Question

What would be a good thesis statement for a Holocaust essay?What would be a good thesis statement about how inhumane the concentration camps were in the Holocaust?
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Accepted Answer

Much of this is going to be driven by what it is you are going to prove in the paper.  I think that this will be supported by what you have in your possession in terms of research materials and sources as well as what the task or assignment is.  If this is for a class, being able to understand the nature and dynamics of the assignment will assist you in carving out a thesis statement that is aligned with what is being asked of you.  I think that there are several paths that can be pursued, but I also feel that this is going to be contingent on what you have, what you need to do, and with what you feel comfortable writing.  Somewhere between the valences of all three lies your thesis statement, something that will be up to you to reclaim and identify.

Answer

One way to come up with a good thesis statement on a historical event as significant as the Holocaust is to think about how you can investigate a particular historical question in a way that is somewhat against the grain. Often times, historical arguments that are seemingly unorthodox, or those which do not fit traditional narratives that people are generally familiar with, are the most valuable, because they challenge us to re-conceptualize the way we understand well-known events. By rethinking our commonly-held presuppositions about history, we are led to greater clarity and a more accurate depiction of the past.
In the case of the Holocaust, one very famous historian who wrote a book with a somewhat unorthodox approach (for the time it was published, anyway) is Christopher Browning. His book, Ordinary Men, looked at the German police-soldiers of Reserve Police Battalion 101 and their complicity in certain atrocities of the Holocaust. For example, Browning investigated the evolution of the battalion's mentality from the first time they were ordered to engage in a mass execution at Józefów in Poland until the unit was finally disbanded and its participants returned home.
What made Browning's work so unique, however, is that he eschewed the common conceptions of his day that any and every participant of the German military (SS or otherwise) who engaged in acts of brutality and mass murder must have inherently been evil people with a deep-seated and fully internalized anti-Semitic worldview (a view that was popularized by Browning's intellectual rival, Daniel Goldhagen, in his book Hitler's Willing Executioners). Instead, Browning argued that the members of this police battalion were simply caught up in a set of circumstances that were largely out of their control, and were forced to make decisions on the spot that would have profound implications on their own future survival. In looking at the participants' later interrogation records closely, Browning discovered that most of these men came from unassuming backgrounds, and were not born-and-bred killers from the start. Ordinary Men convincingly deconstructed the belief that every single person living in Nazi Germany must have been a Nazi sympathizer who was committed to the extermination of the Jews.
This is a very famous example, but it illustrates an important point. A good thesis is one that is both grounded in evidence but that is also unique, and forces readers to rethink what they thought they previously understood about a historical phenomenon.

Answer

You need to consider the facts before you think about the thesis statement. By its very nature, a thesis statement must be developed to fit the evidence, rather than the other way around.
Obviously, the concentration camps during the Holocaust were inhumane; this is not a thesis statement, because it cannot be disputed. Therefore, you need to think about what in particular the evidence shows. What are the main points you want to cover? Do you want to discuss only the death of Jewish prisoners during WWII, or are you thinking more inclusively? You could also debate the definition of what is “inhumane” and what this means—think about the use of numbers instead of names in the camps, for instance.
Your thesis statement needs to have some individual quality to make it different from everyone else’s. What specific topics do you want to cover in your essay? Start with these, and then lay out what it is you feel they show.

Answer

A thesis should contain many elements. First of all, your thesis will tell the reader how you interpret concentration camps during the Holocaust. It will also let the reader know what to expect from the paper and may be something that others will disagree with. It will answer the question that you are asking, "Were concentration camps inhumane?" You will want to convince the reader to agree with what you have to say.
A good thesis should answer the following questions:
Do I answer the question?
Is it specific enough without wandering?
Will others challenge it?

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What would be a good thesis statement for a Holocaust essay? What would be a good thesis statement about how inhumane the concentration camps were in the Holocaust? Thanks

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