The Power Of The Wave By Todd Strasser

“If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” This is a quote by Adolf Hitler, ruler and dictator of Nazi Germany. The students at a high school were studying this person and were wondering how the people of Germany could blindly follow a leader. Their history teacher, Ben Ross, took it upon himself to show his students how it could happen by recreating Nazi Germany through a movement called The Wave. In the novel The Wave by Todd Strasser, Ben Ross’s experiment was an effective one at illustrating the brainwashing the took place during Hitler’s time in power.

First of all, the change in the student’s behavior and the fact that the students spread The Wave to other parts of the school shows the success of the experiment. In the text, Ross’s students were careless and lackadaisical about their work, but after The Wave was in place they were prepared and productive. Also, David and other students spread The Wave to the

football team. This shows that brainwashing occurred because Mr. Ross had told them again and again that The Wave was the path to success and the students, even if they were a little skeptical of The Wave at first, were now spreading the word about it. There are other similarities between The Wave and Nazi Germany. Just as the students were not being productive, Germany was in a state of economic depression before Hitler gave promises of prosperity (Bartoletti 19). To conclude, the change in the behavior of the students and the change in their attitude about The Wave proves the success of The Wave as an experiment that recreated Germany in the 1930s and 40s.
Secondly, just as the people of Hitler’s time blamed the Jews for their problems, the students of Mr. Ross blamed the popular kids. In the novel, David blames Laurie for being popular and said that The Wave was getting rid of popularity and making everyone equal. Later in the story, Amy says a similar thing to Laurie as well. This is because Mr. Ross had brainwashed them to blame popular kids for all the disappointments of their high school life. In Nazi Germany, the Germans were brainwashed to think that they had lost World War I and lost their jobs because of the Jews (Bartoletti 50). These similarities prove that Mr. Ross’s experiment did well in mimicking the brainwashing that occurred during Hitler’s time in power.
Some may say that the means of brainwashing and punishment used in The Wave were much less extreme than in Nazi Germany.

For example, the students in The Wave did not segregate non-Wave members or send them to concentration camps, but the Nazis did that to the Jews. However, if The Wave had not been stopped, it would have escalated to something greatly more severe. For example, Wave members had already vandalized Laurie’s locker and beaten up a student. This leads to the third reason why Ross’s experiment was effective at mimicking the brainwashing of the Nazis - both brainwashed people using fear. During Hitler’s time, it was fear of torture and death. In The Wave, it was fear of being isolated at school and beaten up. The environment at the high school was very similar to that of Nazi Germany - students reporting each other and excluding anyone who was not part of them. Therefore, ruling through fear was the main way of brainwashing in Nazi Germany, and Mr. Ross was very effective in illustrating

this.
In summary, Ross’s experiment was effective in illustrating the brainwashing that took place during Hitler’s time in power. Reasons for this are that the students not only changed their attitude towards The Wave but also spread The Wave into other facets of school life. Also, the students blamed the popular kids, just as the Germans blames the Jews for their problems. Finally, in both cases, the brainwashing was done through fear. Could this kind of brainwashing happen yet again? If so, we must prepare and think for ourselves, so that history will not be repeated.