Ever since studying history in middle and high school, I have been fascinated by World War II. Not only do I think that it is such a remarkable part in history, but I wonder how a. some people to cease to believe/admit that it ever happened and b. how Hitler managed to get all of these people to follow these systematic mass murders and help him execute them.
There has been a lot of research done of conformity in society and I remember that being something that was talked about when I was younger. You dress like your friends, you talk like your friends, etc.
We also all have our own sets of beliefs; we believe what comforts us and prevents us from feeling pain.
Hitler, in WWII, developed large-scale propaganda that he thrust upon Germany and his allies. He also created youth camps, known as Hitler Youth, where young boys were brainwashed in training camps.
The propaganda played a large role in facilitating this brainwashing during both WWII as well as in the 1950s in Korea. At the camps, Hitler had boys of the Aryan race shave their heads, march and showed them all propaganda. The children in these youth camps were taught to focus on “enemies” such as Jews and communists.
In this article, peer pressure convinced people that they were wrong. I think that this may have been what occurred in WWII; Hitler told people that they everyone aside from the Aryan race did not deserve to live and people slowly started assimilating to that idea.
In that study, researchers stated that 70% of the time participants changed their recollection of the film to match others in the group. The researchers conducting this study called these “socially induced memory errors”.
Scientists in the study said that this is not always a bad thing (key word being always). If this is indeed what happened or a social explanation for what transpired during WWII then it certainly came at a cost.
Work Cited:
http://www.naturalnews.com/038716_brainwashing_social_conformity_peer_pressure.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/weekinreview/06weiner.html?_r=1&
http://www.master-of-education.org/10-disturbing-pieces-of-nazi-education-propaganda/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2558424/Inside-Hitler-Youth-camps-youngsters-brainwashed-Nazis.html
http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/articles/effectiveorganization.aspx
I like WWII history and there have been many questions as to how Hitler was able to pull of a lot of the terrible things he did. At that time the propaganda the media spread across the world really played a big factor in how to sway people and still is today! Too much attention brought towards even the dumbest thing can give it power. Hitler was good at swaying people in to aligning many around his visions (even if they weren’t nice ones).
This essay let me remind of ISIS. ISIS did the same things to the children and their soldiers, brainwash the children and soldiers by education. And this is really a terrible way to control people’s mind and make them do something exactly as what they being told. ISIS uses brainwash strategy to convince the soldiers to do the suicide mission without fearless. This is a very immoral action, because ISIS told the soldiers not to treasure their lives. Also, ISIS brainwashed their soldiers to kill the innocent people and the mission is given by Allah. That’s ridiculous.