The holocaust presented the horrors committed against human beings at the hands of other humans. Adolf Hitler obviously is the one everyone blames for destroying the Jewish population but is he really the only one at fault? Who actually committed the actual genocide? I wasn’t actually fully aware of the atrocities committed during the holocaust until I read Ordinary Men in which Christopher R. Browning explains how men who weren’t even ardent NAZI were capable of such atrocities.…
The Holocaust, state-sponsored murder of the Jews in the concentration camps, is one of the darkest events in the human history. Six million people were heartlessly tortured and executed in various places in Germany, France, Netherlands, Poland, Czech Republic, and Austria. It is impossible to deny the evil nature of the Holocaust, and scholars have been trying to investigate the essence of evil in the concentration camps. Richard L. Rubenstein, exploring the nature of the Holocaust from the Judeo-Christian perspective, rejects the idea that God who is worthy of worship would impose such evil punishment upon the Jews, while Primo Levi attributes the evil nature of the Holocaust to lack of structure in the camps and its effect of the moral degradation on its members, and Resnais ascribes the evil of the Holocaust to the ignorance of human nature and absence of moral development of…
Early in the Holocaust, German army units participated in the massacre of the Jews in Eastern Europe. Among these, the Reserve Police Battalion 101 was made up of civilian police men, German men, and volunteers subject to the military draft. They were middle-aged working family men with a lower middle class background. Their main purpose was to be an essential source of manpower in holding down German-occupied Europe. In 1941, they were told that they had to perform a gruesome and undesirable task executing the Jewish population in the area they patrolled. My paper will be focusing on factors that lead up to how these “ordinary men” allow themselves to be a part of a systematic genocide. In trying to understand the factors that made these men’s crimes possible the factors that are central to their actions are several: peer pressure and conformity, the roles, the developing of a rationale for killing, and the environment they were in. Without these elements, the men of Police Battalion 101would not have become executioners.…
The racism to Germany expanded quickly in the year of 1933 when Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Memorable things started to happened because it was the start of the Second World War and this also meant it was the beginning of the Holocaust. This Holocaust was caused by the Germans they were in control of this cruel act they made will never be forgotten. Germans looked at Jews differently because they believed in a different religion then the Germans. The Germans plan was that they were going to get completely rid of all the Jews and their memory. They began to put their plan in to action and several Jews were killed from it and others were missing and that did affect Jewish population greatly. In the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel tells the horrendous story about the everyday life of a Jew during the Holocaust, it’s a memoir of their struggles and their unhappiness. This book tells us how Jews were punished with out no reason and how things could of ended if they would of seen that everybody is the same for this reason people should read “Night” and read what Jews went through those horrible years. The approximate deaths of Jews were 11-17 million not including other races which were discrimination against Jews. The Holocaust emerged as the most significant event in the twentieth century, not just for genocide of the Jewish people, but for efforts humanity. The causes and effects of the Holocaust must awaken our world conscience to the plight of oppressed people…
In 1992, Christopher Browning published his book Ordinary Men, a work in which he narrates the experiences of the men in the Reserve Police Battalion 101. Browning begins by classifying the men as ordinary people, as his title suggests, but quickly reveals not only how easily these men succumbed to the vicious acts they were expected to carry out, but how swiftly they began to take extra measures that were unnecessary as a result of their loss of morality. Based on this, Browning’s account of this Battalion allows him to explain that the Holocaust was made possible…
During world war II, the people known as, Jews, were targeted for deportation to concentration camps and execution. The term, “Inhumanity” was expressed in many different ways during this period of time. Inhumanity can scar people emotionally and mentally. Inhumane people tend to act very cruel towards other people, animals, and the environment. In the story, “Night” by Elie Wiesel, there were many merciless examples of how inhumanity was shown during World War II.…
German anti-Semitism played the main role in Holocaust and extermination of Jewish population in Europe during World War 2. There are different views on this subject among historians. Some support the fact that German society was anti-Semitic and ordinary Germans’ hatred towards Jews was the main factor in horrors of Holocaust. One of supporters of this idea is political science professor Daniel Goldhagen. He argues that German citizens were willing to commit all kinds of crimes against European Jewry during years of World War 2. In his article “The Paradigm Challenged” he emphasizes that many books were written about the Holocaust and none of them includes studies of the perpetrators; people who designed and implemented the strategies of mass extermination of Jews. Goldhagen discussed that most scholars have a very strange view on the attitude of perpetrators. In their studies most perpetrators presented as victims of the Nazi regime and social pressure of that time. They made Germans look like they had no choice, but to follow violent and unlawful orders of their leaders. In fact there was always a choice not to kill innocent people. There is no record of anybody from German military being seriously punished for not following the order to kill Jews. Despite that, ordinary German soldiers were killing Jewish people all around the Europe and the Western part of Soviet Union. Also the writers who defense German perpetrators and look for more complicated explanation of their…
