Outline how the process of dehumanization was central to the development and implementation of the Holocaust

The process of dehumanization was essential to the overall strategy of the Nazis to exterminate groups they found to be subhuman and a threat to the ‘pure’ “Aryan” race.  Hitler was a social Darwinist who believed that the survival of a race or ethnic group depended on racial purity, which meant that intermingling between different groups was a threat to the overall survival.  This was the basis for the plan to exterminate ‘unwanted’ groups to provide the needed space for the Germans to thrive.  He saw certain races as gifted and at the highest point of the racial hierarchy, while others were flawed.  Therefore, mixing would dilute the strong characteristics of the supreme groups.  The enemies of the Nazis included Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, African Germans, homosexuals, and people with disabilities.  In order to complete his plan of eliminating the ‘undesirable’ groups, Hitler and his followers had to create an atmosphere of fear and hatred and an efficient killing machine that has been described as treating its victims as ‘worse than animals’.  Inhumane treatment was easy for a Nazi to do since they already viewed these groups as disease carrying rats, however, to get the rest of the country to follow the plan they had to undertake a propaganda campaign to dehumanize these groups in the eyes of regular Germans.   

Nazis built upon an already frustrated population who was unable to recover economic and social stability in a struggling post-World War I Germany.  They used propaganda in films, pamphlets, and literature to spread their message. There was a widely distributed weekly newspaper which had “The Jews are our misfortune” in bold print on the first page of every issue and caricatures of Jews as hook nosed and ape-like.  Other cartoons followed this strategy, portraying Jews as subhuman, animalistic, apes, diseased vermin, etc.  The propaganda had a dual purpose: to direct anger and blame for economic woes at the Jews and to portray them as sub-human and separate from German society.  The more people saw and read these portrayals of Jews and other groups deemed to be ‘impure’, the less they saw them as part of the same human race.  The Nazis succeeded in creating a battle in the minds of many Germans, an ‘us versus them’ mentality.  The next step of dehumanization in the eyes of society was to segregate Jews from the rest of the community, first with the Nuremberg Laws, next by confinement in Ghettos, and finally, by transport to the concentration camps for the “Final Solution”.      

Nazi treatment of Jews and other victim groups was inhumane and uncommonly cruel.  The experiments done by ‘scientists’ were abhorrent and wouldn’t even have been considered appropriate on animals.  The transportation used to take victims to Concentration Camps were the infamous cattle cars, in which they were literally treated like cattle.  In marches, anyone who fell behind was shot.  And the large scale killing machines in concentration camps were organized like an extermination, considered appropriate by Nazis who viewed their victims as vermin or an infestation. 

Many who look at the Holocaust ask themselves “How could society let this happen”.  The answer lies in the meticulous process of dehumanization undertaken by a well-organized hate group who effectively turned a country against certain groups and were therefore allowed to commit one of the greatest atrocities seen in human history.