...The Holocaust The Holocaust was a tragic event that lasted from 1933-1945 for a total of twelve years. The group of people that was the cause of this was known as the Nazis, their leader’s name was Adolf Hitler. He gained power of Chancellor in 1933, the first year of the Holocaust (Holocaust). Hitler had violence in his past, so it was no surprise when he wanted to cause more harm and violence to others. “He thought that the Jews were an “alien” threat to the German racial purity and community” (Concentration). The Holocaust went on during the battle of World War II. The Holocaust was a tragic event that should never happen again, and here is a few things that went on during these brutal twelve years. The first concentration...
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...Hitler came to power in Germany. Adolf Hitler was a very strong minded individual that liked everything to go his way, and for what he believed in. Germany was already a very racial country, and judged people strongly on their religious beliefs, and their political communities. The Nazis, also known as the National Socialist German Worker's Party, planned to murder the Jewish people. They called this plot, “the final solution.” The Holocaust was a devastating time during World War Two,that changed the lives of many people all over the world. The name holocaust comes from the Greek word “holokauston”, meaning sacrifice from fire. The holocaust killed many groups of people such as the Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled for persecution, but mostly the Jews. When Hitler first gained power, he formed an advanced police and military force to smother anyone who criticized his authority. With this force, Hitler developed the first concentration camp, Dachau. A concentration camp was used to work and starve prisoners to death. Later Dachau became a huge concentration camp to exterminate Jews. Hitler made life miserable for Jews. On April of 1933, the Nazis initiated by boycotting all Jewish ran businesses. The Nuremberg Laws issued in September of 1935, made it so Jews were excluded from most public life. The law included exposing the German Jews of their citizenship, and outlawed marriages and extramarital sex between Jews and Germans. This...
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...Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night tells the story of the Holocaust, the mass genocide of the Jewish people and important event in WWII. The memoir Night begins in the polish town of Sighet. The story is About Elie Wiesel, a Jewish boy whose family gets deported to the concentration camp with other Jews from his town. Upon arrival his Mother and Sister, Tzipora are separated and executed by the Nazis in the Auschwitz death camp. Following that, after months of work, with the advancing allied front, the prisoners were forced to march all night to the Gleiwitz concentration camp. As Elie’s story continues, after being stuffed inside a camp barrack for 3 days without food or water, the Prisoners were let out for a selection, Elie’s Father was chosen to...
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...The Holocaust It all started in 1933 when Hitler came to power in Germany. Adolf Hitler was a very strong minded individual that liked everything to go his way, and for what he believed in. Germany was already a very racial country, and judged people strongly on their religious beliefs, and their political communities. The Nazis, also known as the National Socialist German Worker's Party, planned to murder the Jewish people. They called this plot, “the final solution.” The Holocaust was a devastating time during World War Two,that changed the lives of many people all over the world. The name holocaust comes from the Greek word “holokauston”, meaning sacrifice from fire. The holocaust killed many groups of people such as the Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled for persecution, but mostly the Jews. When Hitler first gained power, he formed an advanced police and military force to smother anyone who criticized his authority. With this force, Hitler developed the first concentration camp, Dachau. A concentration camp was used to work and starve prisoners to death. Later Dachau became a huge concentration camp to exterminate Jews. Hitler made life miserable for Jews. On April of 1933, the Nazis initiated by boycotting all Jewish ran businesses. The Nuremberg Laws issued in September of 1935, made it so Jews were excluded from most public life. The law included exposing the German Jews of their citizenship, and outlawed marriages...
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...On April 11, 1945, American forces, including Harry, freed Buchenwald which in total had held over 238,000 people over its existence of a span of eight years. The death toll was calculated to be around 43,000 or more. Throughout his testimony, including his tales of bonding with the boy, he uses language that conveys his feelings during his experience, for example: pity. He expressed that he felt sorry he had to see the victims but was not able to do anything- and it truly leaves an impact on the reader- showing an unfamiliar perspective from a soldier on the Holocaust. After the Holocaust, most Jews had problems such as having no home, money, or family where they could safely return to, and so this meant they had to live at Displaced Persons. camp. The sand is a sand. At first, these camps did not have the best conditions, but they progressed as more political leaders inspected and invested in these...
