Examples Of Propaganda In Night By Elie Wiesel

Nazi propaganda was meant to promote anti-Semitism, hatred, and fear. The Jew was reduced to a vermin or pest that needed to be exterminated. Not only did the Nazis achieve this dehumanization goal on posters, they achieved their dehumanization of the Jews within the walls of the ghettoes, the concentration camp’s electric fence, and the humane soul of the people.

From the starvation in the ghettos, people had already started falling victim to savagery as they were being transported in the rail cars. After a lady had continually screamed about an imaginary fire, “She received several blows to the head, blows that could have been lethal” as the crowd shouted their approval (Wiesel 26). Just as the woman’s son remained silent as this happened so did Eliezer as he watched men beat an old woman into submission.

The prisoners of the camp had to witness other atrocities first hand, leading to numbness to the idea of death and cruelty. Upon arrival to the camp, Eliezer sees

All of the prisoners were forced to look at the hanging child, “lingering between life and death, withering before our eyes” as they walked past to get their soup. Any one person could have saved him from this cruel death, but it would have only been in vain because the savior and the boy would’ve been shot (Wiesel 65). The Gestapo even forced a man to place his own father’s corpse into the furnace; he had no choice but to do it for fear of his body being next inside the furnace. As they were evacuating camp in the rail cars, the Gestapo ordered the men to throw out the dead bodies, which they agreed to happily because that meant more space for the living, so they threw the bodies out as if they were nothing, like “a sack of flour” (Wiesel 99). The orders to witness and commit heinous acts allowed the prisoners themselves to fall victims to accepting them and refusing to prevent them for fear of