Antisemitism

The 1992 book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, written by Christopher R. Browning, seeks to understand the police officers behind the blitzkrieg against Polish Jews during the German military offensive of 1942. Rather than focus on the liquidation of major ghettos in Warsaw and in Lodz, this study focuses on the smaller towns and villages that included significant Jewish populations in Central Poland. By examining indictments and judgements from legal…

The Jewish people have been marked by violence and persecution unlike any other group of humans in mankind long and often troublesome history. Rather it be at onset of great empires like Rome or at the hands of sadistic rulers like Hitler, the Jews have been face with grave circumstances there entire existence. Yet for reasons some would consider divine intervention and others would simply associate as luck the Jewish race and culture has survived and often times thrived throughout history.…

Humanity’s past is filled with traumatic, violent events. Wars have been waged, bombs have been dropped, and innocent lives have been caught up in the crossfire. Each of these acts is terrible in their own right, but perhaps the most ruthless of them all are categorized under the term genocide. The systematic purging of an entire ethnic group or nation. Genocide does not simply take lives; its aim is to completely blot out a people’s history and future. The effects of such a campaign are clearly…

Jean Améry, a survivor of the Holocaust, paints a very complicated and contradicting picture concerning the “necessity and impossibility of being a Jew.” The impossibility comes from Améry’s faith, or lack thereof. He states, “If being a Jew implies having a cultural heritage or religious ties, then I was not one and can never become one” (Améry, p 83). He has not, is not, and never will, be a Jew because he does not believe in God or partake in Jewish traditions. Before Hitler’s ascent to power…

Resistance should never have a far-reaching definition. Specific events, actions, and ideologies comprise a war, meaning that no single definition of resistance should qualify as a standard. Resistance through the Holocaust manifested itself in different ways, spiritually, nonviolently, armed and unarmed. The danger of narrowly defining resistance which was circulated by post-cold war scholars and painted with prejudice. The bulk of Holocaust research being post-cold war, it is easy to see why…

A Gateway to Death In Night, Elie Wiesel explains his sinister experience of the concentration camps and its ruthless captors. When Wiesel witnessed the deaths and tortures of his race, he became bitter and pessimistic. When he watched the Jews burn, starve, or beaten to death by the captors, Wiesel felt that God was no longer on the Jews’ side. He felt that all hope was lost and that his death was near. Wiesel expresses his emotion and experience through figurative language, such as the Jews’…

When analyzing the Nazi Party in World War II, the party’s success contributed to multiple factors. These components such as political, economic, social changes and the anti-Semitism in Europe contributed to the rise of Nazism in Germany. In the book, War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust by Doris Bergen, states, “In order for a house to burn down, three things are required. The timber must be dry and combustible, there needs to be a spark that ignites it, and external conditions…

Fear does multiple things, it either motivates people to stand up for what they believe in or it motivates them to go against their morals. It all started when Hitler was in the World War One. A yellow cloud floating in the air called chlorine gas and mustard gas were one of the first poison gases used in trench warfare, if you inhaled it damages lung tissue and causes it 's victims to cough violently and choke in some cases, the gas kills you. Trench warfare was not a good adventure, it was a…

The Holocaust was a traumatic event that was carried out by both men and women. It affected men and women differently. Jews saw women after the war as violent tormentors working alongside men in the concentration camps and in the killing fields of Eastern Europe. Gender and sexuality shaped the holocaust for both the perpetrator and the victims differently. The responses of Jews who were victims also varied depending on gender and sexuality. Men were accustomed to killing, but for women killing…

The Holocaust as we know it was the mass murder of six million Jews during WWII. There is a ton of evidence to support this tragic event, yet there are still some people that believe that the Holocaust was not real or that it was greatly exaggerated. These non-believers refer to themselves as the Holocaust deniers. Why would one deny such a large historical event that has so much evidence to back it up? Most people today accept the mass genocide and have learned from it, but others refuse to…