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  • Essay / Authority and Conformity: The Demon Within

    Why did I survive? Why did I massacre thousands of innocent people? How could this have happened? It was just a nightmare, none of this can be real. It's over, let's start living our lives already. These are some of the thoughts I believe the Nazis and prisoners had after the end of the Holocaust. Some people were consumed with guilt over their actions and the difficult decisions they had to make between their survival and that of someone else. Others took a more sociopathic and apathetic approach to their actions during the Holocaust, blaming those responsible for their actions. These different actions and views of events that occurred during the Holocaust can be explained by people's internal and external locus of control, as well as the phenomenon that occurs between authority and conformity. This allows a very brief glimpse into what people's thoughts might have been like after the Holocaust. the holocaust, whether they were forced to be sent to concentration camps or whether they were the people charged with running the concentration camps. We have all heard and seen the horrific effects on people forced into concentration camps by the Nazis, but we cannot fully understand what happened after the Holocaust ended. Did they have survivor’s guilt? How did they progress in life? No one can really understand what happened after the holocaust, but we can try to understand the reasons why people decided to massacre thousands of people or chose to save their lives rather than someone else's. else. People were forced to decide whether their lives were worth more than someone else's. For example, people who were not subjected to Hitler's wrath could have helped the persecuted, but they decided not to do so in order to save themselves. They conformed to today's world... middle of paper..., and were killed because of people's need to constantly prove that they are better than others. Yet how can people say they are better than someone else? Everyone has the ability to express their opinions, express their feelings, and most importantly, everyone bleeds the same color. One person is not better than another because of their looks and intelligence, and no one is better than another despite what society believes. Works Cited Ardent, Hannah. “Total Domination” A World of Ideas: Essential Reading for Academic Writers. 8th ED121-1336 .Benford/St. Martin's, 2010.PrintFrankl,Viktor. “Man’s search for meaning”. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Print. Haslam, S. Alexander and Stephen. D. Reicher. “Contesting the “nature” of conformity: What the Milgram and Zimbardo studies really show.” » Plos Biologie 10.11 (2012): 1-4. Premier Academic Research. Internet. May 16 2014.