Dehumanization Of The Jews Essay

The Holocaust affected the lives of millions because of the hate inside of one certain group of people: the Nazi’s.The victims of the Holocaust provide an excellent example of individuals who suffered from the torment of this psychological process as, for a variety of reasons, the Nazi’s goal was to deprive human qualities such as individuality, compassion and most importantly, identity through the process of dehumanization.People sometimes fought each other for extra rations and later on during the Holocaust, killed each other.

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The internal irrigation system occurs 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).

The Nazi’s wanted to make the victims do degrading things in order to strip the Jews of their identity and make them appear to be subhuman.

Experiencing dehumanization can often lead to feelings of intense hatred and alienation among conflicting parties.

The more severe the conflict, the more the psychological distance between groups will widen.

If the Jews were completely dehumanized, killing people who are less than human was justifiable to the Nazi’s.

The Jews went through dehumanization simply to make the killing of others psychologically easy for the Nazi’s.Purposely withholding a proper mean of transportation, the Nazis place the Jews on the same level as animals and therefore undermine the importance of Jewish existence.To enclose the Jews in a transport meant for animals is to limit their freedom and further dehumanizing the Jews as well as belittling their self-esteem.Dehumanization is defined as a psychological process whereby members of a group of people assert the inferiority of another group.Opponents view each other as less than human and thus not deserving of moral consideration, and are treated as less than humans through subtle or overt acts or statements.However, one of the most extreme efforts at dehumanizing the Jews was through the various experiments done by the Nazi’s.Some of these experiments included: sun lamp, internal irrigation, hot bath, warming by body heat and freezing/hypothermia.In his attempt to bear witness to the horrors of the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate the Jewish people, Primo Levi, a Jewish-Italian chemist, writer and Holocaust survivor provides his own personal testimony of his experience in the Auschwitz concentration camp in the form of his memoirs, If This Is a Man.In these memoirs, Levi not only exposes the actions of the Nazi’s in the Holocaust and their demonstration of dehumanization, he goes beyond retelling his story and seeks to consider and analyze the power of the human condition in all of it’s extremes.During the Holocaust, The Nazi’s employed numerous techniques of dehumanizing their captives which forced the Jews to endure treacherous conditions.One of these techniques is demonstrated in the way that the Jews were conveyed in cattle cars to the concentration camps.