Torture : Torture By Jean Amery

In the annals of history, the Holocaust registers as one of mankind’s most “unspeakable” offenses. And yet, over the past seventy years, survivors have strived nonetheless to transform torture into language—to verbalize the violence against man’s body and spirit that occurred at the hands of the Nazis.

According to article five of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights article five, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” (United Nations Department of Public Information ). In the novel Night, Elie Wiesel narrates his story as a young Jewish boy during the Holocaust. The captured Jews were sent to concentration camps where they received the absolute worst forms of torture, abuse, and barbaric treatment. The diabolical treatment has clear physical effects, but it also ventilates psychological changes on those that are unfortunate enough to encounter it. However, these transfigurations to their complexion and righteousness cannot be accredited to the weakness of the Jewish adore, but rather to the remorseless treatment they received. Elie Wiesel, in his novel Night, exhibits the brutal torture and punishment he receives, in order to display just how horrendous the German Nazis’ dehumanization of the Jews was.

WW2 took the lives of more than 72.4 million people, ("11 Facts About the Holocaust.") and killed more than two-thirds of all the people living in Europe at the time, ("World War 2 Statistics."). As part of their service to their country, the Nazis were commanded to perform horrific actions any reasonable person would question. These tortures included, “putting people’s hands in boiling water until the skin and fingernails came off...pulling teeth and cutting and twisting off the ears; running electric current through the victims…” ("Nazi Torture and Medical Experimentation.") “Prisoners were submerged in ice water to see the effects of hypothermia, injected with chemicals and poisons to test their effectiveness, sterilized, vivisected, and operated on without anesthetic,” (Smallwood). When many of these prominent Nazi soldiers were put on trial in Nuremberg, Germany, they argued they were serving their country, following orders from their superior. Here, we confront the thought-provoking question of whether it is just to obey your superior or serve your nation while breaking the moral code of humanity. These Nazis committed acts and imposed punishments upon their prisoners, that many have labeled as sinister, inhumane, unjust, and gruesome. But can we blame them for following the demands of their superiors and their country? Is it

Some People consider “brainwashing” an extreme word to use for what the Nazis did to prisoners. They would argue that the prisoners were pushed to dehumanization through hunger, cruelty, and a lack of social structure. The prisoners were pushed by varying factors, however the Nazis had a predetermined goal to get the prisoners to devalue themselves. Hitler and the German Nazi`s envisioned a world to be dominated and controlled by a Nazi philosophy therefore they went to many lengths in order to instill their philosophy into others.

Throughout time, torture has been used as a cruel war tactic to exploit human beings and dehumanize the characteristics that give people their identities outside of prison walls. In Rena 's Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, Rena Kornreich tells her own accounts of the torture she experienced by both men and women during World War II. Similarly, Coco Fusco sheds light on the use of torture by women in the United States Abu Ghraib military scandal in A Field Guide for Female Interrogators. While in very different time frames, a female victim and a female liberator seamlessly tie together the antics that have been experienced and performed in war by thousands of men and

“‘Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions’” (Quotes About Holocaust, 1). The Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz was the brutal murder site of millions of innocent Jews and other perceived enemies of Germany. Here, death and suffering was the norm and there was no escape from the wicked acts of the Nazis until the prisoners’ long awaited liberation. However, Auschwitz changed the victims’ lives forever.

The level of agony they put the Jews through shows how intolerant the Germans are to the Jewish faith. The author explains how inhumane the camps and Nazis are by descriptively telling about the events he undergoes. To give an idea of how gruesome it is, Elie Wiesel gives a brief description of a child struggling to breathe after being hung, “The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing” (64). The Nazis forced the Jews to watch such events to spread fear around the

For instance, when the Jews were waiting for the cattle car, they were not allowed to sit down. (Pg. 96) They were very tired and had no strength left in them. Another example of torture is when the Nazi’s did not give the Jews enough clothes to keep them warm in the winter. (Pg. 78) A lot of people froze to death. The last example of torture is the Death March. (Pg. 84) The death march was the most torture the Jews received. All of them were on the verge of death. They had to run several miles before they were allowed to stop. If they stopped to do any little thing, they were

Torture and suffering is something that should be considered cruel, and not human-like, that is not making the world a better place. The time of the Holocaust was a taunting, and dark times in the world, where torture and suffering seemed the right thing to do to people. Elie Wiesel was a victim of the torture and suffering by the Germans, in his book Night, and spoke up when he survived. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, the main character, Elie, was a really good person and showed many positive traits, but when he was sent to the infamous death camp, Auschwitz, that forced him to change his character.

