One of the major Nazi criminals from the Holocaust was Franz Strangl, a commander of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps during the Holocaust. In 1961 his name appeared on an official list of “Wanted Criminals.” He was tracked down by Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, and Strangl was arrested in Brazil on February 28th, 1967. He was tried for co-responsibility in the mass murder of 900,000 Jews at the Treblinka extermination camp and sentenced to life in prison in 1970. Franz Stangl should be held responsible for his actions during the Holocaust.
Stangl should be held responsible of his actions because he was one of the leader of the death camps during the Holocaust and helped kill 900,000 Jews. The author of the biography stated, “Soft-voiced, polite and friendly, Stangl was no sadist, but took pride and pleasure in his work, running the death camp like clockwork,” (Biography 1). Stangl had the ability to help the Jews but instead he chose not to. He participated in helping with these atrocities, and did nothing to stop them.
…show more content…
During an interview Strangl stated “Cargo," he said tonelessly, "They were cargo.” (1). He also later stated, “I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. I sometimes stood on the wall and saw them in the tube...naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips like..,” (1). It takes a certain type of person to get to the point of seeing fellow men as Strangl did, and also be able to continually ignore the painful cries for help. When Strangl mastered the skill of no longer seeing those at the camps as humans, he was able to emotionally detach himself from the horrors of the death camps. That skill also helped him perform his tasks as leader of a death camps. While he was emotionally detached, he never was able to truly face his responsibilities for many of the things that happened at the
In the symposium section, Abraham Joshua Heschel quoted, “No one can forgive crimes committed against other people. It is therefore preposterous to assume that anybody alive can extend forgiveness for the suffering of any one of the six million people who perished.” (171). Simon Wiesenthal would possibly never forgive the SS officer because he doesn’t represents to those who suffer and died by the SS officers because he is just one jewish person out of many different jews that died. At that point, Simon Wiesenthal does not represent the rest of the jews and other Holocaust
His father, Shlomo, a shopkeeper, was very involved with the Jewish community, which was confined to the Jewish section of town, called the shtetl. In 1944, the Jews of Hungary were relatively unaffected by the catastrophe that was destroying the Jewish communities of Europe in spite of the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935 designed to dehumanize German Jews and subject them to violence and prejudice. The Holocaust did not reach Hungary until 1944. In Wiesel's native Sighet, the disaster was even worse: of the 15,000 Jews in prewar Sighet, only about fifty families survived the Holocaust. In May of 1944, when Wiesel was fifteen, his family and many inhabitants of the Sighet shtetl were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
Simon Wiesenthal: The Nazi Hunter. There are many heroic individuals in history that have shown greatness during a time of suffering, as well as remorse when greatness is needed, but one individual stood out to me above them all. He served as a hero among all he knew and all who knew him. This individual, Simon Wiesenthal, deserves praise for his dedication to his heroic work tracking and prosecuting Nazi war criminals that caused thousands of Jews, Gypsies, Poles and other victims of the Holocaust to suffer and perish. The Life of a Holocaust Victim The effect the Holocaust had on Wiesenthal played a major role in the person he made himself to be.
Most can agree that one of the biggest catastrophes in the world. Though no one bothers to ask who was responsible. The most common response is that Hitler was the perpetrator, which is true to a degree but the responsibility isn't his and only his. There were many chances for people to help Jewish people in their time of need but nothing was done. It’s easy to say that measures should have been taken to protects the Jews though when it came to act on them many were bystanders. Many of these bystanders unfortunately included Americans, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jewish people themselves and lastly the Germans.
Primo Levi recollects his intense experiences after being sent to a German death camp (Auschwitz) in his book Survival in Auschwitz. The Nazis had been collecting Jews and others to lock inside concentration camps; there the Nazis used extreme tactics in keeping the prisoners under control in an inhuman state. For example, the prisoners would dig holes at random times during the day then have to fill them up later, they were stripped from there names and given a six-digit number for which they were referred to, and they were fed just enough to work, but not enough to resist the guards. Levi and many others were able to, in some degree; hold on to there humanity during this outrageous time.
If you have been in a History class you have probably heard of an event that happened after World War Two called the Nuremberg Trials. These trials were conducted by the United States. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson was appointed to lead the trials (Berenbaum). During these trials they charged with Crimes against the Peace, War crimes and Crimes against Humanity (Berenbaum). Many major Nazi leaders committed suicide before officials could hang them or before even being caught. The famous Doctor Goebbels killed his children then him and his wife committed suicide (Berenbaum). Only twelve out of the twenty-two who stood trial were hanged, twelve, while the rest just got prison time. Besides major Nazi officials, Physicians were put on trial, the people who were part of the mobile killing squads, Concentration camp officials, Judges and Executives who sold concentration camps Zyklon B. You can expect that they had many excuses, but m...
