The Importance Of Nazi Darwinism In The Zookeeper's Wife

Hitler and the Holocaust is a very informational novel written by Robert S. Wistrich that not only explains this horrible time in history, but also gives us a look into the mind of Hitler and Nazi ideology. This book is not just centered on Hitler and Germany as it my sound, antisemitism spread like a plague all across Europe even before the Holocaust took place. In this work, Wistrich is not making an argument, but is trying to find an explanation on why so many inhumane actions were allowed.

The application of Nazi ideas and ideology was based on two types of force against individuals and social groups. One of these took the form of propaganda and indoctrination, the other was based on terror (Kühl, 2002). The Nazi ensured that not to appear

Once, Adolf Hitler said, “It’s not the truth that matters, but victory.” Obviously, this quote shows that Hitler’s mindset was directed towards winning, and not his moral values. He made false accusations about the innocent Jews, killing over six-million of them. These false accusations were simple, repeated, and, eventually, people believed it. The rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party affected how people viewed the Jews at the time. To begin, events in Adolf Hitler’s life lead to his viewpoints and affiliations. Secondly, the creation of the Nazi Party was critical to the formation of Germany’s point of view. Lastly, Jewish people had been used as scapegoats for the loss of World War I and Germany’s economic crisis.

Nazi’s verbally, physically, and psychologically dehumanized Jewish people. The Jewish people were verbally dehumanized by being referred to as rats, cockroaches, and other discourteous names. The German soldiers did this in attempt to get in there prisoner’s heads and make them feel as if they are filthy, worthless, and a vermant to the world. Nazis often times described the Jews as subhumans, and they didn 't mean this metaphorically. David Smith, co-founder and director of the Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of New England said, "They didn 't mean they were like subhumans. They meant they were literally subhuman." They physically abused the Jewish people in so many ways so often that it became dehumanizing. Whether it be taking away their basic necessities of life, treating them like lab rats, or just beating and working them till their death. When Jewish people arrived at the concentration camps, they usually showed up with some belongings. But, at arrival these belonging would be stripped away and be thrown into a pile of everyone 's possessions which the Nazis would scavenge through looking for jewelry and things or expense. In the camps, most Jews wouldn’t even have enough food or water to be healthy in these camps. This seemed to be one of the main ways the Nazis would

This view of social dominance and evolutionary superiority is very in line with the views of the Nazi Party and ordinary Germans. This hate for the Jews starts with Hitler’s Ant-Jewish propaganda and the implementation of the Nuremberg laws. In “Perish the Jew,” Hitler puts his views of racial superiority into writing, “The Aryan regards work as the basis for the maintenance of the national community as such; the Jew regards work as a means of exploiting other peoples” (Hitler 223). With this writing and other propaganda, Hitler successfully spread a hate for Jewish people across the country. Hitler then created the Nuremberg Laws, which slowly but successfully stripped the Jews of all their rights and made them second-class citizens in Germany. The Jews slowly became, in the eyes of the German people and the SS, people who could be consciously oppressed and turned into slave workers.

Horror struck on January 30, 1933, when Germany assigned Adolf Hitler as their chancellor. Once Hitler had finally reached power he set out to complete one goal, create a Greater Germany free from the Jews (“The reasons for the Holocaust,” 2009). This tragedy is known today as, “The Holocaust,” that explains the terrors of our histories past. The face of the Holocaust, master of death, and leader of Germany; Adolf Hitler the most deceitful, powerful, well spoken, and intelligent person that acted as the key to this mass murder. According to a research study at the University of South Florida, nearly eleven million people were targeted and killed. This disaster is a genocide that was meant to ethnically cleanse Germany of the Jews. Although Jewish people were the main target they were not the only ones targeted; gypsies, African Americans, homosexuals, socialists, political enemies, communists, and the mentally disabled were killed (Simpson, 2012, p. 113). The word to describe this hatred for Jewish people is known as antisemitism. It was brought about when German philosophers denounced that “Jewish spirit is alien to Germandom” (“Antisemitism”) which states that a Jew is non-German. Many people notice the horrible things the Germans did, but most don’t truly understand why the Holocaust occurred. To truly understand the Holocaust, you must first know the Nazis motivations. Their motivations fell into two categories including cultural explanations that focused on ideology and