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...people have written about the Holocaust. But not many Holocaust survivors have written about their personal experiences of this horrific period. Although we have read dozens of historical books and articles about this genocide written by well respected historians, there aren’t enough memoirs of the Holocaust written by people who experienced everything first hand. Books that are considered primary sources are very few and this is why those biographies and autobiographies of victims and survivors of the Holocaust are priceless. Primo Levi’s memoir If This Is A Man is one of those books describing the horrible acts that the author endured during the Holocaust. In his autobiography, Levi describes his time in Auschwitz after being captured by the Nazis during World War II until the concentration camp’s liberation almost two years later. The events are described in chronological order in the way the Italian – Jew author experienced it all....
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...Elie Wiesel wrote about the Holocaust Memorial in a serious, questioning human society matter. This museum is not an answer to the Holocaust. It is a question mark." This quote represents why did the Nazis do what they did? Why did everything happen? It is a question mark in human society. Previously, I just learned brief parts of the Holocaust: the sign "work makes you free," the crematorium, the starvation, and the display of humans as animals. After visiting this museum and reading the book Night by Elie Wiesel, I realized the many sufferings that the prisoners experienced, not just from the Nazis, but from other prisoners as well. During this World War/Holocaust era, humans felt selfish in every situation. There would be unknown events...
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...The Holocaust. What comes to mind when this single event is mentioned? Tragedy, fear, death, sadness? For many, the thought of the Holocaust sounds like it occurred a lifetime ago. However, the atrocities which the Jews faced transpired less than seventy-five years ago. The Holocaust is not another shrapnel of ancient antiquity to be disserted – it is a chapter of modern history which must be deliberated and reflected upon. For this time, history cannot repeat itself. The nefarious concentration camps had their own social climate, as Jews braced themselves every day for the same endless battle of survival and did anything they had to do in order to outlive their relentless enemy – death. The story of how countless people were ripped from their homes and thrown into death camps is told firsthand, by the autobiographical novel, Night, written by Holocaust survivor Eliezer Wiesel. According to Wiesel’s recollection, it all commenced when German officers began to enter Jewish towns and occupy them. There was talk of German tensions, but almost everyone was indifferent. Before they knew it, Jews were being placed into ghettos, curfews were being imposed on them, and they were having more rights taken away from them. Anti-Semitism became...
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...In the context of the Holocaust, oral history has been especially significant and beneficial to document and give witness to the horrific suffering and torture sustained by humans during the World War II. Particularly, it is imperative and an obligation to study the testimonials and biographies of those who were labeled as political prisoners taken away to concentration camps to be brutally persecuted and killed. The Holocaust was an atrocity of an unimaginable magnitude, with the loss of 6 million Jews plus 5 million others; it is unacceptable to question the validity of oral history in relationship to the Holocaust. To question or deny the oral testimonies of the Holocaust is as if one were to refute the existence of the Holocaust, along with all those who have lost their lives, and its impact on modern society. However, the article entitled History Matters, as seen on George Mason University’s website under the Interpreting Oral History section, points out the potential flaws of oral history. The article states, “just because someone says something is true, however colorfully or convincingly they say it, doesn't...
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...atrocities of the Holocaust. ‘Night’ is set during the Holocaust time period in 1944–45, toward the end of the World War Two. It mainly takes place in Auschwitz and Buchenwald which are both Nazi Germany concentration camps. The memoir depicts his experiences with his father in those concentration camps. ‘Night’ takes the reader on a journey where Eliezer, who was only 15 and his family, along with many other Jews, were forcibly removed from their hometown and transported to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. He wrote about their battle for survival, and of his battle with God for a way to understand the spiteful cruelty he witnesses each day as well as his increasing disgust with humanity due to the inhumane treatment of the Jews and how they were...
