The Role Of Dehumanization In The Holocaust

Dehumanization was a process greatly used in the Holocaust to make it painless to kill all those people who they thought to be unworthy of living. It is the process of depriving someone or many people of human characteristics. During the Holocaust, the Nazi’s gradually stripped away their rights in time stripping them of their identity, whether they were conscious of doing so or not. The Nazi’s first started by tearing away their address. Jews were forced to evacuate their houses and put into concentrated ghettos. These ghettos were small and overcrowded. The Nazi’s would take a town full of people and compact them into roughly four houses. The living conditions were horrid and they couldn’t see outside because the windows were barred. Surrounding …show more content…
Although that is when they officially lost their citizenship, I believe it was lost when they were prohibited from leaving their houses for days at a time. When they were taken on the cattle cars they were allowed one bag to pack their personal belongings. Not long after they were denied even that and their last bit of home was gone. That was the third factor in the process of dehumanizing them. Deprived of even their homes now they would arrive at a concentration camp and face one of the most dismal events one can ever encounter. They would be separated from their family. At arrival, they would be forced to divide into women and children and men without even saying goodbye. When one family member is lost it can take years to grieve and recover and they weren’t even spared five minutes to say goodbye. They no doubt by then had lost all hope and doubted they could even lose anymore but they would be proven wrong. In another attempt to make them less than human they disregarded their names and instead turned them into numbers that were stamped onto their arms. They were treated like meat, they were stamped, overworked and packed into cattle