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Dicuss the factors that affect conformity and obedience to authority pdf
Society and morality
Dicuss the factors that affect conformity and obedience to authority pdf
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Why did I survive? Why did I massacre thousands of innocent people? How could this have happened? It was just a nightmare none of this can be real. It’s over and done with let’s just get on with our lives already. These are some of the thoughts I believe both the Nazi’s and prisoners had after the holocaust was over. Some people were guilt-ridden by their actions and the harsh decisions they had to make between their survival and the survival of someone else. Other took more of a sociopathic and apathetic approach towards their actions during the holocaust blaming their actions on the people in charge. These different actions and outlooks on the events that occurred during the holocaust can be explained by people’s internal and external locus of control, and the phenomenon that occurs between authority and conformity.
This allows a very brief look on what people’s thoughts might have been after the holocaust whether they were forced into concentration camps or the people in charge of running the concentration camps. We have all heard and seen the horrific effects on the people forced into concentration camps by the Nazi’s, but we cannot fully comprehend what happened after the holocaust was over. Did they have survivor’s guilt? How did they push on in life? No one truly can understand what happened after the holocaust, but we can try to understand the reasons why people decided to massacre thousands, or choose to save their life over someone else’s. People were forced to make the decision whether or not their life was worth more than someone else’s. For example people who weren’t subjected to Hitler’s wrath could have helped those persecuted, but they decided against it in order to save themselves. They conformed to the world aro...
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..., and killed because of people’s need to constantly prove that they are better than others. Yet, how can people say they are better than someone else? Everyone has the ability to state their opinions, they can express their feelings, and most of all everyone bleed’s the same color. One person is no better than someone else because of looks and intelligence, and no one is better than someone else despite what society believes.
Works Cited
Ardent, Hannah. “Total Domination”A World of Ideas: Essential Readings for College Writers. 8th E.D.121-1336 .Benford/St. Martin’s,2010.Print
Frankl,Viktor. ”Man’s Search for Meaning”. Boston: Beacon Press,2006. Print.
Haslam, S. Alexander, and Stephen. D. Reicher. "Contesting The “Nature” Of Conformity: What Milgram And Zimbardo's Studies Really Show." Plos Biology 10.11 (2012): 1-4. Academic Search Premier. Web. 16 May 2014.
Six million Jews died during World War II by the Nazi army under Hitler who wanted to exterminate all Jews. In Night, Elie Wiesel, the author, recalls his horrifying journey through Auschwitz in the concentration camp. This memoir is based off of Elie’s first-hand experience in the camp as a fifteen year old boy from Sighet survives and lives to tell his story. The theme of this memoir is man's inhumanity to man. The cruel events that occurred to Elie and others during the Holocaust turned families and others against each other as they struggled to survive Hitler's and the Nazi Army’s inhumane treatment.
Humans morals are challenged when forced to endure great suffering and torment. During the Holocaust, some inmates broke under great distress and their morals went wrong. Other inmates not only had to worry about the Germans, but also the people who lost all morality and turned into brutal savages. In the memoir Night by elie Wiesel, humans can’t maintain a moral mentality when under great suffering as portrayed through Elie and fellow inmates.
Activities in the concentration camp struck fear within the hearts of the people who witnessed them, which led to one conclusion, people denied the Holocaust. Nazis showed no mercy to anybody, including helpless babies. “The Nazis were considered men of steel, which means they show no emotion” (Langer 9). S.S. threw babies and small children into a furnace (Wiesel 28). These activities show the heartless personality of the Nazis. The people had two options, either to do what the S.S. told them to do or to die with everyone related to them. A golden rule that the Nazis followed stated if an individual lagged, the people who surrounded him would get in trouble (Langer 5). “Are you crazy? We were told to stand. Do you want us all in trouble?”(Wiesel 38). S.S guards struck fear in their hostages, which means they will obey without questioning what the Nazis told them to do due to their fear of death. Sometimes, S.S. would punish the Jews for their own sin, but would not explain their sin to the other Jews. For example, Idek punished Wiesel f...
