Before World War I, there were significant differences among the classes. There had always been the working class, which was rarely thought about by the upper classes. They were simply viewed as part of the machine that worked to better their own lives. They had miserable living conditions and even worse working conditions. The upper classes were living a life that in no way resembled this. The only time that they actually paid attention to the working class prior to World War I was when the working class revolted against them. This problem would take a turn for the better because of the war. Since countries on both sides of the line were dedicated to winning war by using their countries every resource they had available, women of both the upper and lower class had to work in the workplace. Men from both the upper class and the lower class became soldiers fighting for their nation.

            In an effort to win the war on the home front, upper class women and lower class women began to work side by side for the good of their country. The upper class began to humanize the lower class. They were no longer thinking of them as part of a machine. Part of this reason is because they were now doing the same jobs as they were, but perhaps the greater reason for this humanization of the working lower class was that they began to develop a sense of camaraderie with one another. It was not an easy process at first, but these friendships that were made between these people were friendships that would last a lifetime. Naomi Loughnan, a 17 year old upper class woman living in London, England in 1917, wrote about this. She stated “… attempts at friendliness from the more understanding are treated with the utmost suspicion, though once that suspicion is overcome and friendship is established, it is unshakeable.”[1] The relationship between men of different classes on the battlefield was both similar and different to the relationship that women forged between one another on the home front. The soldiers were fighting alongside one another against the enemy. Upper class men and lower class men were in the same trenches. They were both taught to dehumanize their enemy, and to a certain degree, one another. They were not supposed to grow to attached to their fellow soldier incase they were killed. These soldiers were supposed to be killing machines. However, the bond they formed amongst different classes came at the end of the war. When the soldiers went home, they felt alienated by the civilians. The civilians had been exposed to the propaganda, but the soldiers had seen the real fight. When soldiers came home on leave they felt alienated. All of the civilians wanted to talk about the war. They wanted to know how great their country was doing, or how ugly the enemy really was. The propaganda had accomplished exactly what it was supposed to do, but since the soldiers’ experiences proved the propaganda wrong, they felt alienated by their own families. Although the civilians were a part of the war effort, they were not sacrificing as much as the soldiers were. One example of how a soldier felt alienated by his own family was when Emilie Carles brother came home on leave during World War I. Her brother said to her

“After the war, he and I (the German enemy), if we’re not dead, if we haven’t lost every shred of our human dignity, we’ll have to get back on the job fixing up the ruins left by the war. But the war, well, neither he nor I will get anything out of it. When it’s all over, the profits will be in the hands of the capitalists and the guys rolling money from selling their weapons, the career soldiers will have the stripes and promotions they’ve won, but not us, we won’t have anything to show for it, we won’t have won anything. You understand?” [2]

This shows that when the soldiers came home from the World War I, they had troubles expressing themselves to their own family. There were no words that could describe what they had experienced, and the only ones who could possibly relate were fellow soldiers who had fought in the war. It did not matter if the soldier was from the upper or the lower class; they were bounded together by common experiences. The upper class women had humanized the lower class as had the upper class men. They all had friends in the lower class and they were able to sympathize with them more, which led to improvements for the lower class men, women and children. The classes, although they still existed, were becoming more leveled. At one point in times, these lower class workers were not even considered to be human, but now they were very much human. The idea of dehumanizing a group of people was not a new idea, and it was used in both World War I and World War II. 

            The leaders of the armies during World War I wanted their soldiers to dehumanize the enemy. The idea was that if the soldier dehumanized the enemy it would be easier to kill them. This worked in the beginning of the war. The soldiers had brand new weapons at their disposal. The machine gun, gas canisters, explosives, barbed wire, airplanes, and tanks were all fairly new to warfare. This gave the soldiers a false sense of confidence. It was a false sense because the generals did not know how to properly deploy these weapons in order to help win the war. Soldiers began to die very gruesomely in no-mans land. Others were left stranded in no-mans land, while others simply sunk into the mud. Once the soldiers realized that this war had turned into a war of attrition, some of the soldiers began to humanize the enemy. Paul Baumer was a German soldier during World War I. He described how he began to humanize his enemy.

“But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the agony – Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”[3]

They realized that the enemy had the same experiences that they did. Besides their own men, the only other people on the face of the Earth that could possibly understand them were these soldiers. Because of this, many of the opposing forces began to make unofficial truces with each other. The dehumanization of the enemy during World War I ultimately proved to be not as effective as it was designed to be.

            However, Adolf Hitler was very successful in the dehumanization of an entire group of people during World War II. Hitler was able to isolate one group of people based solely on their religion, and dehumanize them. The Jews were his target during World War II. Instead of trying to dehumanize his physical enemies, which in this war would include soldiers from France, Russia, Great Britain, The United States and other allies, he choose to attack a group of people that he could control. Once he rounded up the Jews, his S.S. officers were able to dehumanize them. They were very systematic in how they did this as well. The S.S. officers took away their name and assigned them a number. They were referred to as ‘pieces’ and treated as animals. They had to work hard and live in degrading living conditions with very little food or water. Primo Levi was a Jew who was fortunate enough to survive Auschwitz during this time. He described the dehumanization later in life.

“Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of a pure judgment of utility.”[4]

An indeterminable amount of Jewish citizens from many different countries were killed during the this were refugees. Once liberated by the allied Russian soldiers, they had nowhere to go. Many choose to immigrate to the United States and other allied countries. Unfortunately, anti-Semitism was a problem here in the United States as well as other allied countries as well. This limited the amount of Jewish people that could enter the United States. The dehumanization of the Jewish people had worked so well, that it had an effect on the Jews before the war, during the war, during the transition to peacetime, and during peacetime.  

            Over 6 million Jewish men, women and children died as a result of the Holocaust. It will never be known the exact amount of deaths because whole Jewish holocaust. In World War I, the dehumanization failed to work, and those targeted were able to return home. This wasn’t true for the Jewish citizens. Their homes had been destroyed, whole families had been murdered, and they families were killed at the same time. Hitler set in motion a series of events that this world will never forget. Even though both World War I and World War II were extremely devastating, our society has learned many things from this war. One of the most important lessons is based off of the dehumanization of other people. World War I proved that it may work for a short time, but it will ultimately fail. World War II proved that it could work for a much longer time if you choose a group of people that could not defend themselves. So many lives were lost in these wars that it would be a crime not to remember the lessons that they taught us.