The Holocaust

When I think to myself of the biggest example of hatred towards another group of people that was just a complete example of prejudice, extermination and most of the other topics we have been discussing in this course, the prime example of that in my mind is the Holocaust. Before reading more thoroughly into the assigned readings, I thought that the only people who were mistreated, placed into concentration camps, and killed were Jews. I was completely misinformed. During the rule of Adolf Hitler, and the Nazis they murdered and/or persecuted many handicapped and mentally disabled individuals along with Gypsies, homosexuals, and people who had different political and religious views differing from their own. This is just yet another extreme example of a group that is tremendously ethnocentric. They believed that anyone who thought or felt differently than them was opposing or just a threat to the master race of Germans. They thought that mentally handicapped individuals were a biological threat, as well as gypsies and Jews and they felt the need to rid themselves of those groups. The Germans reshaped all of the laws and social standpoints to make the Jews inferior to them. They made laws in which the Jews could not attend universities, quit their job, and could have no jobs in court positions. These laws were enforced upon the Jews by the Germans in 1933, at this time we could maintain the limited rights that the Germans allowed them to have. Between 1937 and 1939 the Germans began to seize Jewish owned stores, but after a short time this turned into the Nazis destroying any business owned by the Jews, invading their homes, and killing Jews. Already 1936 the Nazis had many different people in concentration camps. There are people that still until today claim that these events did not happen, I personally think that they are in denial. In terms of the DMIS I think that the Nazis in a way were in the defense stage of this model, because they were threatened by the thought of cultural, religiously, racially, sexually different people out in the world. It was said throughout the reading that the Germans thought that their race was the “master race” so they did see other races as less human than their own, another description of being in the defense stage. I think that those people who think these events did not occur should do their own research and not be uninformed naïve individuals and make their own decisions and opinions. Becoming informed and doing research is the only way to truly know something.