How Were The Jews Treated Like Animals In The Holocoust

Less Than Human: Why Nosotros Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others
Past David Livingstone Smith
Hardcover, 336 pages
St. Martin'south Printing
List cost: $24.99

Before I get to work explaining how dehumanization works, I want to make a preliminary case for its importance. So, to get the ball rolling, I'll briefly discuss the role that dehumanization played in what is rightfully considered the single virtually destructive event in human history: the Second World State of war. More than seventy million people died in the state of war, most of them civilians. Millions died in combat. Many were burned live by incendiary bombs and, in the end, nuclear weapons. Millions more were victims of systematic genocide. Dehumanization made much of this carnage possible.

Permit'south brainstorm at the end. The 1946 Nuremberg doctors' trial was the commencement of twelve military tribunals held in Germany after the defeat of Germany and Japan. 20 doctors and three administrators — twenty-two men and a single adult female — stood accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They had participated in Hitler'south euthanasia program, in which around 200,000 mentally and physically handicapped people deemed unfit to live were gassed to death, and they performed fiendish medical experiments on thousands of Jewish, Russian, Roma and Smooth prisoners.

Principal prosecutor Telford Taylor began his opening statement with these somber words:

The defendants in this case are charged with murders, tortures and other atrocities committed in the name of medical scientific discipline. The victims of these crimes are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A scattering only are however alive; a few of the survivors volition appear in this courtroom. But near of these miserable victims were slaughtered outright or died in the grade of the tortures to which they were subjected ... To their murderers, these wretched people were not individuals at all. They came in wholesale lots and were treated worse than animals.

He went on to describe the experiments in detail. Some of these human guinea pigs were deprived of oxygen to simulate high altitude parachute jumps. Others were frozen, infested with malaria, or exposed to mustard gas. Doctors made incisions in their flesh to simulate wounds, inserted pieces of broken glass or forest shavings into them, and then, tying off the blood vessels, introduced bacteria to induce gangrene. Taylor described how men and women were made to drinkable seawater, were infected with typhus and other mortiferous diseases, were poisoned and burned with phosphorus, and how medical personnel conscientiously recorded their agonized screams and fierce convulsions.

The descriptions in Taylor'southward narrative are so horrifying that it's easy to overlook what might seem like an insignificant rhetorical flourish: his comment that "these wretched people were ... treated worse than animals". But this comment raises a question of deep and key importance. What is it that enables one group of human beings to treat another grouping equally though they were subhuman creatures?

A rough answer isn't hard to come by. Thinking sets the agenda for action, and thinking of humans as less than human paves the way for barbarism. The Nazis were explicit most the status of their victims. They were Untermenschen — subhumans — and equally such were excluded from the system of moral rights and obligations that bind humankind together. It's wrong to kill a person, but permissible to exterminate a rat. To the Nazis, all the Jews, Gypsies and others were rats: unsafe, disease-carrying rats.

Jews were the main victims of this genocidal project. From the beginning, Hitler and his followers were convinced that the Jewish people posed a mortiferous threat to all that was noble in humanity. In the apocalyptic Nazi vision, these putative enemies of civilization were represented every bit parasitic organisms — every bit leeches, lice, leaner, or vectors of contamination. "Today," Hitler proclaimed in 1943, "international Jewry is the ferment of decomposition of peoples and states, simply every bit it was in artifact. Information technology will remain that manner equally long as peoples do not find the forcefulness to get rid of the virus." Both the expiry camps (the gas chambers of which were modeled on delousing chambers) and the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads that roamed across Eastern Europe followed in the wake of the advancing High german army) were responses to what the Nazis perceived to exist a lethal pestilence.

Sometimes the Nazis thought of their enemies as vicious, bloodthirsty predators rather than parasites. When partisans in occupied regions of the Soviet Wedlock began to wage a guerilla war against German forces, Walter von Reichenau, the commander-in-chief of the German army, issued an order to inflict a "severe just simply retribution upon the Jewish subhuman elements" (the Nazis considered all of their enemies as role of "international Jewry", and were convinced that Jews controlled the national governments of Russian federation, the United Kingdom, and the Us). Military historian Mary R. Habeck confirms that, "soldiers and officers thought of the Russians and Jews as 'animals' ... that had to perish. Dehumanizing the enemy allowed German language soldiers and officers to agree with the Nazis' new vision of warfare, and to fight without granting the Soviets any mercy or quarter."

The Holocaust is the most thoroughly documented instance of the ravages of dehumanization. Its hideousness strains the limits of imagination. And nevertheless, focusing on it can exist strangely comforting. It'southward all too piece of cake to imagine that the Third Reich was a baroque abnormality, a kind of mass insanity instigated by a pocket-sized group of deranged ideologues who conspired to seize political ability and bend a nation to their will. Alternatively, it's tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely roughshod and bloodthirsty people. Merely these diagnoses are dangerously wrong. What's most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It'due south that they were ordinary man beings.

When nosotros think of dehumanization during World War II our minds turn to the Holocaust, just it wasn't merely the Germans who dehumanized their enemies. While the architects of the Concluding Solution were decorated implementing their lethal programme of racial hygiene, the Russian-Jewish poet and novelist Ilya Ehrenburg was churning out propaganda for distribution to Stalin's Reddish Army. These pamphlets seethed with dehumanizing rhetoric: they spoke of "the odour of Deutschland's beast breath," and described Germans as "two-legged animals who accept mastered the technique of state of war" — "ersatz men" who ought to be annihilated. "The Germans are non homo beings," Ehrenburg wrote, "... If you kill one German, kill another — there is nil more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses."

This wasn't idle talk. The Wehrmacht had taken the lives of 23 million Soviet citizens, roughly half of them civilians. When the tide of the war finally turned, a torrent of Russian forces poured into Germany from the east, and their inexorable advance became an orgy of rape and murder. "They were certainly egged on past Ehrenburg and other Soviet propagandists..." writes announcer Giles McDonough:

East Prussia was the first High german region visited past the Red Army ... In the course of a single night the blood-red army killed seventy-two women and 1 homo. Most of the women had been raped, of whom the oldest was eighty-iv. Some of the victims had been crucified ... A witness who made it to the west talked of a poor village girl who was raped past an entire tank squadron from eight in the evening to 9 in the morning. Ane man was shot and fed to the pigs.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2011/03/29/134956180/criminals-see-their-victims-as-less-than-human

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