Human nature can be essentially good or bad. World War II, an international disaster, created conflicting ideas about humanity. German Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler, was the source of tragedy for many Jews and other innocent lives during this time. The infamous Hitler was the leader of one of the world’s most horrific genocide, the Holocaust. Through Holocaust, many “criminals” were imprisoned, tortured, and killed from concentration camps, death camps, and murder. These “criminals” were mostly Jews, Polish, gypsies, disabled, and other minorities. The novel, In My Hands, by Irene Gut Opdyke and Jennifer Armstrong, voices Opdyke’s story during World War II. Irene’s experiences of protecting Jews show both sides of human nature, good and bad. …show more content…
Milgram wanted to put it to the test and see if the Germans were just following orders from authority figures. For his experiment, he had three roles: the learner, the teacher, and the researcher. The learner, who was an actor, was taken into a room and had electrodes attached to his arm while the teacher and the researcher were in another room that had an electric shock generator and switches that ranged from slight shocks to dangerous and deadly shocks. The teacher had to test the learner’s spelling of a list of words. Every time the learner made a mistake, the teacher is told to administer an electric shock, increasing by fifteen volts each time a question is answered incorrectly. The learner, purposely gave many wrong answers and many teachers administered a shock, but some refused to administer a shock. When the teacher refused, the researcher gave the teacher’s orders to continue the test and ignore the suffering learner. The learner demonstrates that people are obedient towards authority figures. These authority figures are the ones that are …show more content…
In Opdyke and Armstrong’s novel, In My Hands, Irene, Jaina, Helen, and Helen’s mother go to a nearby work camp to look for Helen’s husband. While they are outside, the four of them witnessed “an officer make a flinging movement with his arm, and something rose into the sky like a fat bird. With his other hand he aimed his pistol, and the bird plummeted to the ground beside its screaming mother, and the officer shot the mother too. But it was not a bird. It was not a bird. It was not a bird,” (Document A). The author chooses to use the word, “flinging” when the officer is about to shoot the baby. This indicates that the action of killing an innocent baby is very casual. For this reason, it is possible to assume that leaders believe that genocide is necessary and casual. People in power are transformed during war. Even an officer, who has slight power over citizens casually strolls through the streets and murders “criminals”, because he has authority to abuse his power and neglect basic human rights.In fact, one of the human nature studies, the Stanford Prison Experiment is an example of abuses of power. Psychologist, Philip Zimbardo wanted to investigate how people would conform to the roles of prisoner and guard. The guards were allowed to do whatever they thought was necessary to maintain order, except physical violence was not permitted. The purpose of this experiment was to study
In the Article by Philip Meyer’s “If Hitler Asked You to Electrocute a Stranger, Would You? Probably” discusses the Milgram experiment, and the readiness to obey authority without question.
At first Milgram believed that the idea of obedience under Hitler during the Third Reich was appalling. He was not satisfied believing that all humans were like this. Instead, he sought to prove that the obedience was in the German gene pool, not the human one. To test this, Milgram staged an artificial laboratory "dungeon" in which ordinary citizens, whom he hired at $4.50 for the experiment, would come down and be required to deliver an electric shock of increasing intensity to another individual for failing to answer a preset list of questions. Meyer describes the object of the experiment "is to find the shock level at which you disobey the experimenter and refuse to pull the switch" (Meyer 241). Here, the author is paving the way into your mind by introducing the idea of reluctance and doubt within the reader. By this point in the essay, one is probably thinking to themselves, "Not me. I wouldn't pull the switch even once." In actuality, the results of the experiment contradict this forerunning belief.
Six million Jews died during World War II by the Nazi army under Hitler who wanted to exterminate all Jews. In Night, Elie Wiesel, the author, recalls his horrifying journey through Auschwitz in the concentration camp. This memoir is based off of Elie’s first-hand experience in the camp as a fifteen year old boy from Sighet survives and lives to tell his story. The theme of this memoir is man's inhumanity to man. The cruel events that occurred to Elie and others during the Holocaust turned families and others against each other as they struggled to survive Hitler's and the Nazi Army’s inhumane treatment.
Throughout the Holocaust, the Jews were continuously dehumanized by the Nazis. However, these actions may not have only impacted the Jews, but they may have had the unintended effect of dehumanizing the Nazis as well. What does this say about humanity? Elie Wiesel and Art Spiegelman both acknowledge this commentary in their books, Night and Maus. The authors demonstrate that true dehumanization reveals that the nature of humanity is not quite as structured as one might think.
The learners were a part of Milgram’s study and were taken into a room with electrodes attached to their arms. The teachers were to ask questions to the learners and if they answered incorrectly, they were to receive a 15-450 voltage electrical shock. Although the learners were not actually shocked, the teachers believed they were inflicting real harm on these innocent people.... ... middle of paper ...
A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal is a memoir about his time as a Jewish child in multiple ghettos and death camps in and around Germany during World War II. The author shares about his reunions with family and acquaintances from the war in the years between then and now. Buergenthal wished to share his Holocaust story for a number of reasons: to prevent himself from just being another number, to contribute to history, to show the power and necessity of forgiveness, the will to not give up, and to question how people change in war allowing them to do unspeakable things. The memoir is not a cry for private attention, but a call to break the cycle of hatred and violence to end mass crimes.
