...Armoni Pullin Ms. Ellis Language 16 March 2018 Adolf Eichmann Adolf Eichmann, who was he? Adolf Eichmann was an SS Official, he was in charge of the deportation of jews and was responsible for keeping the trains full of jews moving around Europe to death camps. Eichmann was born on March 19, 1906 near cologne germany. Eichmann died on may 31, 1962, he was executed by the state of Israel. Eichmann moved to austria after his mother's death, he spent his childhood in Linz, Austria. As a kid Eichmann was teased about his physical features and was given the nickname “Little Jew”. In 1932 at age 26 Eichmann joined the growing Austrian Nazi Party, his friend Ernest Kaltenbrunner suggested that he did. Eichmann then became a member of the SS and...
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...This is a critique of Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem by Eric Fromm, written in 1963. Fromm states in his article that disobedience is what originally set the human race on the path to thinking on their own, but obedience to authority in the end will be what kills us all. Overall his article has several compelling reasons to believe his theory, but it is also not completely believable for several reasons. There are several points that are debatable and his high use of emotion alone could cause one to question his article on a whole. Fromm being a psychoanalyst, sociologist, historian, and philosopher may have contributed to his using the pull of emotion so much. In his article Fromm states that history began with an act of disobedience and that history will possibly end with an act of obedience. Adam and Eve’s disobedience caused humans to then rely on themselves, and that until this happened humans were not able to fully develop the ability to reason or love. Similar to Adam and Eve, other cultures also have their own stories of how history began with disobedience. Through disobedience man has continued to evolve spiritually and intellectually, through this enlightening was learned that not all disobedience is a virtue and not all obedience is vice. Fromm defines autonomous obedience or humanistic conscience as obeying yourself, and this is not submissive. Heteronomous obedience or authoritarian...
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...another individual, who is usually an authority figure. It is assumed that without such an order the person would not have acted in this way. Obedience occurs when you are told to do something (authority), whereas conformity happens through social pressure (the norms of the majority). Obedience involves a hierarchy of power / status. Therefore, the person giving the order has a higher status than the person receiving the order. Adolf Eichmann was executed in 1962 for his part in organizing the Holocaust, in which six million Jewish people, as well as gypsies, communists and trade unionists were transported to death camps and murdered in Nazi Germany and surrounding countries under Nazi control. Eichmann was a logistical genius whose part in the Holocaust was the planning of the efficient collection, transportation and extermination of those to be killed. At his trial in 1961, Eichmann expressed surprise at being hated by Jewish people, saying that he had merely obeyed orders, and surely obeying orders could only be a good thing. In his jail diary Eichmann wrote 'The orders were, for me, the...
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...Running Head: POWER OF SITUATION AND OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY The Power of the Situation in Milgram's Obedience Experiments Ahsan Chishty Ohlone College POWER OF SITUATION AND OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY The Power of the Situation in Milgram's Obedience Experiments Stanley Milgram is a name universally known for the Yale professor who shocked the world with his experiments on obedience. In 1961, Milgram along with many other colleagues devised an experiment after receiving a grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct an experiment in response to the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Milgram wanted to know if Germans under the rule of authority figures did exactly what they were instructed to do by those of higher power than them due to the fact that many of the explanations for the Nazi atrocities was simply that Nazi soldiers were following orders. After placing an ad in the New Haven Register for a learning experiment on the study of memory. According to Thomas Blass (2009), offering participants $4.50 and a paid bus fare for an hour of their time seemed to be the biggest factor that attracted people to the ad but several of the participants also agreed to be a part of the study to learn something about themselves, expand their curiosity about psychology, or because they were fascinated by memory and hoped to understand it better through an experiment like Milgram's. The subjects were introduced to a man in a lab coat who...
