Gerda Weismann remembers when the war started. She heard shooting coming coming from the roof. Her family moved into the basement of their home to hide. There was no water, electricity, heating, or air conditioning. Her brother was forced into a labor camp shortly after the war started. Gerda says the worst day of her life was on June 28th 1942, it was the last day she saw her father. When she was taken to a concentration camp her and her mom were separated. She was on a truck leaving her mother and she jumped off. The soldiers put her back on the truck and told her she was too young to die. Gerda was taken to a slave labor camp where she got very sick. The woman who ran the camp saved Gerda’s life by making her work even though she was sick.…
The wars between the Axis Power and the Allied and the dropping of atomic bombs in Japan were usually what come into a discussion about World War II. Besides those events, the most horrific and considerably inhumane time was the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a period time during World War II, when Adolf Hitler launched a “movement” to kill all the Jews and anyone he deemed as lower than him in his territories. Most people now looked back at history around this time and believed that the SS and policemen killed the Jews because of brainwashing and forcing. But, in the book Ordinary Men, Christopher R. Browning argued that it was not the case. He argued that these police officers were ordinary men just like everybody else and they were not forced…
During the Second World War, and unspeakable injustice occurred. Six million Jewish people were slaughtered solely based on their religion. Men, women, and children were plucked from their homes and taken under control of the Nazi 's. Their valuables were stolen. They were put to work in concentration camps where they were starved, beaten and tortured. Their identities were stolen, their names taken away, and identification tattoos were engraved in their bodies. Scientific experiments were preformed on these people with no anesthesia. Men and women alike were dragged to death pits where they were shot in the back of the head at point blank range, falling into mass graves while other were gassed in large chambers and tossed into the crematories.…
The Holocaust was certainly one of humanity’s darkest hours. The Nazi leaders of Germany rounded up millions of Jews from across Europe and place them in camps to be exterminated or for hard labor. These actions were caused by the Nazis’ belief that all of the Jews were responsible for corruption and injustice in the continent. They labeled all of them in this fashion and sought to get rid of them as a group. Part of this mentality was characterized by depriving the Jews of their individuality. This is reflected in “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.” The workers of the death…
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 second World war is understood as having been started and ended in various fashions. We know this to be true as there is copious amounts of literature analyzing, explaining, investigating, and theorizing "the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", or as some may prefer , " The Fall and Rise of the 3rd Reich". From these books and works produced on the subject matter, an underlying fundamental truth has been scribed for all to accept at the true story of WWII--or more accurately the allied version of WWII. The general public around the world has some knowledge of the story of Hitler and the Nazi's campaign ending with an Allied victory. With this undeniable knowledge granted to us by hindsight understanding the allied victory is often seen as inevitable. The supporting justification for the Allied victory is the notion…
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.…
In the memoir Night the narrator Elie Wiesel recounts a moment when Moishe the Beadle told him what happen when he was gone , “ Infants were tossed into the air and use as targets for the machine guns”(Wiesel 6). The Nazi’s didn’t treat the Jew’s as humans. As the author describes his experiences, many other example of inhumanity as revealed. Two significant themes related to inhumanity discussed in the book Night by Elie Wiesel are lots of faith and getting closer to love ones.…
In the introduction to Alan E. Steinweis’ book Kristallnacht 1938, he argues that the German citizens attacking Jewish synagogues, businesses, homes, properties and the Jewish people themselves on November 9th, 1938 is important to understand the perspective of German Society and it’s role in the prosecution of Jews perpetrated by the Nazis. It further suggests that the involvement of Germans in the attacks was far more wide spread than just a small group of Nazi and Nazi sympathizers. It included not just German military officers and personnel, but also workers, teenagers and even children. Kristallnacht 1938 is different than other books and publications on the subject of the events that occurred in Germany in November 1938. Its primary focus is more on the individuals committing the attacks rather than the Jewish victims. It also argues against some of the prevailing theories noted in other works about the Kristallnacht.…
