During the Nazi reign, millions of people died under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. Hitler believed in an Aryan race, which he thought was the perfect race. Anyone who did not conform with Hitler’s idea of a perfect race was deemed inferior. Those considered inferior were targeted by the Nazi regime. During the Nazi regime, people who were targeted suffered through physical and mental maltreatment, mainly at the hands of officers and doctors. The Nazi regime had their own doctors that implemented harsh medical practices on those under their control. Hans Reiter discovered Reiter’s Syndrome, later renamed “reactive arthritis” and ran Hitler’s Reich Health Office (“Don’t Mention The …show more content…
Dehumanization is the psychological process in which opponents view each other as less than human and not deserving of moral consideration (Maiese). The dehumanization of “inferior” races in Germany was a subtle process. The process started with the Nuremberg Laws, otherwise known as the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, in 1935. The Reich Citizenship Law stated that only people of "German or related blood" could be German citizens. From this law, Jewish people, anyone who was descended from at least three Jewish grandparents, were no longer citizens. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor prohibited Jews from marrying German citizens. Jews could not hire a German woman under the age of 45 to work in their homes (Engel). On November 9, 1938, which later became known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, Nazis destroyed thousands of Jewish-owned businesses, burned most synagogues, and arrested more than 30,000 Jews to take to concentration camps in Germany and Austria. The Nazis created ghettos in which Jews were kept when awaiting transport to concentration camps (Berenbaum). At the concentration camps, the prisoners were slowly deprived of the most basic of psychological and physiological needs. In 1939, Hitler signed the Euthanasia Decree. After the implementation of this law, gas chambers were …show more content…
Many doctors used their power over others to gain test subjects for their illegal procedures. Those considered inferior were exposed to humiliating and sometimes dangerous experiments. The Nazi government placed laws that slowly took away the mental and physical needs of people. The Nazi regime was a government that misused its power to inflict physical and mental pain on those considered inferior through experimentation, humiliation, and both physical and emotional