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...Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor, wrote a narrative called The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. In this he writes about his experiences in concentration camps, as well as one, almost life changing question that was brought to him buy a Nazi soldier on his death bed. One day he was taken into a hospital room that occupied a wounded Nazi named Karl. Simon, worried and confused by the situation, remained silent as Karl proceeded to tell him about himself and a terrible crime that he had committed. He tells Simon about how one day he and his fellow comrades were out on the job and rounded up a large group of Jews and put them all in a house, where they were tightly packed together. The soldiers then threw in grenades that set the house on fire. Any Jew that tried to jump out of the house or to escape would be shot. After sharing the story with Simon, the soldier explained how guilty he felt and asked Simon for forgiveness. This was a question that Simon could not and did not know how to answer, so he walked out of the room. The question still harasses Simon, wondering what he should have done in that situation. In his narrative, he asked many different essayists for their thoughts, and with that he received many answers. Dith Pran, a witness and a survivor of the Cambodian killing fields, is one of many that wrote a response to Simon Wiesenthal. In his response, he says that the key to forgiveness is understanding. Pran believes that the soldiers...
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...Upon reading The Sunflower, your personal account of the horrific atrocities committed during the holocaust, you leave the reader with no definite answer, but a very thought-provoking question about… “What would I have done?”. This question you have placed before the reader is a haunting one and it would be naïve to conclude that the answer would be fairly simple to not forgive Karl. On the other hand, if I am going to hold to my Christian faith and moral values, then yes, I unquestionably would forgive Karl. In order for me to let go of any hate, the forgiveness would not only be for Karl, but for myself. Looking back on the pages you have written, as Karl tells you his story, he states, “I joined the Hitler Youth, I found friends and comrades” (32). Basically, what Karl is saying is that he was more than aware of his choices. He went against the Catholic Christian values he was raised with and consciously chose to be part of the Hitler regime. He did not go in blindly. It raises the question of how can one find “friends or comrades” when it comes to hatred and murder? It is a selfish act of hatred that each person holds and these signs show there is no true remorse for the killings committed. Karl did not ask forgiveness for his comrades, but only himself and only while on his deathbed. This sheds a light on who he truly is. He is a murderer. Equally important, are the letters from noted religious and world thinkers, that give their very candid answers. Whether they have...
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...For my English project I did a representation of a hanging. To me this hanging is a great example of things that should not have happened or ever happen again. During the holocaust many people we able to witness many different things, such as hangings, burnings, beatings, and shootings. During a lifetime the average person doesn't get to witness these things, and never should have to. After reading this book about the holocaust I would recommend anyone who doesn't know a whole lot about the holocaust to go do research. The book talked about the child that got hung and talked about the burnings of Jews and the way they were treated. This is definitely something that I wish would have never happened, and hopes that it never has to happen again. I picked this scene mainly because I thought it was completely wrong. In the book there were three people that were going to be hung, two older men, and then a smaller child. That day they were called to do a roll call. When everyone was lined up for roll call they brought the three people up to be hung. Right then and there they hung the three people in front of everyone, they made everyone file by and look at all three of the people. Both if the men died instantly, but the young boy was to small to die instantly. He dangled for a half hour before dying. After reading that paragraph I hope you got the same feeling I did after we read it in class. This definitely had the biggest impact on me after reading about the holocaust. The...
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...Imagine a young child and happy parents walking together down together in a park, but the next second they are locked up in cages and are tortured. This brutality created by the Holocaust tore relationships between children and parents. In the two novels Night and Sarah’s Key the two main characters, Sarah Starzynski and Elie Wiesel, suffer through the Holocaust, which impacts their relationship with their parents and their close connections are affected by death and torture in the death camps. Sarah Starzynski starts out with a wonderful life in France, but soon is rounded up in the Vel d'Hiv and sent to a death camp with her family. Likewise, Elie Wiesel, is a religious teenager, that is taken away to the Auschwitz death camp where he struggles to survive. To begin with, Sarah was a young Jewish girl, around eleven, with blond hair and was protective of her little brother, Michael whom she locked in a cup board in order to protect him from the police. Before the Holocaust, Sarah asserted that, “ She was safe, with her mother, with her father.” ( Rosnay, 19)This statement suggests that Sarah was just an innocent, and clueless girl before the Holocaust which made her relay on her parents more. Thus, the close connection between Sarah and her parents was still strong because of Sarah’s innocence making her need someone to guide her throughout life. Nevertheless, the bond between Sarah and her parents eventually started to break as the reader tries to uncover Michel’s story in...