And in fact, many historians have been fairly comfortable to do so. But Christopher Browning’s account of the factors that encouraged regular Germans to take part in Hitler’s hideous plan reveals something of great importance where an event like the Holocaust is concerned. His Ordinary Men seeks to shift perspective away from the notion that those predisposed toward the behavior that perpetrated this greatest of human tragedies were inhuman and accustomed to operating in fashions more sociopathic than militarily appropriate. In doing so, he sets a sizable challenge for himself. Truly, there is no way to address why the German people participated in without elaborating upon some of the most unspeakable acts committed in modern history. To that end, Ordinary Men takes its readers through some difficult narratives that reveal brutal, amoral behaviors that would imply a society impoverished of intellectual, ethical or academic development to that point. Moreover, the base and vile nature of the war crimes committed against a people unprepared to defend themselves and presenting no legitimate antagonism to its aggressor, suggests that the German people themselves were inherently bad people, inclined toward acts of evil and…
The Nazi’s were ruthless executioners, although, when the Nazi’s first came to Sighet they were rather reassuring. They were housed in local homes and were welcomed into the Kahn’s, Elie’s neighbor, home. The Germans were seemingly polite and charming to their hosts, and, on some occasions, smiled at them. Then on the 7th day of Passover, the German’s turned on the Jews and arrested the Jewish leaders of their community. They forced the remaining people in the community to stay in their homes for three days. If they left, the penalty was death. Moishe the Beadle had warned the town’s people of this. He had told them stories about the horrors the Germans had committed, of being taken away into a forest and barely escaping death. Yet, when he came back to Sighet, no one believed him and disregarded his warnings. He had come running to Elie’s house and reminded them that he had warned them, and then left without a response. That same day, the Hungarian police burst unexpectedly into every Jewish home. They were told that Jewish people could no longer possess gold, jewelry, or any valuables. In the following days their merciless attacks on children, women, and the elderly fueled everyone’s anger. They were promptly forced to leave their ghetto to go to the small ghetto, and from there they were herded into cattle cars. There were at least 80 people per car, and the conditions of the cars…
German troops started entering Lidice by the hundreds, we had never seen this before. The Gestapo started ransacking our house and looking for anything suspicious. Then they just left, nobody said anything. everyone was confused, Why would they just leave like that? If only i had known that they didn't leave they were only waiting. (after the funeral of Heindrich Hitler ordered Karl Frank that the small community lidice would be wiped out as punishment) On June 9th we were all sleeping in our bedrooms when we were woken up by the sound of trucks driving in, german soldiers broke into the house and ordered us to go to the village square. My youngest Bazil was crying and i knew something was terribly wrong. They told me to go to one side of the square while my children and my wife had to go to the other side, i was reluctant and screaming, they couldn't do this! My oldest daughter was screaming “dad, dad” but i couldn't do anything, they were pushing me farther away and i lost sight of them. They locked us into Horak farm. I knew it was over the second they broke me away from my family. My fingers were clenching and i was so angry i felt helpless. I knew i was going to be the first to die because i am jewish. I tried to hide it as best as i could when the soldiers always came into town but i knew they would find out somehow. When the more german soldiers started to watch us i saw some of the men whispering to each other. I stared at one of the…
So began the horror of the Holocaust. "The 15 year old boy [Elie Wiesel] was separated from his mother and sister immediately on arrival at Auschwitz. He never saw them again. He managed to remain with his father for the next year as they we were worked almost to death; starved, beaten and shuttled from work camp to work camp on foot or in open cattle cars in the driving snow- without food, proper shoes or clothing. In the last months of the war, Wiesel's father succumbed to dysentery, starvation exhaustion and exposure."…
Imagine you’re having a fun time with your family doing something, and then some people grab you and separate your entire family. Now you have to work at a camp with a ton of strangers if you don’t want to get killed. Those people that took you were Nazis. The camp that they took you to was a concentration camp which reeks with the stench of illnesses, diseases, and death. That’s what the Holocaust victims had to live through. This essay will be about the social injustices of the concentration camps during the Holocaust.…
Imagine witnessing the deaths of thousands. Imagine the flames that lick the charred, black sky. Imagine the faces, faces stripped of their past and future. Most of all, imagine being saved from such a scorching fate, only to work as a slave in a chilling environment. After going through all these atrocities, fingers are bound to be pointed—but towards whom? In Night, by Elie Wiesel, his faith is tested the moment the Germans came knocking on their doors: He went from being a faithful boy who sought God’s teachings to an empty shell who held God accountable.…