The Jewish people were seen as the root of all evil long before Hitler’s dictatorship. During the middle ages anyone who hadn’t converted to Christianity and the “New Covenant” with Jesus of Nazareth was targeted by Europe and labeled as “agents of the devil”. In this manner the Jewish people of the fifth century were pushed into small “ghettos”. The involvement of the Jewish people in finances and newspaper was seen as a threat and inspired many conspiracy theories to circulate about Jewish “evil”. Segregation forced the Jews to move around to the west and back again which inspired even more theories of “world domination”.
In 1933 500,000 Jewish people were under German rule and were demonized and forced into ghettos with little to live on. The state of the ghettos and the lack of resources converted the people living within them into exactly the picture that the German’s had described the Jewish people to be: “rats” and “disease ridden”. Typhus was renamed “Jew Fever” to further liken the Jewish people to sub-human disease carriers.
At this time following the Nazi rise to power in 1933 Hitler established the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. In this way the Nazi message was communicated through many mediums. This opened the door to the dehumanization of the Jewish people.
Survivor stories written by those who endured the horrific struggle of the concentration camps paint a picture of dehumanization and being treated like animals. The Jewish people were seen as less than human making it more simple for ordinary people to torture them and participate in their mass murder.
“David Livingstone Smith explains how dehumanization makes us capable of atrocious acts.“
Works Cited:
Dwork, Deborah, and Jan Van Pelt, Robert. Holocaust: A History. New York: Norton, 2002. Print.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Nazi Propaganda.” Holocaust Encyclopedia.http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005202. Accessed on Dec. 02, 2014.
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