The Importance Of Dehumanization In The Holocaust

Anti-semitism, which is defined to be the hatred of Jews, played a major part in our world history, such as the Holocaust. The Nazis believed that the Jewish community was inferior to their own race, and wanted to get rid of them for good. Initially in the early 1930’s, Adolf Hitler conducted one of the worlds now largest genocides, the annihilation of the Jews during WWII. Nealy six million Jews died during the span of twelve years, which was ⅔ of the Jewish population in Europe, and he was able to do so using the four stages of isolation. Those of which, were the stripping of rights, segregation, concentration, and extermination. The stripping of rights was taking away the Jewish men and women's basic needs, stripping them of their German citizenships, forcing them to wear an armband of the star of David, and etc. The second stage of isolation was segregation. The Jews were kicked out of the comfort of their own homes, and were forced to live in an isolated area called the “ghettos”. The third stage was concentration. After a couple of months from being moved to the ghettos, the Jews were brought to concentration camps where they were forced to work for hours at a time under all conditions, they were starved and all were mistreated. The last stage of isolation is the extermination, which was the stage in which the Jews were killed. The Nazis used different methods to do so, many were shot, beaten to death, burnt alive, but most were brought into gas chambers where they were gassed with Zyklon b which killed all within 3-15 mins of inhalation. There was not much of an option for the Jews their only chance of making it out alive is by figuring out various tactics to survive. Surviving meant that they had to live within a grueling environment, despite the difficult circumstances. Regardless of all the hardships they faced during that time, they were able to survive and overcome them by using different strategies, such as trading with one another, using their skills, and made friendships and built allies with one another in the camps.

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

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.

Their loss of humanity, made the Jew feel like they are not human but things. Throughout the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the Jews are slowly losing their humanity as the story does on. The Nazis dehumanized the Jews through taking their religious purpose, starvation, and watching other people die, which Wiesel show through hyperbole.

In “night” we see how the Jewish people are being oppressed and dehumanized in so many ways. One example is “I became A-7713. From now on, I had no other name” (PG.42). This quote shows how they were stripped of their identities and replaced it with a simple number. As if they were just a number on a sheet of paper. We see in the book how the Nazis only see the Jewish people as numbers and had no knowledge of their actual lives or their identities. They are also given such little amounts of food,

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.

From the very beginning, dehumanization is portrayed when Jews were treated as nothing more than mere animals and loaded into cattle cars to meet their impending doom. The conditions on the cattle cars were horrific. Elie recounts the experience by stating, “Lying down was not an option, nor could we all sit down. There was little air... thirst became intolerable, as did the heat”

Dehumanization is the psychological process of demonizing the enemy, making them seem less than human, and therefore, unworthy of human treatment. The Nazis used this tactic to portray Jews as animalistic so that people would willingly persecute them. The Holocaust was a result of persecution. It led to around 12,000,000 innocent people being killed. Dehumanization is evident in Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night.

Dehumanization is the proceSS the Nazis used to make the Jews feel helpless and unworthy. The Jews were dehumanized in a variety of ways. When Elie first arrived in Auschwitz, he thought he was getting sent to his death (a crematorium). The SS officers yelled things like “You will be burned! Burned to a cinder! Turned to ashes!” (Wiesel, 31). The SS officers did not actually plan on cremating all of the Jews, they just said that to scare them. That is one of the tactics they used to dehumanize the Jews. On top of that, the Nazis loved to separate families and friends. Being separated from a loved one can be very traumatic. Most of the time, the families were never reunited, most people did not survive the Holocaust. Furthermore, SS officers often beat the Jews. They used violence as a solution to almost everything. The SS officers found it very amusing to make the Jews run until

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.

When you think of the word dehumanization what does your mind process? Do you think of losing rights, do you think of a new sense of change, or does your mind evaluate the process of becoming un-human? According to a series of research, Webster dictionary states that dehumanizing means “to treat (someone) as though he or she is not a human being.” Throughout the book Night and The Book Thief , we enter a world of brutal acts of stripping human qualities from opposite races such as Jews. In the book Night, we take a journey with a boy named Eliezer and see life through the mindset of being a young Jew in an agonizing time period. We watch as he gets taken away into a concentration camp, gets separated from his loved ones, goes into the process of

The Nazi’s stripped the Jews, literally, of all clothing, gold-plated teeth, and even of their families upon arrival at the camp. If they were determined to be too weak to work, they would be put in a line and executed. This left the Jews alone and humiliated in the world. If they had any family who survived the arrival, they would be lucky to still be with them. If they did pass inspection, they would be sent to work where they would more than likely die. Upon arrival, the inmates saw atrocities the burning of adults…and infants. Another way the Nazi’s dehumanized the Jews was by forcing them to dig their own mass graves. By doing this, they would be unrecognizable and therefore not humans, just a pile of bones with no distinction of any kind.

Throughout the Holocaust, Jewish people suffered in numerous and various ways. Jews suffered as a part of the Nazi plotted “Final Solution.” The Final Solution was a plan during World War II to systematically exterminate the Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Europe. This resulted in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust, the destruction of Jewish communities in continental Europe. The leader of the Nazi regime was Adolf Hitler, who believed there was a perfect race, which was the Aryan race (Bohm 4). The Aryan race had blue eyes and blonde hair, although Hitler himself was not an Aryan. Throughout the Holocaust, Jewish people suffered physically, psychologically, and financially.

Hitler took away the human rights of the Jews. This group did not deserve the treatment they

Dehumanization lead to sadness, anger, confusion and so many different emotions. The Germans made the Jews feel the most insignificant they can ever feel and would ever feel. They tortured them by burning them alive, splitting them from their families, making them march for long distances, torturing them until death, and so many other things that we can never eve picture to occur in this world. Little kids had to leave their houses and go to live in places like concentration camps, or death camps, and they had to learn to take care of themselves even from a young age. This lead to conflicting trauma’s and kids to start feeling so many emotions a kid should never feel in their lives. The parents had to see their kids