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...The paragraph starts with different questions that represent people’s arguments about judgment; like how can i tell right from wrong, if the majority or my whole environment has prejudged the issue? These are the arguments that people use to justify their unwillingness to judge. Some people say that judgment should not be made if one was not present during an event. In addition they also say that judgment is connected to arrogance. However, for Hannah Arendt these arguments are not valid and seem to be a non-sense since ability to judge is the main part of her argument about morality. One of the false arguments is who I am to judge; and reason why this argument is used by people is well explained by Hannah Arendt in the next paragraph. Hannah Arendt says “Who am I to judge? actually means We're all alike, equally bad..."(19). She points out on people's unwillingness to judge because we are afraid of being confronted with our imperfections such as lack of self-confidence. People realize that we are not free agents, therefore we cannot take responsibility. We are afraid of responsibility of realizing, saying and accepting the truth. The unwillingness to judge can result into people who are incapable of differentiating between right and wrong. Another false argument used by people is to what extent we can judge past events at which we were not present. Hannah Arendt was told that judging itself is wrong. This is a kind of argument that Eichman used during the trial...
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...1.6 million People were sent to concentration camps during World War II, of which one million died. Death was caused by starvation, people becoming too weak that they were unfit and were killed off, and being hung due to insubordination. Medical experiments on the prisoners also resulted in death. Dr. Mengele, the man who had done taboo medical experiments on prisoners. This is the life of Josef Mengele from his life as a young individual, to becoming a very well known “doctor”, to becoming a wanted victim. This is the Angel of Death. Born on March 16, 1911 in Gunzburg , Josef Mengele was the oldest son of Karl Mengele. He lived in an upper middle class family which ran a machine tool business. His family was described as a “Strict Catholic” family. His peers in the town he lived in would describe Mengele as an intelligent and popular person. “A young person with intelligence but more or less ordinary” were the words of description from a close relative. From a very young age Josef Mengele was interested in the racial theories of Alfred Rosenberp, a philosopher of National Socialism. In 1935 Mengele graduated from the University of Munich with a Ph. D in physical anthropology. After graduating he got into believing racism towards Jews. Two years later he became an assistant of Dr. Omar Von Verschuer who was most and commonly known for researching twins. He then served as a medical officer in the beginning of World War II with the invasion of the Soviet Union, he redeemed four...
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...George Makreas Prof. Christopher Dowling ENG 100 T-TH G00848186 The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness The Holocaust will always be remembered by the world as a period where human evil was most prevalent, and where millions of innocent lives were taken in cold blood. It doesn’t matter whether your ancestors were involved, or if you were around to experience it, you only have to be human in order to feel for all of the people who were affected. Over the years studies like Milgram’s Obedience Experiment, and Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Study have shed light on some of the basic roots of human evil, but these roots are not enough to pave the way for forgiveness of the events that occurred. Simon Wiesenthal’s story “The Sunflower” exploits these evils and presently brings us into the life and character of Simon, a Jew in a concentration camp in Poland, who has ultimately been sentenced to death for just being born the way he is. He is brought to the bed of a dying SS Nazi soldier named Karl, who after telling him of his life decisions, asks for forgiveness as his dying wish. Simon leaves the soldier in silence, and we never find out if he ever truly forgives him. But Wiesenthal does leave us all with the question of what we would do in his position. With such brutalizing and horrific events, the atrocities that Karl commits are unforgivable because he willingly participates to take the lives of innocent people, which are acts that cannot be undone. ...
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...Nazi Death Camps Nazi Death Camps Arbeit Macht Frei Arbeit Macht Frei 2012 Joseph Frimpong Western Civilization 2 11/2/2012 2012 Joseph Frimpong Western Civilization 2 11/2/2012 Arbeit macht frei; when translated into English means labor makes you free. This was the first thing many Jews in the 1940’s saw as the banner above the gates of the place they’d likely die read. (Wachsmann) German soldiers fed Jews false hope, thinking that the harder they worked the closer freedom would be when in reality freedom could only come with death. The world changed forever when an estimated 20,946,000 people died due to the world war ignited by Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. The Third Reich was the name for Nazi Germany under Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) when it was a totalitarian state. Totalitarianism is a political system where the state holds total authority over the society and seeks to control all aspects of public and private life wherever necessary. (Dictionary) Soldiers were killed in battle, Civilians in cross fire, and by starvation but nothing compares to the systematic execution and elimination demonstrated by the Third Reich sponsored death camps. Before the organized concentration camps that are well known throughout the world to have killed a countless number of people there were camps built in the early 1930’s when the Nazi’s first came into power. Earlier camps were temporary and were set up to confine, interrogate, torture, and weaken...