Some will say that the Jewish people cannot be held responsible for the crimes committed, because they are the victims. This is not the case, however; the Jewish people could have prevented a great deal of pain and suffering that they experienced. Elie wrote “And thus my elders concerned themselves with all manners of things - strategy, diplomacy,politics, and Zionism - but not with their own fate” (8). The Jewish people had heard of what the Nazis had done to the foreign Jews of Sighet, their town; a Jew had returned and told them, but they refused to listen; they ignored his warnings. Furthermore, the Jewish people had many chances at this time to escape; most notably emigration to another country. The Jewish people ignored the warnings they had received, and their chance to escape; for this reason, they bear a certain degree of responsibility for what
Simon Wiesenthal life and legends were extraordinary, he has expired people in many ways and was an iconic figure in modern Jewish history. Szyman Wiesenthal (was his real named and later named Simon) was born on December 31 in Buczacz, Galicia (which is now a part of Ukraine) in 1908. When Wiesenthal's father was killed in World War I, Mrs. Wiesenthal took her family to Vienna for a brief period, returning to Buczacz when she remarried. The young Wiesenthal graduated from the Humanistic Gymnasium (a high school) in 1928 and applied for admission to the Polytechnic Institute in Lvov. Turned away because of quota restrictions on Jewish students, he went instead to the Technical University
Another reason was identity. Napoleon only represented Stalin, and that really brought out his characteristics. Since Napoleon was meant to represent Stalin, all of Stalin’s traits, most of his bad deeds, and events occurred in the book. For example, in Animal Farm, Orwell made Snowball seem smarter than Napoleon, but made Napoleon more powerful. This is true in real life because Lenin was a lot more educated than Stalin, but Stalin ended up with the power (Radinsky 97)
As World War II occurred, the Jewish population suffered a tremendous loss and was treated with injustice and cruelty by the Nazi’s seen through examples in the book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Victor Frankl records his experiences and observations during his time as prisoner at Auschwitz during the war. Before imprisonment, he spent his leisure time as an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, Austria and was able to implement his analytical thought processes to life in the concentration camp. As a psychological analyst, Frankl portrays through the everyday life of the imprisoned of how they discover their own sense of meaning in life and what they aspire to live for, while being mistreated, wrongly punished, and served with little to no food from day to day. He emphasizes three psychological phases that are characterized by shock, apathy, and the inability to retain to normal life after their release from camp. These themes recur throughout the entirety of the book, which the inmates experience when they are first imprisoned, as they adapt as prisoners, and when they are freed from imprisonment. He also emphasizes the need for hope, to provide for a purpose to keep fighting for their lives, even if they were stripped naked and treated lower than the human race. Moreover, the Capos and the SS guards, who were apart of the secret society of Hitler, tormented many of the unjustly convicted. Although many suffered through violent deaths from gas chambers, frostbites, starvation, etc., many more suffered internally from losing faith in oneself to keep on living.
Evidence: Joseph Stalin was the son of a poor shoemaker from a backward province with a significantly low education. Stalin had always had a place for faith in the destiny of the Russian social revolution and an incredible amount of determination to play a role in it. Stalin’s rise to power was remarkable and deadly, yet in an unexplainable twenty-nine years of leadership he turned Russia into a highly industrialized nation. Stalin was a tyrannical ruler who played the most significant role in shaping the direction of Europe at the end of World War II in 1945. He went from a young revolutionist to an absolute leader of Soviet Russia.
Ordinary men have the capacity to commit extraordinary crimes and on April 11, 1961, Adolf Eichmann, an ordinary looking man, faced trial for the murder of five million Jews. Adolf Eichmann served in the Nazi party as their expert on Jewish matters. During the Nuremberg trials that took place years before Eichmann’s trial, many witnesses testified to the control Eichmann had over the implementation of the final solution. SS Captain Wisliceny worked under Eichmann in Hungary in 1944 and he proclaimed that Eichmann said, “he would jump into his grave laughing, because of the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience, gave him extraordinary satisfaction’” (48). Also, Eichmann worked with the members of Jewish councils, and they claimed in earlier trials that he had a direct hand in the “Jewish Question” (49).
innocent people, he was not entirely at fault for the Holocaust.
In the Holocaust there were two types of people, perpetrators and rescuers each were different in their own regards, but perpetrators are the topic. A perpetrator is a person who does a harmful, illegal, or immoral action. Joseph Goebbels was a Nazi perpetrator who was the Nazis propaganda Minster tasked with brainwashing the German masses. He made and allowed thousands of propaganda material to be dispersed among the people turning them effectively into and army of angry mobs. He was a Nazi perpetrator who viewed the Nazi cause as just and righteous cause. Joseph Goebbels was the Nazi propaganda minister who brainwashed the German populace into becoming mindless zombies that only believed him and Hitler.
Franz Stangl was a Police Superintendent of the notorious Euthanasia Institute at Scloss Hartheim and is responsible for thousand of deaths during the holocaust. Franz Stangl was born, raised and lived in Altmunster Austria. After training as a master weaver he joined the Austrian police force. He graduated and was transferred to the political division of criminal investigation department in a small town in Austria, a year later he became a illegal member of the Nazi Party. In the Franz Stangl Interview, Franz said “Those big eyes which looked at me not knowing that in no time at all they’d all be dead”. This shows that Franz had no compassion toward all the people who were scared of what would happen he just knew they all had to die. Franz should be held accountable for all these deaths because he didn’t even feel