Murders inflicted upon the Jewish population during the Holocaust are often considered the largest mass murders of innocent people, that some have yet to accept as true. The mentality of the Jewish prisoners as well as the officers during the early 1940’s transformed from an ordinary way of thinking to an abnormal twisted headache. In the books Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi and Ordinary men by Christopher R. Browning we will examine the alterations that the Jewish prisoners as well as the police officers behaviors and qualities changed.
Many different responses have occurred to readers after their perusal of this novel. Those that doubt the stories of the holocaust’s reality see Night as lies and propaganda designed to further the myth of the holocaust. Yet, for those people believing in the reality, the feelings proffered by the book are quite different. Many feel outrage at the extent of human maliciousness towards other humans. Others experience pity for the loss of family, friends, and self that is felt by the Holocaust victims.
Following the beginning of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union would start what would become two of the worst genocides in world history. These totalitarian governments would “welcome” people all across Europe into a new domain. A domain in which they would learn, in the utmost tragic manner, the astonishing capabilities that mankind possesses. Nazis and Soviets gradually acquired the ability to wipe millions of people from the face of the Earth. Throughout the war they would continue to kill millions of people, from both their home country and Europe. This was an effort to rid the Earth of people seen as unfit to live in their ideal society. These atrocities often went unacknowledged and forgotten by the rest of the world, leaving little hope for those who suffered. Yet optimism was not completely dead in the hearts of the few and the strong. Reading Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag by Janusz Bardach and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi help one capture this vivid sense of resistance toward the brutality of the German concentration and Soviet work camps. Both Bardach and Levi provide a commendable account of their long nightmarish experience including the impact it had on their lives and the lives of others. The willingness to survive was what drove these two men to achieve their goals and prevent their oppressors from achieving theirs. Even after surviving the camps, their mission continued on in hopes of spreading their story and preventing any future occurrence of such tragic events. “To have endurance to survive what left millions dead and millions more shattered in spirit is heroic enough. To gather the strength from that experience for a life devoted to caring for oth...
Imagine you’re eating dinner with your family on a quiet, normal night in your small town. Suddenly, a seemingly mad man comes to warn your family that millions of people of your race are being slaughtered. He advises that you immediately pack everything you own, and leave the place that has been your home your entire life. You probably wouldn’t take his warning very seriously, would you? Living in the twentieth century it was hard to imagine that such a barbaric act was actually occurring. Not adhering to this warning, however, cost millions of Jews their lives. Night by Elie Wiesel lets us into the minds of the Jews who were victimized, and Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning offers us the point of view of the
In finding that people are not naturally aggressive. Milgram now alters the experiment to find out why do people act the way they do. He compiled the experiment to answer, why do people obey authority, even when the actions are against their own morals.
Irish Playwright, George Bernard Shaw, once said, “The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.” Inhumanity is mankind’s worse attribute. Every so often, ordinary humans are driven to the point were they have no choice but to think of themselves. One of the most famous example used today is the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night demonstrates how fear is a debilitating force that causes people to lose sight of who they once were. After being forced into concentration camps, Elie was rudely awakened into reality. Traumatizing incidents such as Nazi persecution or even the mistreatment among fellow prisoners pushed Elie to realize the cruelty around him; Or even the wickedness Elie himself is capable of doing. This resulted in the loss of faith, innocence, and the close bonds with others.
Summary of the Experiment In Stanley Milgram’s ‘The Perils of Obedience’, Milgram conducted experiments with the objective of knowing “how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist" (Milgram 317). In the experiments, two participants would go into a warehouse where the experiments were being conducted and inside the warehouse, the subjects would be marked as either a teacher or a learner. A learner would be hooked up to a kind of electric chair and would be expected to do as he is being told by the teacher and do it right because whenever the learner said the wrong word, the intensity of the electric shocks increased. Similar procedure was undertaken on the teacher and the results of the experiments showed conclusively that a large number of people would go against their personal conscience in obedience to authority (Milgram 848).... ...
If This Is a Man or Survival in Auschwitz), stops to exist; the meanings and applications of words such as “good,” “evil,” “just,” and “unjust” begin to merge and the differences between these opposites turn vague. Continued existence in Auschwitz demanded abolition of one’s self-respect and human dignity. Vulnerability to unending dehumanization certainly directs one to be dehumanized, thrusting one to resort to mental, physical, and social adaptation to be able to preserve one’s life and personality. It is in this adaptation that the line distinguishing right and wrong starts to deform. Primo Levi, a survivor, gives account of his incarceration in the Monowitz- Buna concentration camp.
The Holocaust is one of the largest and most complex genocides in human history. During this period, over six million Jewish men, women and children, in addition to other racial groups, were murdered by the Nazi Party led by Adolph Hitler. The War also cost the lives of thousands of German soldiers, and innocent civilians. Through the story of Helmut and his family, Seiffert showcases the trauma inflicted on Berliners, the realities of war, and the mindset of German citizens, specifically people with disabilities and children who lost their parents during the time of national decay. The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert illustrates how the Nazi period negatively impacted the lives of ordinary Germans, particularly men who were