In this case, Alexander Weber an infamous SS officer is being tried for his contribution to the billions of deaths caused by the Nazi party.  As the final juror to make the decision to whether he is guilty or not, I say that he is innocent for the things he’s done, and he is not guilty!  My reasons are as follows: He was incapable making decisions, do to the fact that he was being basically brain washed to think that such things as prejudice are morally correct.  Also, the officer had nearly no choice in whether he could commit the crimes or not, do to the fact that his fellow officers would kill him for insubordination, or disobedience.

          First of all, Mr. Weber had, for the most part been brainwashed in a way, though it was more trickery than anything.  The SS officer had been told of greater equality, better economy, and dozens of other artificial promises.  Adolf Hitler, Mr. Weber’s leader, had established these ideas, and then slowly he drove more and more ideas into his head.  Thus brainwashing, this is stated in The Wave, by Todd Strasser. It says, “You traded your freedom for what you said was equality. But you turned your equality into superiority over non-Wave members.” This is showing how the students had given up their own freedom, so that they could become part of the group…but then the power they had became to overwhelming, and they became “better” than anyone else.  This quote is a perfect example of how trickery had taken hold so easily on Mr. Weber.  Another such instance is when Mr. Ross the student’s teacher started “The Wave”, he did so by making the things they did feel like the norm, and eventually it became a thing of power. If you were in The Wave you instantly were the “better” person over another student like you whom wasn’t in The Wave.  In addition, an exemplary time in “The Wave” that had demonstrated this affect is when David, and Laurie, his girlfriend, had their little quarrel.  He followed her down the road, and then he started to argue with her about whether The Wave was a movement for the good of the people.  Laurie thought that it was a bad thing, because it got innocent people hurt, on the contrary David thought that The Wave brought about a good sense of order, and it didn’t cause problems but mend them.  So, in the end David shoved Laurie to the ground, and then it him that he didn’t mean to, and The Wave nearly made the decision for him.  These incidents prove that such large movements, tagged along by propaganda, can make the mind think differently than it should, not by the fault of the person being affected.

          In a second story, called Night, by Elie Wiesel, there are many occurrences where an officer does things he has no say in, like Mr. Weber. At one point, a boy named Meir saw his father with bread in his hand, after a walk across more than 100 miles in the snow.  He actually goes to him and knocked him to the ground and beat him to death, now keep in mind that this is his own father.  He killed his father because he didn’t want to die himself. This severe incident only occurred because of the extreme conditions, and that is precisely why Mr. Weber did should not be punished for the crimes that took place in Germany’s death camps…He probably, as an officer, was directly under strict watch by Hitler, therefore making it a “His life or mine?” kind of situation.  A second time that a person had no choice in an issue was in “Night”, when the men and women were forced to dig their own graves, only to be shot into by the Nazis.  The people did not want to dig their own graves, but they had to because when there are five plus SS guards armed with heavy machine guns, you just tend to listen…A third and final time a person in “Night” had to do something against their own will, do to extreme circumstances, was when the families had to witness a public hanging of someone in the camp.  A dentist, that was issued to commence in extracting gold fillings from the prisoners, had been caught hording some of them for himself.  The Nazi leaders saw to it that he be hung, and so he was hung, while masses of imprisoned Jews were called out to endure the gruesome spectacle.  The people of the camp had not chosen to watch a man die out of their own will, but by the fact that if they’d been caught, they would have been killed. In the case we are discussing today, Mr. Weber could have been forced by his own death or his family’s murder to participate in the mass killing of Jews in Germany.

          Clearly, this evidence of many forced killing, and brainwashing confirm how Alexander Weber could have been severely influenced, and not actually wanted to do the crimes he’d done. As you should now understand, Mr. Weber is an innocent man!