Holocaust 8 Essay, Research Paper

The Holocaust, what is the true depth of the word? As sad as

it may seem, it affected the lives of millions because of

the hate inside of one certain group of people, the Nazi s.

Dehumanization is to deprive human qualities such as

individuality or compassion. Victims of the Holocaust went

through dehumanization simply to make the killing of others

psychologically easy for the Nazi s.

Many victims of the Holocaust suffered from various

experiments which eventually led to the death. Some of the

experiments were things such as: sun lamp, internal

irrigation, hot bath, warming by body heat,

freezing/hypothermia etc. The internal irrigation system is

when, the frozen victims would have water heated to a near

blistering temperature forcefully irrigated into the

stomach, bladder, and intestines. (Medical Experiments of

the Holocaust and Nazi Medicine) Why would anybody perform

such horrible things on another human being? That is a

question that many people still can t answer. It is much

more complex than it may seem. The Nazi s wanted to make the

victims do so many degrading things that they would appear

to be subhuman. Killing somebody less than human was more

justifiable to the Nazi s. One experiment that was conducted

on a pair of Russians describes the torture that many

victims went through. The experiment of the twins is

graphically described, the next part of the examination

consisted of tubes being forced through their noses and into

their lungs. They were then ventilated with a gas which

caused them to cough so severely that they had to be

restrained. The sputum from the lungs was collected for

examination. (Medical Experiments of the Holocaust and Nazi

Medicine) These sort of things went on throughout the camps

and the victims were just being used as lab rats.

The living conditions within camps played a major role

in the deterioration of the victims. On September 1, 1939,

when Germany invaded Poland, the lives of anybody who wasn t

part of the superior Germanic race changed forever. As

soon as people began being sent away to various camps, the

process of dehumanization started. Children were kidnapped

from their homes and sent away to camps, and the children

that were useless were killed by starvation, lethal

injections, and disease. Hitler initialed an order to kill

institutionalized, handicapped patients deemed incurable.

(THE CAMPS) Everybody who was thought to be useless was

killed in some way. By the late 1930 s there were hundreds

of camps scattered throughout Germany; and camps were

quickly being established throughout much more of Europe. In

these camps the death rates were so high, from

malnutrition, typhus and exhaustion that the disposal of

corpses became a serious problem. (THE CAMPS)

The treatment in transporting and caring for the

victims is probably one of the main factors in the

dehumanization of people during Holocaust. The victims were

treated inferior simply because of their nationality. The

Nazi s made it a point to degrade these people in every way

possible by taking away their rights and free will. Praying

wasn t permitted and was often followed by death. Alexander

Kimel, a Holocaust survivor, expresses how the Nazi s

treated the victims:

The Germans establishes a bureaucracy that

dealt with people like we are dealing with

commodities not even cattle. For example coal

is mined, sorted, transported and burned in

a casual manner, when it comes to transport

cattle man is more careful; cattle requires

the supply of fodder, water and proper facilities.

The SS dealt with their victims like with

commodities. People were collected, stored,

transported to Gas Chambers for processing

without any provision of food, water or sanitary

facilitates. On the opposite the lack of food

especially water was used cruelly for facilitating

the destruction; hungry, thirsty, emaciated

people do not resist.(Kimel)

People were treated as though they weren t human and didn t

deserve to live on the earth. Hundreds, even thousands, of

people died thinking that they were inferior to others

because of the way they were born.

My heart goes out for all the people that died during

the Holocaust, and to all of the families that lost a love

one. Nobody knows what it feels like unless they went

thought it themselves. When reading Night the pain that the

people went through is sad enough to make anybody want to

take back the actions of the Nazi s. We walked over

pain-racked bodies. We trod on wounded faces. No cries. A

few groans. (Wiesel, pg. 88) Although I read the horrifying

facts about all the terrible things the victims had to go

through, I can t imagine what it was like to actually had

went through it. To watch your family be ripped apart, and

then be separated and killed according to importance is

something unthinkable. The process of dehumanization is so

abundantly clear. Although it isn t spoken about very

freely, it happened with everybody that went through the

Holocaust.