By using dogs, the Nazi soldiers reinforced their ideas that Jewish women were sexual deviants and were part of a sub human race. To the victims, this kind of violence was especially degrading as the officers would laugh and taunt them while the dogs were biting them among other things. This is just another example of how women’s experiences of violence were gendered, in that, the sexual violence was specifically enacted against them in this way due to the Nazi rhetoric surrounding Jewish women and how acts of violence against them are meant to demean their femininity. In The Jewish Women of Ravenbrück Concentration Camp the author, Rochelle Saidel discusses how gender plays a large role in the identity of the camp survivors, along with how …show more content…
Forced sterilizations were fairly common in camps such as Ravenbrück, as they were all women, the Nazis could do regular sterilization experiments on their bodies to carry out their ultimate goal of race purification and keep Jewish women from procreating. Even though men endured forced sterilizations as well, one would argue it affected women more deeply because in the societal norms at the time women’s worth in society was dictated by how many children they had. Nazi rhetoric that surrounded issues of pregnancy greatly affected Jewish women because of the propaganda surrounding how they are promiscuous and could have children seemingly faster than …show more content…
In 1942 the German government created a law that “banned all birth…rendering abortions compulsory” which meant that they were targeting the Jewish women demographic. As described in Saidel’s book Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women in the Holocaust, “pregnancy was a death sentence…as women discovered to be pregnant were automatically sent to the gas chambers” which meant that women and sometimes doctors in the camps would perform abortions in order to save the mother as they believed that the lives of the children could not feasibly be saved. In the cases of pregnancy in concentration camps, Saidel appropriately calls the experience “childdeath” instead of childbirth” because many times the mothers would be forced to have abortions or would perform abortions on themselves in order to escape the frequent deaths of pregnant women. If these pregnancies came to term, it would often have irreparable consequences. It would often result in the direct murder of both the mother and the child, as they would kill them together in gas chambers, but also there were reports of “women who gave birth were forced to witness their infants being smothered or drowned” which was yet another psychological and physical torment on women. Women’s experiences of pregnancy and abortion in camps is something that is often excluded from the
The Silber Medal winning biography, “Surviving Hitler," written by Andrea Warren paints picture of life for teenagers during the Holocaust, mainly by telling the story of Jack Mandelbaum. Avoiding the use of historical analysis, Warren, along with Mandelbaum’s experiences, explains how Jack, along with a few other Jewish and non-Jewish people survived.
Dehumanization Through Elie Wiesel Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, is an account about his experience through concentration camps and death marches during WWII. In 1944, fifteen year old Wiesel was one of the many Jews forced onto cattle cars and sent to death and labor camps. Their personal rights were taken from them, as they were treated like animals. Millions of men, women, children, Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, disabled people, and Slavic people had to face the horrors the Nazi’s had planned for them. Many people witnessed and lived through beatings, murders, and humiliations.
Shields, Jacqueline. "Concentration Camps: The Sonderkommando ." 2014. Jewish Virtual Library. 20 March 2014 .
Between Night and The Hiding Place, comradeship, faith, strength, and people of visions are clearly proved to be essential in order to survive in these death camps. Corrie, Elie, and other victims of these harsh brutalities who did survive had a rare quality that six million others unfortunately did not.
Gerda Weissmann Klein’s personal account of her experiences during Germany’s invasion of Poland and of the Holocaust illustrated some of the struggles of young Jewish women at the time in their endeavors to survive. Weissmann Klein’s recount of her experiences began on September 3, 1939, at her home in the town of Bielitz, Poland, just after Nazi troops began to arrive and immediately enforce their policies on Polish Jews. On that night, which had only been the beginning for her and her family, Jews within Nazi Germany had already felt the effects of Adolf Hitler’s nationalist ideals for almost five years. From 1933 until 1939, when Weissmann Klein’s experiences began, “anti-Semitism was a recurring theme in Nazism and resulted in a wave of
Thousands of people were sent to concentration camps during World War Two, including Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. Many who were sent to the concentration camps did not survive but those who did tried to either forgot the horrific events that took place or went on to tell their personal experiences to the rest of the world. Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi wrote memoirs on their time spent in the camps of Auschwitz; these memoirs are called ‘Night’ and ‘Survival in Auschwitz’. These memoirs contain similarities of what it was like for a Jew to be in a concentration camp but also portray differences in how each endured the daily atrocities of that around them. Similarities between Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi’s memoirs can be seen in the proceedings that
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.