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...Mengele’s Experiments The Jewish Josef Mengele asked the Jewish people for doctors. About fifty moved forward. Then he asked the fifty doctors if they studied pathology and forensic medicine, but only Doctor Nyiszli moved forward. That gave Doctor Nyiszli a place as Mengele’s personal research pathologist. Mengele used Doctor Nyiszli by making him dissect the bodies of Mengele’s experimental victims, just so Mengele could learn more about the Jewish people (Deem X). Doctor Joseph Mengele did terrible things to the Jewish people, such as using one of the Jewish to conduct his experiments on the Jews and his notorious twin experiments, Doctor Mengele conducted a possible seventy different medical research projects during the Holocaust. He worked with many different people besides just Jewish individuals, such as dwarves who were at a young age of two and up. One of Mengele’s experiments included him injecting chemicals into people’s eyes to try and change their color (Michman X). One of the survivors of the Holocaust was Doctor Nyiszli. He most likely only survived the Holocaust because he was the only Jewish Doctor to study pathology and forensic medicine. His work in forensic medicine and pathology acquired him to be Mengele’s research pathologist. Doctor Nyiszli did not have it easy though. Mengele forced Doctor Nyiszli to dissect the people Nyiszli might have knew. Most of the bodies Mengele sent him were twins, and because Doctor Nyiszli was dissecting them...
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...Wiesel’s Changes of Faith The Holocaust brought about many hardships and created severe adversity for its victims that may have created experiences ultimately too traumatic that transformed their lives for years to come, either through starvation and labor in the concentration camps or execution and incineration in the extermination camps. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel tells the story of himself as a young Jewish boy born in Romania, who in 1944, was forced into ghettos with the rest of the Jewish citizens and later deported, along with his father, to the Nazi’s largest killing center, Auschwitz-Birkenau. While living through this day-to-day horrifying basis, Elie begins to live with overwhelming fear and total alienation, as well as his increasing loss of faith on God and whether God is even existent or not for His lack of participation in trying to help the Jews. Although Elie manages to survive his long and frightening journey through both labor and death camps, his faith was never at the high-most air-reaching level as it dramatically changed throughout the course of the novel because of his disturbing experiences in witnessing cremated human beings, executions, and the going through the loss of his entire family. Prior to being deported to the camps, Elie’s faith was extremely high as he was well-established with his studies in mysticism and the cabbala and his great involvement with religion through prayers. Elie is finding a great interest in wanting to...
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...3/28/13 Screening Report #2: Summer of Aviyah Although it is common to refer to those whom escaped the horrors of the Holocaust as Holocaust survivors, no one truly survived it; they endured it and made it out alive. In the film, Summer of Aviyah, this notion is made clear though the portrayal of the main character’s life, Aviyah. Aviyah and her mother are Holocaust survivors who emigrated and made refuge in the newly founded state of Israel. While they escaped the physical traumas of the Holocaust, the physiological traumas are still clearly present for Aviyah’s mother. Aviyah may have little to no memory of her life before Israel, but it undoubtedly shaped who she is too. The film begins with Aviyah rehearsing for a play and she insists to her teacher that her mother will not come. To her surprise, her mother shows up right as she is about to sing, but then she freezes up due to the immense shock. After leaving, her mother notices lice in her hair, which leads up to the scene that I find to be most shocking. Just as it was done in the concentration camps, Aviyah’s mother fully shaves her head. In this moment of chaos, as Aviyah is crying and begging her mother not to, it felt almost as if her mother was trying to show her in a small for what it was like in the concentration camps. It was a devastating scene. Aviyah is a young girl that shares the same aspirations and dream that many young girls have. She simply wants to be a part of the group, but she cannot be because...
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