Maus: Dehumanization In The Holocaust

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Maus Essay “Milligrams experiment results showed that the more personal or closer the test subject was to the victim of the shock the less-likely they were to go on with the experiment”(Cherry). These results show that people that were further away or that distanced themselves away from the victim of the shocks were more likely to go to higher voltage shocks. This is what happened in the case of the Nazi guards and the Jew's. The guards distanced themselves from the Jew's, in other words dehumanized them so they can more easily commit atrocious acts of murder and killing and not feel as responsible for it. Dehumanization is a necessary step in genocide because it conveys racism and hate towards the Jews, as well as the psychological distancing…show more content…
In the Nazi camps such as Auswich there was an environment of public opinion that encouraged racism and hate crimes. These conditions allowed further steps of dehumanization to be put on the Jews which permitted the guards to commit violent and racist acts. This was shown in Maus regard the way Mandelbaum was killed “On the walk to work, a guard grabbed his cap away. So what could he do? He ran to pick it up. And the guard shot on him for trying to escape. The guard got a congratulations and a few days vacation for stopping the escape”(Spiegelman ,35). Not only were these types acts accept but they were encouraged and rewarded. The guard received a congratulations and a vacation from all the other guards. This also shows that the guards were playing with the Jew's like a bunch of animals; the guards didn't wait for the Jew's to actually do something wrong they made it happen because they enjoyed it and the rewards that come along with it. In the example regarding the Reserve Police Battalion 101 Browning said “The context of war must surely be taken into account in a more general way than as a cause of combat-induced brutalization and frenzy, however. War, a struggle between “our people” and “the enemy,” creates a polarized world in which “the enemy” is easily objectified and removed from the community of human obligation”(161…show more content…
The guards used dehumanization of their enemy to make it easier to commit brutal killings such as the ones seen the the Reserve Police Battalion 101. As John Dower had observed, “The dehumanization of the Other contributed immeasurably to the psychological distancing that facilitated killing. Distancing, not frenzy and brutalization, is one of the keys to the behavior of Reserve Police Battalion 101”(162, Browning). Most of these people in the Reserve Police Battalion 101 had never seen blood or war before. So distancing themselves, in other words, making them seem as least human as possible, made it easier for the soldiers to commit these horrible atrocious killings. These ordinary people put themselves in the psychological mindset that their victims were lesser than them, or they deserved to die, anything they could think of in order to excuse their killings(164, Browning). This can also be seen in Maus , in regards to some of the horrible executions and killings committed by the Nazi guards. On their march to Germany “In the daylight, farahead, I saw it. KRAK! Sombody is jumping, turning, rolling 25 or 35 times around and stops. “OH” I said “They maybe killed there a dog.” When I was a boy our neighbor had a dog what got mad and was biting the neighbor came out with a rifle and shot. The dog was rolling so, around and around,
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