The Holocaust in Nazi Germany was, at its most fundamental roots, the massacre of millions of Jewish people in Germany and throughout country conquered by Germany during the duration of World War II. While those primarily responsible for this mass execution had no doubt about the value of the act, the actual executioners faced internal struggles to realize their duty. Even though Germany was an anti-Semitic country for much of its history, the fact remains that these executioners were killing the people they had lived with all their lives. Because of this guilt, the ordinary Nazis charged with executing the Jewish people would be forced to begin a complete transformation in order to accept the work they were doing. Maxine Kumin, with her poem “Woodchucks,” aptly depicts the transformation, from contrition to gratification, that a Nazi soldier experienced during the execution of a seemingly countless number of Jews through the use of various devices literary, including allusions, images and diction. Kumin uses allusions in multiple areas to set the scene of a World War II environment, making the understanding of his final point of the poem increasingly evident. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The first use of these allusions is in the first two lines of the poem with its reference to the "killer bomb", prompting its audience to recall the firebombings used by the American military on various Japanese cities. Similar to the poem, the firebombings did not achieve the goal the military hoped to achieve, a parallel to the farmer who tried to gas the groundhogs with cyanide to no avail. This gave the US military the feeling that it was acceptable to use a much more brutal and little to no humane weapon, a direct comparison to the farmer immediately deciding that the rifle was his only option in the scenario. In the same stanza, Kumin goes on to draw similarities between groundhogs and the Jews of Nazi Germany by detailing their ability to escape by saying, "they had a basement out of reach." Stories of several Holocaust victims had become widespread at the time of writing this poem, particularly among American poets. The most important story of these involved those hiding in attics, floors, and basements, exactly what groundhogs were said to be hiding. This creates a second alignment of the perspectives of both the farmer and the Nazi soldier when faced with the task of killing what were considered "pests." The idea that the Jews were not people, but simply irritants, which the Nazi soldier so desperately wants to see, in order to rid himself of the guilt resulting from these mass murders, is clearly represented in this comparison. Kumin deepens the resemblance between The Nazi Soldiers and the Farmer, with his final allusion to World War II, in the last line of the poem, with a direct comparison to Nazi tactics, "gassed underground in the discreet manner of the Nazis", which directly puts forward the idea of ​​a Nazi soldier. in the public mind. By using this allusion in the last line, Kumine pushes the audience towards his goal with his poem through the use of the word Nazi allowing the reader to make the connection and understand the journey of a Nazi executioner. Kumine future describes the journey through its use of imagery.”