How Did The Holocaust Kill The Disabled

According to the texts and eyewitness accounts, the Holocaust had horrendous effects on the people who lived through it. During this time Jews were being rounded up and put into concentration camps by order of the German government. Writings and testimonies from survivors of the Holocaust are around even to this day. According to these sources, Holocaust survivors suffered tremendously since they were treated as less than human , they lost loved ones, and were constantly abused.

Jewish people were not the only ones persecuted by the Nazis during this time period. The leading group also captured and killed gypsies, disabled people, blacks, and some slavic people like the Polish and Russians. The discrimination did not stop there, people with different ideological, behavioral, or political ideas were not accepted within the german community either. Between these groups of people were also some communists, socialist, religious groups and homosexuals.

How were the Jews dehumanized by the Nazis? The Nazis dehumanized the Jews through depriving them of basic human needs, individuality, and by treating them like animals. Elie Wiesel, surviver of the Holocaust, explains dehumanization in his autobiography Night. Night takes its reader through an amazing realization of how the people changed from civilized humans to vicious and animal-like. Each event that happens to Elie and the Jews, strips away pieces of their humanity. The Nazis dehumanize the Jews by robing them of their beloved possessions.

People were basically removed from their homes, barred from daily activities, and forced to live in uncleanliness in ghettos throughout Germany and the countries that the Nazis took over (Cureton, 2013). Further research by Cureton is that the rest were forced into labor, while many were confined to prison for their beliefs, race, religion, or for political purposes.

Another group of victims in the Holocaust was the mentally and physically handicapped. It Hitler’s mind, his new vision of the world needed to be ‘perfect’ and these people threatened it. The majority of the handicapped were killed on the spot instead of being put through the concentration camps. In 1939, the ‘euthanasia

At first, the Nazis were only killing political opponents like Communists and/or Social Democrats, for which their harshest persecution was used. Many of the first prisoners sent to Dachau (The first official concentration camp opened near Munich in March of 1933) were communists. By July, the concentration camps run by the Germans held around 27,000 people in what they called “protective custody.” The Nazis had huge rallies and acts of symbolism such as burning of books by Jews. During the years of 1933 to 1939, the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany got out quickly, but many were left behind, and they lived their lives in a constant state of uncertainty and fear. During the fall of 1939, Hitler started the so-called Euthanasia Program. The Euthanasia Program allowed Nazi officials to select around 70,000 German citizens institutionalized for mental illnesses or disabilities. These Germans were to be gassed to death. After prominent German

The Jews were dehumanized by first being stripped of their rights as a human and their identities. A quote from Maus I states that, “They registered us in … They took from us our names.” (pg. 6) The Jews were forced to be stripped of their clothes as a form of public humiliation. By doing this, they made everyone feel as if they were worthless and that they were not special in any type of way. The Nazis mowed people down in a “Holocaust of Bullets” and also subjected Jews to horrendous public humiliation by forcing them to strip in the streets. In the concentration camps the Jews also had to go through the process of getting all their hair cut off.

This statement depicts a glimpse of what the Jewish people had to endure during the holocaust. The holocaust was an extreme form of massacre. It is the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation. The duration of the holocaust was from January 30th, 1933 to May 8th, 1945. The holocaust began in the year of 1933 when the Nazi party came to power, the leader Adolf Hitler believed that the Jewish people belonged to a 'low' and 'evil' race, and they were affecting the lives of the Germans pessimistically. Hitler's motto was to punish, alienate, and torture anyone who differed from him, with religion being a main factor. The Nazi’s blamed the Jews for all the social and economic problems

The Nazis dehumanized the Jewish people through abuse, starvation, and cremation. The Nazis dehumanized the Jews by extreme mental and physical abuse. After getting whipped twenty-five times and asked to stand up, Elie thought, “If only I could answer him, if only I could tell him that I could not move. But my mouth would not open” (Wiesel, 58). Elie was brutally whipped for no logical reason, but rather was singled out due to his race.

made them live in “ghettos”, and brought them to concentration camps to work to their death (Introduction to The Holocaust). Nazi’s did not only kill Jews, they also killed people who did not behave correctly to their standards, homosexuals, people with disabilities, their political views, communist, socialist, and Jehovah’s witnesses (Introduction to The Holocaust). Millions of people died during The Holocaust and few escaped the wrath of the Nazi’s (Introduction to The Holocaust).

Throughout the Holocaust, the severity of the violence increased drastically. By the end of the Holocaust, people were beaten, starved, and pushed to their physical limits. Elie Wiesel experienced these actions first hand. The Jewish were treated more severely by the soldiers and by each other during their marches, convoys, and when they were ill. This was all due to the dehumanization of the Jews.

One way the Nazis dehumanized the Jews is by treating them as animals. They were forced into atrocious accommodations. Tightly packed cattle cars transported them from place to place. Eliezer states on page twenty-two of Night by Elie Wiesel, “The Hungarian police made us climb into the cars, eighty persons in each one.” Everywhere they went, they were met with filthy conditions. The transitions were brutal along with nearly everyone and everything else they encountered.

From leaving jews naked in front of hundreds of people, to leaving them without food, and even taking away their names, the German Nazis dehumanized the whole of the jewish population which helped Hitler reach his ends. As Elie Wiesel writes in his award winning novel

Hitler took this hatred he possessed for the Jews and his pursues of Aryan supremacy to an extensive degree. Between 1939-1945 Hitler took action, extermination, or death camps were established for the sole purpose of killing men, women, and children. Jews were not the only victims of the Nazis during World War II, The Nazis also imprisoned and killed people who opposed their regime on grounds of their ideology; Roma (Gypsies); Germans who were mentally impaired or physically disabled; homosexuals; and captured Soviet soldiers. Heinous crimes inflicted upon the prisoners within the concentration camps and during Hitler’s reign were intense beyond belief. So called camp doctors would torture and inflict incredible suffering on Jewish children, Gypsy children and many others. Patients were put

Likewise, both stories have their similarities, but they also have their differences in the way they survived the Holocaust.