed for no reason. Although talking about the Holocaust is never a fun subject to discuss, it is crucial in preventing future genocides. Up to 6 million Jews were put to death, which was ⅔ of the Jewish population in Europe. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, aided by collaborators, killed those 6 million Jews between 1941-1945. Other groups were targeted by the Nazis like homosexuals, Soviet prisoners of war, political opponents, the “incurably sick”, Roma, and Jehovah Witnesses. In this paper I will be talking about death marches, Hitler’s mentality, and Nazi human experimentation.

For as long as human history has existed, genocide as existed along with it. Even though the term itself was not coined until the 1940s by Raphael Lemkin in response to the Holocaust, the act of genocide has been occurring for millennia. In 146 BCE the first recorded act of genocide occurred with the Roman destruction of Carthage According to the Genocide Convention, genocide is defined as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Genocide happens for a multitude of reasons and is often a combination of circumstance that leads to its occurrence. The Rwandan genocide in the 1990s is a prime example of genocide and while it can be explained using several sociological theories, it most closely correlates with Marxism and Conflict Theories.