The Nazi’s Dehumanization of Jews Essay Example

The Nazis were known for their extremely cruel treatment and injustice towards Jews. To them, the Jews were animals or “others”. The Nazi’s goal was to humiliate them and make them suffer before they killed them. To do this, they dehumanized them to make them feel like animals. The Nazis dehumanized the Jews by taking away their names and identities, giving them just enough food to die slowly, and taking their hair for profit after they died.

When the Jews arrived at the camps, they still had a name and identity. However, in an effort to dehumanize them, the Nazis took away their names and replaced them with numbers. Shortly after Wiesel arrived at the camp, “The three ‘veteran’ prisoners, needles in hand, tattooed numbers on [the prisoners’] left arms. [He] became A-7713. From then on, [he] had no other name.” (Wiesel, Elie. Night. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2006). Wiesel had his identity and name stripped from him, and he was reduced to a letter and four numbers. The Germans wanted to do everything in their power to make the Jews feel as inhuman as the Nazis thought they were. They wanted to take away everything individual about them and group them into one group of “others” to humiliate and slaughter. The Jews were not even allowed to keep their names, erasing any trace of their past lives. They could not keep a shred of themselves in the camp, and all individuality was taken from them. They were not allowed to feel human, as they didn’t even have names. To the Nazis, they were known as numbers and letters and nothing else to keep them from being human.

The Nazis were strategic in the way they fed the prisoners because the goal was to never let the Jews live, but let them be alive long enough to become inhuman. To do that, they fed them just enough food each day so they could die slower. Art Spiegelman told his father’s story in Maus, and his father recounted the lack of food and the quality of it. He told his son, “In the morning for breakfast [they] only got a bitter drink made from roots…One time a day, they gave us soup made of turnips…And in the evening [they] got a spoiled cheese of jam. If [they] were lucky a couple times a week [they] got a sausage big like two of [his] fingers…If you are how they gave you, it was just enough to die more slowly.” (Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began. Pantheon Books. 1980.) The Nazis were smart enough to know how to slowly starve the Jews to death. They knew that if they only fed them a certain amount of calories a day with minimal fat, they would eventually die. They didn’t want to kill the Jews all at once, they wanted to make them suffer and be dehumanized before they died. The meals they were fed were meager and unnourishing, and they only got decent food with luck. The Jews had no choice but to eat what they were given to keep themselves from dying even faster. The food kept the prisoners malnourished and unhealthy. It had no nutritional value at all, and was created to slowly kill them. Their three meals a day had no substance to them and ensured that they would not feel human. The Jews were robbed of feeling human because they were treated and fed like animals, taking away their humanity. Every day they wasted away, and could no longer feel human. They were being dehumanized through a lack of food, making them feel less and less human every single day.

The dehumanization of Jews did not stop after death. The Nazis wanted to continue to make the Jews feel inhuman and separate from society long after they were murdered by profiting off of their bodies, especially in their hair. When Elie Wiesel spoke to Oprah, she said that no words can describe the mountain of human hair preserved for more than 60 years behind a special glass case, 67 feet long.” and Wiesel said that the purpose was “...for industry. The first thing they did was to [shave] the head, and from the corpses as well. They felt nothing should be lost for the war effort.” (“Winfrey and Wiesel Auschwitz”. YouTube. Uploaded by Salmen High. 12 May 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCdejlk6v-c) Winfrey also said “Human hair shorn from the victim’s scalps was gathered and sold to German factories to make cloth. At the time of the liberation, seven tons of hair was discovered at Auschwitz, ready to be transported for sale.” (“Winfrey and Wiesel Auschwitz”. YouTube. Uploaded by Salmen High. 12 May 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCdejlk6v-c) Even after the Nazis murdered the Jews, they still treated them like animals. They took the hair from their corpses and industrialized it for profit. Their hair was turned into cloth, so parts of their bodies could get no rest in the afterlife. It can be compared to killing an animal and using its fur, because to the Nazis, the Jews were inhuman. Their bodies were not put at rest peacefully, and they were shaved to make money. So much hair was shorn in that time period, showing that the Nazis were making sure that the Jews were seen as the “others”. Even in death, the Nazis were able to dehumanize the Jews and make them animals.

During the Holocaust, Jews were treated like animals and stripped of their humanity. To the Nazis, they were “others”, simply there to be humiliated then executed. The Nazis wanted to dehumanize the Jews in as many ways as possible. They didn’t want the Jews to have any traces of their humanity remaining. The ways the Nazis dehumanized the Jews were taking away their names and identities, feeding them just enough food to have them slowly starve to death, and shaving the hair off of their corpses to turn into cloth.