ZERO : Emotions for Hitler

Auschwitz never had any emotional appeal to me. Although I knew it was the scene of one of Adolph Hitler’s concentration camps and death camps, I did not really think of genocide with much emotional thought. Even though I had learned that it was mass murder and that many innocent lives were lost, I still had never though about it deeply. This documentary film, however, made me think deeper into the subject. I realized how horrifying it would have been to experience what was done to the Jewish race. The most intriguing scene was when the video explained how the Jews were executed in groups by gassing. As the video illustrated how these chambers were structured, it reflected to me how petrified and fearful those who were imprisoned inside would have felt. During IB World History class, when we had learned about how Hitler had started WWII and his motivations, I had thought that to some extent, Hitler was not entirely a villain. I had thought that in some logic, it was the surrounding countries and their leaders that were to be blamed due to not taking action in the early stages of Hitler’s reign. But through this video, I resulted with the idea that Hitler was not a villain for his ambitions of constructing a larger empire but in the sense that he was responsible for ‘The Holocaust’. In many ways, the film changed my perspectives of how I viewed Hitler.