Blind Obedience
The Holocaust was an inhumane genocide constructed by Germany elected leader Adolf Hitler, which began January 30, 1933, and ended May 8, 1945. Many participated in this inhumane genocide by simply obeying blindly. The result of blind obedience, total eleven million deaths. During the Holocaust, the factors that contribute to people to blindly obey are that it is ingrained that everyone must have obedience towards authority, it fulfills psychological needs and fear of consequence for not obeying authority.
It is ingrained in the human’s mind that humans must have obedience towards authority which explains many German’s obedience towards the Nazi. The dictionary definition of authority is “A person or organization having power
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In “Notes on Cultures of Violence, Cultures of Caring and Peace, and the Fulfillment of Basic Human Needs” written by Ervin Staub, a professor of psychology, emeritus, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he includes both the social and cultural reasoning to why people blindly obey and participate in creation of destruction such like the Holocaust. For the social aspect of it, he says “Group are ethnocentric, seeing their value and beliefs as superior to those of other” (Staub 7). Hitler thought the German race was the superior race, wanting to create the perfect race of Aryan, which he influenced Germans to believe so too. This resulted in eleven million lives throughout Europe because people who wanted to be better than someone else supported Hitler and obey his command. For the cultural aspect of why people blindly contribute to the destructive event of the Holocaust, Staub says “conditions and experiences contribute to the generation of group with extreme ideologies that identify either minorities as the state (or both) as their enemies (Staub 9). After World War I, Germany was facing economic and geopolitical consequences. Germany’s economy was highly inflated and the land of Germany was taken away for their natural resources that were present. All it took was someone to step up and promise Germans that they will fix all the problems, in which Hitler did. Non Jews German joined together to blame Jews for the suffering in Germany, causing conflict for the Jews. If Germans did not blindly support Hitler for the social or cultural aspect, then it was their desire to fit in. The sense of belonging is a human need, it is important in seeing value. Conformity is what most German were looking for, the act of matching attitudes, belief, and behavior to group
The Holocaust represents 11 million lives that abruptly ended, the extermination of people not for who they were but for what they were. Groups such as handicaps, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, political dissidents and others were persecuted by the Nazis because of their religious/political beliefs, physical defects, or failure to fall into the Aryan ideal. The Holocaust was lead by a man named Adolf Hitler who was born in 1889, and died in 1945.
If a person of authority ordered you inflict a 15 to 400 volt electrical shock on another innocent human being, would you follow your direct orders? That is the question that Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University tested in the 1960’s. Most people would answer “no,” to imposing pain on innocent human beings but Milgram wanted to go further with his study. Writing and Reading across the Curriculum holds a shortened edition of Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience,” where he displays an eye-opening experiment that tests the true obedience of people under authority figures. He observes that most people go against their natural instinct to never harm innocent humans and obey the extreme and dangerous instructions of authority figures. Milgram is well aware of his audience and organization throughout his article, uses quotes directly from his experiment and connects his research with a real world example to make his article as effective as possible.
Name: Institution: Course: Tutor: Date: German Collective Guilt I believe that the majority of the German people as a whole were guilty of the Holocaust. Ideally, during the Second World War (WWII) the huge majority of citizens in Germany as well as the overpowered European states took no risks. They were spectators, attempting to get going with their lives the best they could. However, they failed to protest against Nazi domination or endanger their welfare, attempting to overcome their novel rulers by assisting the person in need. Nevertheless, after the end of WWII, many asserted not to have recognized the right nature of Nazi maltreatments as well as the Holocaust.
From 1933 onwards, Adolf Hitler and his Nazis began implementing simple discrimination laws against the Jews and others who they did not see part of their master race. Hitler and the Nazis believed that German power was being taken by the Jews. Hitler was able to convince his followers of this issue with the Jewish question as it was known, and get away with murdering millions of people in an attempt to cleanse society of anyone inferior to the master race. The Holocaust lasted for 12 years, until 1945. Starting as early as 1944, the Allies were finally advancing on the Germans and began taking over their camps. These liberations and takeovers by the Soviets, American’s and other allies slowly began to remove Hitler from power. In my essay I will go into detail on the final years of the holocaust and how it ended.(1)
History, however, generally identifies the Holocaust to be the series of events that occurred in the years before and during World War II. The Holocaust started in 1933 with the persecuting and terrorizing of Jews by the Nazi Party, and ended in 1945 with the murder of millions of helpless Jews by the Nazi war-machine. "The Holocaust has become a symbol of brutality and of one people's inhumanity to another." Resnick p. 11. The man responsible for the Holocaust was Adolf Hitler and his Nazi war machine.
What possible reason can someone have for supporting or participating in the genocide and murder of millions of innocent people? During the period of the holocaust, the German peoples participation or indifference’s towards state sponsored genocide and murder could have been an effect of racism, national pride, and peer pressure.
