how
were the Jews treated
by the Nazis?
Answers
NPR logo
AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
'Less Than Human': The Psychology Of Cruelty
March 29, 20111:00 PM ET
Heard on Talk of the Nation
30-Minute Listen
David Livingstone Smith is co-founder and director of the Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of New England.
Courtesy of the publisher
During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. In Less Than Human, David Livingstone Smith argues that it's important to define and describe dehumanization, because it's what opens the door for cruelty and genocide.
"We all know, despite what we see in the movies," Smith tells NPR's Neal Conan, "that it's very difficult, psychologically, to kill another human being up close and in cold blood, or to inflict atrocities on them." So, when it does happen, it can be helpful to understand what it is that allows human beings "to overcome the very deep and natural inhibitions they have against treating other people like game animals or vermin or dangerous predators."
Rolling Stone recently published photos online of American troops posing with dead Afghans, connected to ongoing court-martial cases of soldiers at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. In addition to posing with the corpses, "these soldiers — called the 'kill team' — also took body parts as trophies," Smith alleges, "which is very often a phenomenon that accompanies the form of dehumanization in which the enemy is seen as game."
Answer:
The onset of World War II brought accelerated persecution and deportation and later, mass murder, to the Jews of Germany. In all, the Germans and their collaborators killed between 160,000 and 180,000 German Jews in the Holocaust, including most of those Jews deported out of Germany.
• By the start of World War II in September of 1939, over half of German Jews had relocated to other countries. Approximately 304,000 Jews, emigrated during the first six years of the Nazi dictatorship.
•Between 1939 and 1941, Jews were systematically deprived of their property and their ability to work. By early 1939, only about 16 percent of Jewish breadwinners had steady employment of any kind. Life in Germany became increasingly difficult as a result of many restrictive laws.
•In 1941, Nazi anti-Jewish policy became more radical. Jews were marked with a Star of David View This Term in the Glossary badge. The first deportations of Jews from Germany to ghettos and camps in the east began.
Explanation: