Examples Of Dehumanization In The Holocaust

What is dehumanization? Dehumanization is to treat someone as though he or she is not a human being. The Jews were dehumanized all throughout the Holocaust without any sympathy. They slowly began to lose their rights before they realized it was too late to fight back and show that they were worthy of humane treatment. This process was not only for the poor, but also the rich, no one was excluded. The Germans made sure all the Jews endured the procedure of being dehumanized or harshly killed.
A time when the Jews were dehumanized was when they were on their way to Birkenau. The Germans packed eighty Jews into one car at a time in dreadful conditions, only giving them so much water and bread to last them on the journey. As mentioned on page 26, they were all dehydrating in hot, suffocating air that included a sickening stench. The Germans were tormenting them before it had officially started. It was inconsiderate that they began to treat them like animals before arriving to their destination. They did not allow them to spend their last couple of days in a tolerable environment, knowing they were going to be treated poorly from that day on. The Jews had already indicated it was no longer their lives after they saw they …show more content…
The Germans knew that assigning numbers would diminish who they were as humans. It took the place of who Eliezer had grown to be and identified him as one out of thousands. In the novel, it says, “ I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.”As people, we build who we are and our originality is what sets us all apart. Getting our names taken away is also taking everything that we have developed over the years. After being beaten, famished, and cursed at for so long those destructive comments began to take route in the Jews and brought their self-esteem down. It was another way to make them feel

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