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...the Holocaust. Literally translating to “Sacrifice by Fire” the Holocaust is a gruesome stain on humanity’s past. This dark occurrence lasted from 1933, when Hitler started his career as Chancellor, to the liberation of the camps in 1945. Not many survivors are left to tell the horrific tale of the Holocaust, but the ones that are paint a strong picture of a close approximation of “Hell on Earth”. The daily lives of death camp occupants vary greatly depending on age, gender, race,...
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...The Holocaust ended May 8th, 1945 with the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest camp in Nazi territory and the one where most deaths took place; but for those who were lucky enough to survive, the effects of the war would remain with them for the rest of their lives. Not only were the Jews stripped of all their belongings and identity, but they were also forced to betray their own ethical codes. As survivors tried to assimilate back in to every day life, the memories of the family they had lost and the brutal events they witnessed kept resurfacing, leaving long-term psychological effects such as: anxiety, depression, psychosomatic disorders, survival guilt, isolation, and sleep disturbances. Not only did the survivors themselves experience these effects, but their children and grandchildren would as well. Victor Frankl’s memoir Man Search for Meaning, Lawrence Langer’s memoir Holocaust Testimonies: The...
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...Is Responsible For The Holocaust All over 22 countries, approximately 5,962,129 Jewish people were murdered during the Holocaust.The Holocaust was a death massacre of the Jewish race and many other humanly races. It was Hitler’s idea to create a “perfect race” of people. Concentration camps and the ghettos were created to keep the prisoners sanctioned in and to work. Crematoriums were big pits of fire where prisoners were burned. Throughout the entire Holocaust, the three groups of people most responsible for the cause are the top SS soldiers, the minor SS soldiers, and lastly Hitler. Top SS soldiers inflicted many harsh punishments along with giving out the orders to minor SS to carry out more orders and discipline. An example of a top SS was Heinrich Himmler. He established the concentration camp for Third Reich and was the head of Germany’s extermination camps. Himmler gave out most of the orders to the rest of SS. He was the one who carried out the order from Hitler to kill the range of 6 million Jews. Himmler was brilliant on the setting up of the concentration camps and how they would work. He believed too in the “purity” of the German race....
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...The Holocaust: Effects of Dehumanization in Art Spiegelman’s Maus War broke out in Europe in September of 1939. Everything went downhill from then, Germans began to take over and minorities such as Jews were quickly forced to go to concentration camps, these horrible camps were stationed all over Europe. One of the main camps in Poland was Auschwitz. Opened in May 1940, it was an extermination camp located in southern Poland in a small town named Oswiecim. The camp consisted of three separate camps not far from one another so that communication could be kept between them. These three camps included: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II–Birkenau and Auschwitz III–Monowitz. Auschwitz I was classified as the base camp where prisoners mainly worked, Auschwitz II–Birkenau was the main extermination camp where prisoners went to die in a variety of ways after being too weak to work, and Auschwitz III–Monowitz another labor camp, which held prisoners who worked at a German chemical factory, IG Farben. The killing methods ranged from being lined up at a wall and shot to being put into ‘showers’ that realized a toxic gas. Once the prisoners were dead, they were then burned in the crematoriums at the camp. Essentially the prisoners of the labor and death camps were treated as objects and not as the humans that they were. Many might even go as far as refer to the Germans as heartless for doing the things that they did to the innocent Jews and other monitories. Art Spiegelman’s Maus shows...
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...The Holocaust was traumatizing event in the 1900s. It was a life changing event for the Jews. This time period went down in history. Rudolf Hoss, estimated during the Nuremberg Trial that nearly three million people died while being held hostage in death camps. Also, ninety percent of the ones killed were known as Jews. In death camps the people who were known as “different” suffered from cruel treatment, harsh environment and immoral medical experiments. Well, we all know Hitler had millions of people killed in death camps. It seemed, due to the history that Hitler was a racist man. Hitler disliked any other race that were not considered his race. “That if they eliminated the people who stood in their way and the degenerates and racially inferior, they-the great Germans would prosper” (Schwartz). So, Hitler wanted to kill a lot of...
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