The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel gives an in depth view of Nazi Concentration Camps. Growing up in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Wiesel, a young Jewish boy at the innocent age of 12, whose main focus in life was studying the Kabbalah and becoming closer in his relationship with God. In the memoir, Elie Wiesel reflects back to his stay within a Nazi Concentration Camp in hopes that by sharing his experiences, he could not only educate the world on the ugliness known as the Holocaust, but also to remind people that by remembering one atrocity, the next one can potentially be avoided. The holocaust was the persecution and murder of approximately six million Jew’s by Aldolf Hitler’s Nazi army between 1933 and 1945. Overall, the memoir shows
For instance, throughout the book, she emphasises her point stating that women are not any different from men when it comes to violence, and they equally commit murder when given the opportunity in the right circumstance, but she refuses to acknowledge the male and female murder statistics. A modern statistical analysis which concludes, “Although women compromise more than half of the U.S population, they committed only 14.7% of the homicides noted during the study interval. In contrast to men, who killed non-intimate acquaintances, strangers, or victims of undetermined relationship in 80% of cases.” Although Hitler’s Furies is useful for learning the role women played in the Third Reich, it is a one-sided book with an agenda. Hence, it is not a book to be recommended for using as an academic source when examining the role of women in the Third Reich without prejudice.
it may be said that the woman's is a smaller world. For her world is
"A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust-Victims." A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust-Victims. University of South Florida. Web. 19 May 2014.
Primo Levi, in his novel Survival in Auschwitz (2008), illustrates the atrocities inflicted upon the prisoners of the concentration camp by the Schutzstaffel, through dehumanization. Levi describes “the denial of humanness” constantly forced upon the prisoners through similes, metaphors, and imagery of animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization (“Dehumanization”). He makes his readers aware of the cruel reality in the concentration camp in order to help them examine the psychological effects dehumanization has not only on those dehumanized, but also on those who dehumanize. He establishes an earnest and reflective tone with his audience yearning to grasp the reality of genocide.
In the “American Holocaust” by David Stannard, Stannard points out how the Spaniards, British, and Americans were treating the indigenous people differently. In chapter 1 of the “American Holocaust,” Stannard talks about how the Europeans main goal was to find and acquire gold. When the Europeans began to arrive in America they began to discover a land that contained a variety of gold. Once they discovered that there was gold they began to establish and did not see the indigenous people as part of the land. Indigenous people were required to work in forced labor and take care of the land however they were not part of the land and did not have their own property, towns and villages. In the first chapter of the American Holocaust Stannard
As a prisoner, she was allowed to work as a doctor who was forced to aid Dr. Josef Mengele. Dr. Mengele was a man who practiced very bizarre, unethical medical experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz and he eventually became known as “the doctor of death” or “the angel of death.” Dr, Perl said, “One of the greatest crimes in Auschwitz was to be pregnant.” (Brozan C: 20) Not only did Dr. Mengele perform horrible experiments on pregnant women, but he also preformed tests on handicapped prisoners and twins (which he is most famous for).
The Nazi’s perpetrated many horrors during the Holocaust. They enacted many cruel laws. They brainwashed millions into foolishly following them and believing their every word using deceitful propaganda tactics. They forced many to suffer doing embarrassing jobs and to live in crowded ghettos. They created mobile killing squads to exterminate their enemies. Finally, as part of “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question”, they made concentration and killing camps. Another thing the Nazi’s did was to use eugenics as another mean to micromanage the population. What is eugenics, you might ask? It’s the field of scientific study or the belief in genetically improving qualities, attributes and traits in the human race and/or improving the species as a whole—usually done by controlled/selective breeding. Those with positive, desirable, and superior traits are encouraged to reproduce and may be given monetary incentives by the government to have large families. Those with negative, undesirable, or inferior traits may be discouraged from having offspring. They may be sterilized, or undergo dangerous medical procedures or operations with high mortality rates. I chose this topic because it appealed to me and seemed interesting. In the following paragraphs, the tactics, methods, and propaganda the Nazi’s used will be exposed.