Similarities Between The Holocaust And The Crucible

The slave laborers were exhausted. They lived in camps infested with disease. The Nazis used gas tanks to murder the weak. There are many similarities as well as differences between The Holocaust and The Crucible. The Holocaust can be compared to The Crucible for a number of reasons. In the beginning of the Crucible, a scene told the audience how a teenaged girl, Abigail, helped her employer, John Proctor, commit adultery. She knew she had grudges toward some people, including her mistress, because her lover confessed and she got fired. In an attempt to try and cover up her mess, she tries to “contact the devil” by dancing naked in the woods with her friends. One of those girls who danced was the minister’s daughter, Betty. As the minister
saw them dancing, Betty was afraid of being scolded, so she decided to play sick and bewitched to avoid getting in trouble. As the scene went on, some characters were convinced some witchcraft was happening in town. The town didn’t approve of this and they made it obvious by wanting to persecute those who were accused of witchcraft.
Back to Abigail, she decided to accuse people just because she knew she would get all the attention and power if she did. Some say she may have had a grudge towards the people she accused or she just wanted to. Now, those people she accused were definitely not involved in any witchcraft. What the government wanted was for these people to admit to the crime they didn’t commit so they can be “open with God” and go on living a better life. For some people, they valued their life enough to do it. But for some, they didn’t want to soil their name. This is where some of the similarities between The Crucible and The Holocaust can be compared. As the Nazis accused the Jews for the downfall of Germany, they sent them all to concentration camps to work for their life. The Jews had to go and live in disease infected camps with poor hygiene and a much too crowed room. It’s obvious that the leaders of the Nazis had much hate for them and that’s why they wanted them dead. It doesn’t mean they did anything wrong and they are definitely not the cause for Germany’s downfall. They are just a race and they just wanted to live. There was no proven fact that the Jews were plotting to give Germany a low
economy. In The Crucible, Abigail was accusing poor women and people she didn’t get along with. Another character, Goody Putnam, was accusing the mid wives she’s worked with, who “shriveled up” her babies. In the story, there were no known facts that any of the accused people were in association with the devil or practicing witchcraft in any way. It was just obvious that these characters had mush hate for them and they wanted them dead as well. Not only are there similarities between The Crucible and The Holocaust, but also differences. Unlike The Crucible, the Jews did not have a choice whether they will go to the concentration camps and work or die. The Germans made sure that they tracked back enough to even the last fifth or sixth generations to find Jewish blood in a person. If they even had a great grandmother who was Jewish, they were a goner. They were all sent to concentration camps to wither and die. In The Crucible what the government wanted was for the accused people to admit to a crime, even if they didn’t do anything. So unlike in the Holocaust, they can say they were doing witchcraft to save their lives. The reason for this was so the government wouldn’t be embarrassed to tell the townspeople they were wrong all along and they didn’t want to lose their power over the people. In explaining what I thought were similarities and differences between The Crucible and The Holocaust, I conclude that it was right to compare these two. The fact that they were both incidents of genocide was a similarity. The fact that the characters in The Crucible had a choice to live by “admitting their crime” and the Jews in The Holocaust did not was a major difference.