Atrocities against humans have existed since time immemorial. Many have become victims of the cruelties of tyrants and other heinous crimes, and history would forever attest to the suffering of these human beings. Fyodor Dostoyevsky once said that man is artistically cruel, and it is an insult to the beast to be compared to man. For no beast can take so much pleasure in intricately torturing another being, in watching with satisfaction the aching spirit of a suffering man.
Man can do such evil things, and the extent of immorality and insanity is sometimes incomprehensible. Two of the most renowned crimes against an entire race are the slavery of Africans in colonial America and the organized elimination of Jews in Europe. Some debate whether the US Slavery of Africans is more horrendous than the European Jewish Holocaust or the opposite. But weighing the similarities and differences only prove that the upheavals of these races are immeasurable and are beyond imagination. No one would ever know the pain they were subjected to. However, the crimes against the Jews for generations of antisemitism are a more horrendous portrait that people often misunderstand.
The Jews were threatened of extermination as an entire race, and the scar of inhumane acts against the people of Israel is deeper than people anticipate. Others underestimate the hardships in concentration camps and experimental laboratories. Although the Blacks and the Jews have experienced similar forms of deliberate transgression on their rights as humans, the Jews have struggled for centuries and are still struggling to this very day to fight for their right to live. Therefore, this paper stands that the Jews suffered more than the African slaves in America. The Holocaust The Holocaust is known as the systematic slaughter of European Jews by the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler in Germany during World War II.
The Nazis killed some six million Jews out of the nine million living in Germany and German-occupied territories. They also killed about five million composed of Gypsies and Slavs, who, like the Jews, were considered undesirable. Extreme anti-Semitism was a fundamental aspect of Nazism. Hitler wanted to rid Germanic life of all Jewish influence. But the problem he encountered was the method that would best fit his plant in achieving the answer to the ??? Jewish question??? (History of the Holocaust – 1938-1945-6, 000, 000 Deaths, 2008; History of the Holocaust ??? An Introduction, 2008; Forced Labor, 2008; Final Solution: Overview, 2007; The Holocaust, 2008). After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Jews were dismissed from the civil service and banned from certain fields of law, medicine, and teaching.
The government encouraged boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses. In 1935, the Nazis enacted the Nuremberg laws, which stripped Jews of their citizenship and forbade them to marry non-Jews. By this time, it had become impossible for most Jews to earn a living. During the night of November 9-10, 1938, the Nazis carried out a nationwide raid, vandalizing synagogues and Jewish businesses.
Thousands of Jews were arrested. The night came to be called Kristallnacht because of the shards of glass in the streets afterwards (History of the Holocaust – 1938-1945-6, 000, 000 Deaths, 2008; History of the Holocaust ??? An Introduction, 2008; Forced Labor, 2008; Final Solution: Overview, 2007; The Holocaust, 2008). German conquests during the early years of World War II brought millions of European Jews under Nazi control. At the Wannsee Conference in 1942, top Nazi leaders decided upon what they called the ??? final solution of the Jewish question???- the extermination of the Jews. The Nazis began building special concentration camps, called extermination camps, equipped with gas chamber and crematoria that were capable of killing and cremating thousands of people each day (History of the Holocaust – 1938-1945-6, 000, 000 Deaths, 2008; History of the Holocaust ??? An Introduction, 2008; Forced Labor, 2008; Final Solution: Overview, 2007; The Holocaust, 2008). The Nazis deported Jews to ghettos in Eastern Europe, from which they were sent to concentration camps.
Special units began the mass shootings that ultimately claimed two million lives. Jews were driven into ghettos in Polish cities and kept in utter misery until, crowded into freight cars; they were transported to death camps at Auschwitz, Dachau, Chelmno, Majdanek, and Treblinka in Poland. Upon arrival, about one tenth were treated as slave labor until murdered. Most Jews were immediately sent to their deaths as they were taken to gas chambers disguised as showers. Their bodies were cremated after their gold teeth, hair, and clothes were taken for the German war effort.
German scientists and doctors of the concentration camps performed inhumane acts on prisoners through their medical experimentation. Many were maltreated with inconceivable methods such as injection of animal semen on human female subjects, conjoining of identical twins, and hypothermia examinations. With their study of eugenics, many individuals were left with permanent disabilities and were not able to survive their scientifically directed experimentations. The destruction of millions of Jews and others required the voluntary cooperation of thousands of German civilians. Although there was a German resistance movement, there is little evidence of widespread refusal to cooperate with the Nazis (History of the Holocaust – 1938-1945-6, 000, 000 Deaths, 2008; History of the Holocaust ??? An Introduction, 2008; Forced Labor, 2008; Final Solution: Overview, 2007; The Holocaust, 2008; Medical Experiments of the Holocaust and Nazi Medicine, 2008; Nazi Medical Experiments More Common Than Thought, 2004). African Slavery in the United States?? On the other hand, slavery in the Americas began shortly after the first European settlers arrived in the New World.