The Nazis also adopted the social Darwinist take on Darwinian evolutionary theory regarding the “survival of the fittest.” For the Nazis, survival of a race depended upon its ability to reproduce and multiply, its accumulation of land to support and feed that expanding population, and its vigilance in maintaining the purity of its gene pool, thus preserving the unique “racial” characteristics with which “nature” had equipped it for success in the struggle to survive. Since each “race” sought to expand, and since the space on the earth was finite, the struggle for survival resulted “naturally” in violent conquest and military confrontation. Hence, war even constant war was a part of nature, a part of the human condition. Hitler and the Nazi party outlined their racial enemies in clear and unequivocal terms. For Hitler and the Nazis, the Jews represented a priority enemy both within and outside Germany. Their allegedly racial and inferior genetic makeup spawned the exploitative systems of capitalism and communism. In their drive to expand, the Jews promoted and used these systems of government and state organization, including constitutions, proclamations of equal rights, and international peace, to undermine the race-consciousness of superior races like the German race and to

Therefore this paper will focus on similar critiques, arguing that a combination of the long history of anti-Semitism and “scientific” racism interpretations presented by Friedlander and Weiss provides the most logical interpretations of the Nazi government and the origins of the Holocaust.

Throughout the history of political parties and factions, none has been so infamous as that of the Nazi party. They were the world’s enemies for a decade in the early twentieth century, and still continue to stir up controversy throughout the world. Understanding what the Nazis believed in, how anti semitism contributed to Nazi beliefs, and if Nazis still exist today helps to conclude why they did certain actions.

The Holocaust was one of the most horrific events, to ever occur in history. Hitler and the Nazi party started a genocide that killed millions of people because of their ethnicity. The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman tells the perfect story of how life was like during the Holocaust period, through a woman and her family. The main characters in the book are Antonina, the wife and mother, Jan, the husband, and Rys, the couple’s son. The Nazi’s invaded Poland, and took over the Jan and Antonina’s zoo. Throughout the whole novel, Jan and Antonina Zabinski play an active role in the underground network of both hiding Jews and taking care of animals within their Zoo. The main character, Antonina, finds herself managing various relationships during the novel, she’s a zookeeper, a wife, and a mother as well. Throughout the course of the novel, she reveals aspects of her relationship between the animals, and her husband.

Anti-Semitism, deeply ingrained in the culture, would lastly become the focal point of racial fervor, but it was the general xenophobia that fuelled both German nationalism and the idea of pure racial solidarity. Any deviation away from the pure German line meant a serious threat to the Volk, who were “not defined by links to an original biological community, but was itself an actual living community” in need of protection from the defilement of miscegenation (Hutton 153). The embedded racial ideology would reach boiling point under the fascist extremism of Hitler’s rule, but it was not until the actual racialization under law of Jewish identity that militant and indiscriminate extermination measures would be implemented.

The Nazi Conscience by Claudia Koonz is an intriguing read. Koonz’s thesis in the book is that Nazis, being a large party, were mostly of different mindsets, they had differing morals. Koonz writes about the party and how it got most of its fundamental bases. She talks about who brought eugenics to the table, and how Hitler convinced the people of Germany to be a part of the Nazi organization. She also writes about the radical members and what was done to keep them in line.

The first thing to understand in the psychoanalysis of Nazis is the history and their beliefs through Fascism. Fascism is an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization which was started by Benito Mussolini that was then later adopted by Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, who created Nazism as the ideology and practice of the Nazis, especially the policy of racist nationalism, national expansion, and state control of the economy as his own national socialism or as Wilhelm Reich called it in his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, “Führer ideology” (28). Some ideas that helped with the Nazi ideology were attempting to put the

After the Great War in the nineteenth century, European nations had a difficult time finding economic stability. Germany took full responsibility for starting World War I and by signing the Treaty of Versailles, Germany agreed to give up huge portions of territory and pay reparation to victorious allies. The harsh principles which were outlined by the Treaty of Versailles made economic stability in Germany difficult to achieve and caused Germany to suffer from inflation and the Great Depression. Unemployment and the fear of communism allowed Adolf Hitler to rise to power in 1933. Before Hitler came to power, he spent nine months in jail where he wrote his autobiography Mein Kampf (My Struggle), where he mentions how Darwin’s theory of

The most widely known aspects of Nazi ideology are their hatred of Jewish people and their tireless efforts to exterminate the entire race during their rule. This distinctly Nazi belief of antisemitism is not one that the Nazis created. It instead had existed for several thousand years throughout Germany and all of Europe. As Stackelberg and Winkle explain, “The origins of the stereotype of Jews as immoral materialists can be traced to the unwillingness of Jews to give up their religion in favor of world-renouncing Christianity” (Stackelberg and Winkle, Anti-Semitism, p. 2). This feeling of hatred towards Jews persisted for centuries, especially in countries that had a majority of Christian citizens. There were a number of people that continually perpetuated these anti-Semitic views with the works that they published and their actions towards Jews. A great