The Holocaust was inhuman. “The IMT defined crimes against humanity as ' murder,extermination, enslavement, deportation...or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds'” (Trials). Murder, extermination, persecutions all occurred during the Holocaust. Nonetheless the Nazis tried to hide what was going on in Germany. After Soviet Union's attack in eastern Belarus, the Germans began moving all the prisoners in every concentration camp in Europe. The Nazi did not want the public, especially the Allies, to know the stories in these camps. They viewed these prisoners as labors and bargain chips (Death Marches) and treated those poor men and women's lives as dust under their feet. They kept the prisoners alive only because they were “hostages”, and Germans needed those labors to work for them in order to continue fighting the war; in short, the prisoners were still useful to the Nazis. Fortunately, no matter how hard the Germans tried to cover up their crimes, the Allies found enough evidence for the trial after World War II. After the Allied troops captured the concentration camps, the survivors testified and provided evidence for British officials to use on the trials of Nazi war criminals (Testimony). The Allies sentenced the criminals guilty, executed many of the high ranking Nazi officers, and officially ended the bloody chaos.

<br>The Holocaust is the most horrifying crime against humanity of all times. "Hitler, in an attempt to establish the pure Aryan race, decided that all mentally ill, gypsies, non supporters of Nazism, and Jews were to be eliminated from the German population.He proceeded to reach his goal in a systematic scheme." One of his main methods of "doing away" with these "undesirables" was through the use of concentration camps. "In January 1941, in a meeting with his top officials, the 'final solution' was decided". The Jewish population was to be eliminated. In this paper I will discuss concentration camps with a detailed description of the worst one prior to World War II, Buchenwald.

The lives of prisoners in the Holocaust was horrific due to Hitler’s rule. Between 1933-1945, there were thousands of people killed each day because of their religion and ethnic group. By the end of the Holocaust, over 6 million people had been murdered thanks to the Nazi soldiers running the concentration camps. Over the course of months, things continued to worsen and the death count increased daily. The soldiers were trained and experienced at killing which heightened the situation, considering they could kill more people than ever before. Many young children lost their chance of life because the soldiers killed everyone, no matter what age. Anyone, brought to a camp was either killed on the spot, or was worked to death by the soldiers.

The Holocaust was an awful time in world history: the concentration camps played a big role in this awful unnecessary experience.

Eighteen million Europeans went through the Nazi concentration camps. Eleven million of them died, almost half of them at Auschwitz alone.1 Concentration camps are a revolting and embarrassing part of the world’s history. There is no doubt that concentration camps are a dark and depressing topic. Despite this, it is a subject that needs to be brought out into the open. The world needs to be educated on the tragedies of the concentration camps to prevent the reoccurrence of the Holocaust. Hitler’s camps imprisoned, tortured, and killed millions of Jews for over five years. Life in the Nazi concentration camps was full of terror and death for its individual prisoners as well as the entire Jewish

The author stated that “the dark fascination of torture on [him] and many other South African writers”, seems to have two particular reasons (Coetzee ed. Attwell 363). The author summed up, “the first [reason] is that relations in the torture room provide a metaphor, bare and extreme, for relations between authoritarianism and its victims”, and reason two “that the torture room is a site of extreme human experience, accessible to no one save the participants” (Coetzee ed. Attwell 363. The element of torture creates a crisis of comprehension for the Magistrate, as well as for the reader, in Waiting for the Barbarians, however also of portrayal for