In the book Night, by Elie Wiesel, Hitler’s main goal was to make the Jews feel inhuman; he was very successful in this. The Jews were tortured everyday for no reason at all other than for the SS officers’ own amusement. The SS officers treated the men as if they were animals, making them fight for food. Women, babies, old, sick, and handicapped were put into the crematoriums as soon as they arrived at the camps. They killed people for no reason, with no remorse whatsoever. Torture, being treated like animals, and being burned alive or killed were all things that led to the Jews feeling as if they were not human.…
In the excerpt from Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 1010 in Poland”, Browning told us of the elite killing squad of less than 500 men, that killed around 83,000 Jews. (215) Not just men, ordinary men, like the ones you see every day. Most of the men were involved in white collar jobs, just trying to support their family when they were chosen for the group. What caused these men to commit outrageous acts against humanity? Can anyone be brainwashed to execute deeds like these men? If you grew up your entire life being told a certain group of people were evil and bad, and you had the opportunity to help your country and kill these people, would you, could you? These were the questions Browning was trying to uncover.…
The Holocaust was an unparalleled crime composed of millions of murders imprisonment, racism, and destruction. It destroyed millions of lives and wiped out over six million Jews during the course of World War II under Hitler’s power. The aftermath of these horrific events proved to be a difficult one since no form of punishment could ever suffice to the torture and pain the Nazi’s inflicted on the Jewish Community. This challenge was attempted by the International Military Tribunal (IMT) held at Nuremberg, Germany where they held Nazi’s in court for crimes of war and genocide. These became known as the Nuremburg Trials.…
The Holocaust is the most horrifying crime against humanity of all time. 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 Holocaust: Buchenwald). The Jewish population was to be eliminated. The people that were sent to concentration camps such as Buchenwald were treated horribly and it is unimaginable what they had to go through while they were there.…
One of the worst most detrimental event that has ever occurred in our history was the Holocaust. Arising in 1933, Hitler was in charge of this awful plan. Known as the Nazis, they strived to kill Jews or put them in labor camps. There ended up being about a 6 million death count of just the Jewish community. There were few people who would stand for the Jews, defending them and their rights. Some people even helped Jews escape from their death camps or labor camps. All of these people demonstrated moral courage by helping the Jews and risking their lives and everything they had to give the Jews a chance at life.…
The Holocaust was a horrific time, dating from 1933 to 1945, in our history as human beings. The descriptions and facts in this essay may make you question if we as people are even human to begin with. Such evilness is portrayed in the time of the Holocaust by the soldiers of what is called the Nazi army. The Nazi army was led by a very cruel and evil man named Adolf Hitler, a said spawn of the devil himself. The era of the Holocaust was a time span in which many people considered “a time of Hell.”…
The Holocaust has been put down as one of the most awful and horrifying events in world history. It is impossible for someone to understand and see what the victims of the Holocaust had to go through. Millions of people died because someone couldn't see past the outer shell of a person and judged them because of who they were. That person was Adolf Hitler. He brain washed tons of people into agreeing in his opinion. He wanted the “perfect” race and would kill anyone in the way of his wish, like Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and people with physical or mental disabilities. He put innocent people through the absolute worst conditions and had no mercy.…
The Holocaust was the country that sponsored mass murders for of over six million Jews by the Nazi government during World War II. It was the culmination of close to a decade of official discrimination, racial segregation, and brutal violence against the Jewish residential district in Germany. Under the shield of the war, the Nazis turned to systematic genocide after 1941, setting up industrial-style “extermination camps” planning to execute the detained Jewish population of Germany and Europe. While other groups targeted for extinction by the Nazi state, including gypsies, gays and communists, anti-Semitism was a fundamental tenet of Nazi ideology. In fact, Hitler believed until the end that the “war against the Jews” was a more important goal than victory in the conventional military battles of World War II. The Holocaust is today known as one of the worst mass crimes in human history.…