In some areas, Indian slave labor was use at first, but soon the Europeans began to import blacks from Africa. Several European nations became engaged in a profitable slave trade in Africans. An especially barbarous aspect of the slave trade was the passage from Africa to America on overcrowded, poorly supplied vessels and the consequent disease and death. From the early 16th century to the mid-19th century, about 15 million Africans were transported to the New World (Ronald et al. 2008; Slavery in America, 1995; Delaney, 2008). The first blacks were brought to what is now the United States in 1619.
They were not slaves but indentured servants. However, it was not long before blacks were being brought in as slaves. Slavery existed in both the North and the South during the colonial period. However, it was the introduction of large-scale cotton farming in the South after the Revolutionary War that made slavery profitable (Ronald et al. , 2008; Slavery in America, 1995; Delaney, 2008). Only a minority of Southern whites, less than one-fourth, held slaves, and most of them owned only one or two.
Large-plantation owners were the exception, although as a class they dominated social, economic, and political life in the pre-Civil War South, Not all slaveholders were white; some were Indians, and even former black slaves. Slavery varied from place to place. Not all slaves labored on plantations; some worked as domestic servants, skilled artisans, and factory hands. For the vast majority, however, bondage meant submission and degradation. It was a physically and psychologically brutalizing experience. In general, blacks??? existence as human beings was given no recognition.
They had little or no protection under the law, and little hope of emancipation. There were few slave revolts, but many thousands of slaves fled the South (Ronald et al. , 2008; Slavery in America, 1995; Delaney, 2008). Undoubtedly, the conditions under which masters and slaves operated varied considerably.
Different factors such as individual personalities, occupations, size of slave holdings, and particular economic enterprise determined the influence of the slaves and their relations with their masters. Slaves and ex-slaves were all segregated in societies. They were not treated equal, not even humans. They were compared to the animals and were assigned to eternally become servants to the white race. It is a total injustice to be sentenced to a life imposed by foreign atrocious acts.
The America would forever be indebted to the African slaves and to their children, as the land of the free was actually a land filled with traces of slavery (Ronald et al. , 2008; Slavery in America, 1995; Delaney, 2008). The Plight of the Victim RacesAmerica may be the epitome of the land of freedom and opportunity, but it has also been a soil tainted with slave blood of Africans brought to suffer. But the conditions of the Jews were far more severe, as they were not only campaigned to become forced laborers, but also sentenced to their total elimination.
Genocide is beyond serious that the Jews were planned to have been subjected to. Both experience brutal mental and physical torture, but the brief years that the Holocaust transpired, they were in the brink of extinction. Given individual portraits of their sufferings, it is difficult to measure with accurate comparison the degree of Jewish plight against the African. But the facts are laid and we have seen that the Jews were sent in cattle trains, although comparable to the freight ships used on Africans, the Jews were being sent to both their prisons and their deaths. In the other hand, the Africans were being sent only to their prisons where they were to serve as slaver workers.
The Jews were systematically terminated, unlike the Africans who were traded and left to live with their masters. The bottom line is, the Africans were made to suffer but they were intended to live, the Jews were conquered and gathered in order to die. However, sometimes death is an act of mercy. It is better to be left to die with ease, perhaps through the gas chambers or the firing squad.
For it could be more humane to kill a man with a gun than to make him suffer in labor before dying. Perhaps it is more difficult to bequeath the life of slavery to your children, than to not have children at all. And perhaps it is an act of kindness to just eliminate a population than to sentence them to eternal slavery, shame, and suffering. Conclusion The atrocities on the Jewish race can never be justified by any form of human reasoning. And neither were those on the African slaves.
But it is with prudence that this paper claims that the Jews had a greater plight than the slaves in America. It is always debatable and people would always have subjective opinions. But the truth is only one thing, the extent of human idea of making his neighbor suffer is far from the horrors of the actual sufferings of the victims. Referenceshttp://www. jewishvirtuallibrary. org/jsource/Holocaust/history. htmlhttp://www. jewishvirtuallibrary. org/jsource/Holocaust/labor. htmlhttp://www. remember. org/educate/medexp. htmlhttp://www. ushmm. org/wlc/article. php? lang= en&ModuleId= 10005151http://www. ushmm. org/wlc/article. php? lang= en&ModuleId= 10005143