As early as age thirteen, we start learning about the Holocaust in classrooms and in textbooks. We learn that in the 1940s, the German Nazi party (led by Adolph Hitler) intentionally performed a mass genocide in order to try to breed a perfect population of human beings. Jews were the first peoples to be put into ghettos and eventually sent by train to concentration camps like Auschwitz and Buchenwald. At these places, each person was separated from their families and given a number. In essence, these people were no longer people at all; they were machines. An estimation of six million deaths resulting from the Holocaust has been recorded and is mourned by descendants of these people every day. There are, however, some individuals who claim that this horrific event never took place.
The Holocaust was the great plan to make Jews to become instinct and other people that Hitler considered inferior to him. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in Germany led this great plan from 1933 to 1945. Approximately twelve million people had their lives taken, half being Jews. Everything changed and became impacted all around the world when Hitler took over Germany, he had a strong prejudice against the Jews. His goal was to create the perfect race of human, blonde hair, blue eyed Germans. The soldiers in Hitler’s camp was his followers, the Nazis, which did all of his dirty work for him. There were also many other people that contributed to his massive event. There became different clans and groups of people going out on their own and doing the killing also, not only Jews. For example, the doctors that ran test on people and experimented on the people didn’t care about their patients wellbeing or health
The Holocaust could be best described as the widespread genocide of over eleven million Jews and other undesirables throughout Europe from 1933 to 1945. It all began when Adolf Hitler, Germany's newest leader, enforced the Nuremburg Race Laws. These laws discriminated against Jews and other undesirables and segregated them from the rest of the population. As things grew worse, Jews were forced to wear the Star of David on their clothing. The laws even stripped them of their citizenship.
An powerful leader can lead people to do many things, even when a leader is evil, men will still obey the authority figure. One example of this obedience is where the German citizens allow the Nazi soldiers to live in their homes. This example shows that the citizens are following this authority figure. The obedience is
In conclusion, there were many groups besides the Jews that became victims to the persecution and murder by the Nazis. There were motivations in creating a master race, and occupying new land to create space for the German people, protecting and watching out for any political parties or cultures that may have gone against Hitler or damaged his master race, and he wanted to rid his country of those unhelpful to it or going against religious traditions.
The Holocaust, the mass killing of the Jewish people in Europe, is the largest genocide in history to date. Over the course of the Holocaust, nearly six million Jewish people were killed by the Nazi Party and Germany, led by Adolf Hitler. There are multiple contributing factors to the Holocaust that made it so large in scope. Historians argue which of these factors were most significant. The most significant contributing factor is the source of the Holocaust, the reason it occurred.
The Holocaust was the genocide of approximately six million people of innocent Jewish decent by the Nazi government. The Holocaust was a very tragic time in history due to the idealism that people were taken from their surroundings, persecuted and murdered due to the belief that German Nazi’s were superior to Jews. During the Holocaust, many people suffered both physically and mentally. Tragic events in people’s lives cause a change in their outlook on the world and their future. Due to the tragic events that had taken place being deceased in their lives, survivors often felt that death was a better option than freedom.
After Germany lost World War I, it was in a national state of humiliation. Their economy was in the drain, and they had their hands full paying for the reparations from the war. Then a man named Adolf Hitler rose to the position of Chancellor and realized his potential to inspire people to follow. Hitler promised the people of Germany a new age; an age of prosperity with the country back as a superpower in Europe. Hitler had a vision, and this vision was that not only the country be dominant in a political sense, but that his ‘perfect race’, the ‘Aryans,’ would be dominant in a cultural sense. His steps to achieving his goal came in the form of the Holocaust. The most well known victims of the Holocaust were of course, the Jews. However, approximately 11 million people were killed in the holocaust, and of those, there were only 6 million Jews killed. The other 5 million people were the Gypsies, Pols, Political Dissidents, Handicapped, Jehovah’s witnesses, Homosexuals and even those of African-German descent. Those who were believed to be enemies of the state were sent to camps where they were worked or starved to death.
During the Holocaust, around six million Jews were murdered due to Hitler’s plan to rid Germany of “heterogeneous people” in Germany, as stated in the novel, Life and Death in the Third Reich by Peter Fritzsche. Shortly following a period of suffering, Hitler began leading Germany in 1930 to start the period of his rule, the Third Reich. Over time, his power and support from the country increased until he had full control over his people. Starting from saying “Heil Hitler!” the people of the German empire were cleverly forced into following Hitler through terror and threat. He had a group of leaders, the SS, who were Nazis that willingly took any task given, including the mass murder of millions of Jews due to his belief that they were enemies to Germany. German citizens were talked into participating or believing in the most extreme of things, like violent pogroms, deportations, attacks, and executions. Through the novel’s perspicacity of the Third Reich, readers can see how Hitler’s reign was a controversial time period summed up by courage, extremity, and most important of all, loyalty.