Murders inflicted upon the Jewish population during the Holocaust are often considered the largest mass murders of innocent people, that some have yet to accept as true. The mentality of the Jewish prisoners as well as the officers during the early 1940’s transformed from an ordinary way of thinking to an abnormal twisted headache. In the books Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi and Ordinary men by Christopher R. Browning we will examine the alterations that the Jewish prisoners as well as the police officers behaviors and qualities changed.
Imagine having to live behind the close fences of a concentration camp and endeavor for survival. From January 30, 1933 to May 8, 1945, the Holocaust was the methodical, bureaucratic, state-supported mistreatment and homicide by the Nazi administration and its colleagues. Specified by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, approximately six million Jews were butchered due to the Nazis blaming them for Germany’s failures. The Jew’s experiences range from the release of extreme propaganda, opening of concentration camps, Kristallnacht, their civil liberties dwindling away, and what the remaining prisoners had suffered through to survive the end of the war.
Following the beginning of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union would start what would become two of the worst genocides in world history. These totalitarian governments would “welcome” people all across Europe into a new domain. A domain in which they would learn, in the utmost tragic manner, the astonishing capabilities that mankind possesses. Nazis and Soviets gradually acquired the ability to wipe millions of people from the face of the Earth. Throughout the war they would continue to kill millions of people, from both their home country and Europe. This was an effort to rid the Earth of people seen as unfit to live in their ideal society. These atrocities often went unacknowledged and forgotten by the rest of the world, leaving little hope for those who suffered. Yet optimism was not completely dead in the hearts of the few and the strong. Reading Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag by Janusz Bardach and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi help one capture this vivid sense of resistance toward the brutality of the German concentration and Soviet work camps. Both Bardach and Levi provide a commendable account of their long nightmarish experience including the impact it had on their lives and the lives of others. The willingness to survive was what drove these two men to achieve their goals and prevent their oppressors from achieving theirs. Even after surviving the camps, their mission continued on in hopes of spreading their story and preventing any future occurrence of such tragic events. “To have endurance to survive what left millions dead and millions more shattered in spirit is heroic enough. To gather the strength from that experience for a life devoted to caring for oth...
The Holocaust is considered the largest genocide of our entire world, killing more than 600,000,000 Jewish people during the years of 1933-1945. The memories and history that have filled our lives that occurred during the Holocaust are constantly remembered around the world. Many populations today “think” that constant reminders allow for us to become informed and help diminish the hatred for other races still today. These scholars believe that by remembering the Holocaust, you are able to become knowledgeable and learn how to help prevent this from happening again. Since the Holocaust in a sense impacted the entire human race and history of the world, there are traces of the Holocaust all across our culture today. As I continue to remember the victims of this tragic time period I think of all the ways that our world remembers the Holocaust in today’s society. Through spreading the word, works of media and memorials across the world, I am continually reminded of the tragedy that occurred.
Holocaust had a big impact on people’s lives because of the indifference and injustice of the people. The story “Night” by Elie Wiesel, The movie “The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas”, and the article “Secret life” are the sources that tell us how bad the holocaust was and how we should stand up when we see people suffering rather than staying aside and be an observer. Being indifferent and an observer encourages the tormentor, which is the opposite of what we should want. By speaking out and acting against injustice we can change what’s going on in other people’s lives that is unfair, and we may save them from their horrible situation. Some people focus on their own needs because they want to save their life and don’t put themselves in danger of other people’s lives, but by being silent and inaction in the face of injustice they will not help other people’s lives and they won’t change what is going on around them that makes them feel bad. The people who are indifferent will not be happy with the outcome of being an observer. If we speak out and act against injustice we can make other people happy and help them to relieve from their situation. If we are speak out we might lose our life, but everybody around us will always remember that we died for other people and we weren’t selfish about our lives. This essay is going to support my opinion of how people should stand up for themselves and other people and how we should act against injustice by giving details from the three sources.
Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and his sudden control over Germany sparked a new age of reform within the new “Nazi-state” (Hunt 848). As Nazism became a major aspect of everyday life in Germany, Hitler plotted against his enemies and those he blamed for Germany’s defeat in World War I: the Jewish race. In his biography, Mein Kampf, Hitler discusses the artistic, social, and technological superiority of Germany (“Aryans”), why he believes the Aryans are the ultimate dominant human race, and he makes many anti-Semitic remarks against the Jews. (Lualdi 224). In 1935, the “Nuremberg Laws” were enacted to deny Jewish Germans of their citizenship; this ultimately led Hitler to carry out his “Final Solution,” in which he hoped to fully exterminate the Jewish race from all of Europe (Hunt 864). After gathering the Jews from their “ghettos” and forcing them into concentration camps all across Europe, Hitler and his Nazi advocates began one of the most destructive and horrifying genocides in history, known today as the Holocaust. Only after being introduced to the conditions of these concentration camps, the hatred and abuse put towards the Jewish, and the gruesome lifestyle they were trapped into living can one understand why the Holocaust affected so many as it did. What exactly were the conditions of these camps, and how did a few lucky survivors prevail while their friends and families perished?
As early as age thirteen, we start learning about the Holocaust in classrooms and in textbooks. We learn that in the 1940s, the German Nazi party (led by Adolph Hitler) intentionally performed a mass genocide in order to try to breed a perfect population of human beings. Jews were the first peoples to be put into ghettos and eventually sent by train to concentration camps like Auschwitz and Buchenwald. At these places, each person was separated from their families and given a number. In essence, these people were no longer people at all; they were machines. An estimation of six million deaths resulting from the Holocaust has been recorded and is mourned by descendants of these people every day. There are, however, some individuals who claim that this horrific event never took place.
For many years, people time and time again denied the happenings of the Holocaust or partially understood what was happening. Even in today’s world, when one hears the word ‘Holocaust’, they immediately picture the Nazi’s persecution upon millions of innocent Jews, but this is not entirely correct. This is because Jews
In conclusion the Holocaust was a horrible thing. It created a world war that could only be stopped by someone winning. The Jews and other prisoners got caught in the crossfire of this world war. The Jewish people and many other prisoners that were in the camps face starvation, selection, transport, and many other
...d decisions that were need to be met, most will lie to one another or to themselves. It becomes a time where everyone is on their own. It just will not work trying to help others and still help yourself. It has been shown that when in the heat of the moment, most will reveal sides of themselves that either oneself or others may not have even known to be there. Now, after realizing not only the physical, but emotional ties that came along with the Holocaust, do you think that it was right to come to an “every man for himself” type of survival or should have they stuck together. This leads to the other question of would there have been a different outcome if had done so? Lies and deceit has shown not only a change in people at this time, but how in the end decisions that were made because of the shift of the inmates had really instigated the situation versus helped.
Most narratives out of the Holocaust from the Nazis point of view are stories of soldiers or citizens who were forced to partake in the mass killings of the Jewish citizens. Theses people claim to have had no choice and potentially feared for their own lives if they did not follow orders. Neighbors, The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, by Jan T. Gross, shows a different account of people through their free will and motivations to kill their fellow Jewish Neighbors. Through Gross’s research, he discovers a complex account of a mass murder of roughly 1,600 Jews living in the town of Jedwabne Poland in 1941. What is captivating about this particular event was these Jews were murdered by friends, coworkers, and neighbors who lived in the same town of Jedwabne. Gross attempts to explain what motivated these neighbors to murder their fellow citizens of Jedwabne and how it was possible for them to move on with their lives like it had never happened.
If This Is a Man or Survival in Auschwitz), stops to exist; the meanings and applications of words such as “good,” “evil,” “just,” and “unjust” begin to merge and the differences between these opposites turn vague. Continued existence in Auschwitz demanded abolition of one’s self-respect and human dignity. Vulnerability to unending dehumanization certainly directs one to be dehumanized, thrusting one to resort to mental, physical, and social adaptation to be able to preserve one’s life and personality. It is in this adaptation that the line distinguishing right and wrong starts to deform. Primo Levi, a survivor, gives account of his incarceration in the Monowitz- Buna concentration camp.