Reflective Essay On The Holocaust

I have heard about the Holocaust for as long as I remember. Coming from Europe it was very much talked about early on in school. The Holocaust took place during World War II and refers to when the German Nazis tried to wipe out Jews, this is called Genocide. About six million Jews were killed, children, women, homosexuals, everybody was targeted. If you were a Jew, you were going to die. What I think often is forgotten about the Holocaust is that it wasn’t just Jews that were victim to the German Nazis it was about 5 million non-Jews that also died during the Holocaust. I think the preconceived notion that I have had in the past was that the Holocaust only applied to Jews, despite them being the most targeted, they were hardly the only ones …show more content…
The Serbian genocide refers to the execution of Serbs by the Ustase regime in the Independent state of Croatia. The ideology of the Independent state of Croatia was a combination of Nazism, Roman Catholism and Croatian Ultranationalism. Croatia wanted to create a “Greater Croatia”. It is estimated that about 60,000 Serbs were killed during the genocide and many more were driven out of Kosovo. During the same time in Germany Hitler was gaining followers after World War I and he was gaining widespread support by a people that needed something new to believe in after the depression that followed World War I. The Holocaust refers to the execution of 11 million people who were killed during the holocaust. Just like during the Serbian genocide Hitler was trying to create a “Greater nation”. He believed that in order to do that you had to wipe out everybody else. Even though Jew’s were the prime victims of the Holocaust millions of other people died as well. Homosexuals, disabled, Jew’s, non-Jew and children died in concentration camps during the Holocaust. Both of these genocides are looking to develop a greater nation based on taking out what they consider are the “weaker” human, therefore these two genocides are very much …show more content…
However, there were certain details that I didn’t know. For example the medical experiments that were conducted on concentration camp victims was something I had not read about earlier. As for genocide, I had no idea there were so many occurrences of genocide throughout history. Where I come from the most talked about is the holocaust so the Armenian genocide was completely new to me. It is sad that I hadn’t even heard about the Serbian genocide, Armenian genocide or the Rwanda genocide. These are important sequences in the world’s history and sometimes I feel as if we only focus on certain occurrences that affect us right where we are without looking at the world as a