And there is another, vaster shame, the shame of the world. It was memorably pronounced by John Donne, and quoted innumerable times, pertinently or not, that ‘no man is an island’, and that every bell tolls for everyone. And yet there are those who faced by the crime of others or their own, turn their backs so as not to see it and not feel touched by it.
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
Societies are not made of sticks and stones, but of men whose individual characters, by turning the scale one way or another, determine the direction of the whole.
Socrates, in Plato, The Republic, Book Eight
It has sometimes been thought that most Germans and Austrians did not know what happened to the Jews and others who were taken away. The truth is more terrible. Many were willing to take part and many others knew well what was being done. There were administrators, typists, drivers, workmen and others, who did not kill people but provided necessary back-up. They usually knew what was going on, but kept their consciences quiet with the thought that their own role was harmless.
Near the death camps, people could not escape knowing. At Mauthausen there were thick plumes of smoke in the sky, day and night, and an appalling smell. Sister Felicitas, who lived nearby, said, ‘The people suffered dreadfully from the stench. My own father collapsed unconscious several times, since in the night he had forgotten to seal up the windows completely tight.’ She described stores of bones, often dumped in the river, and how tufts of hair blew onto the street out of the chimney.1
There was a degree of local revulsion, but people who expressed concern for the victims sometimes seemed more concerned for themselves. One woman near Mauthausen saw people who had been shot taking several hours to die. She wrote to protest: ‘One is often an unwilling witness to such outrages. I am anyway sickly and such a sight makes such a demand on my nerves that in the long run I cannot bear this. I request that it be arranged that such inhuman deeds be discontinued, or else be done where one does not see it.’2
Others went beyond acquiescence. They were enthusiastic. In April 1945 Jews on forced labour were moved away from the advancing Soviet army and marched towards Mauthausen. At Eisenerz stones were thrown at some of them by townspeople coming out of the cinema. Others were ordered to run down a hill. A squad of local militia opened fire and killed 200 of them. One observer noted a festive mood among the militiamen before the massacre: ‘it was for the men of the company seemingly a special joy to be able to seize the weapons’. The squad leader said, ‘Today we are going to have some fun.’3
When prisoners in Mauthausen escaped, many local people enthusiastically joined the hunt. A priest in Allerheiligen described one man laughing as he shot a prisoner pleading for his life. The grocer in Schwertberg collected seven recaptured prisoners from the local cell and shot them one at a time in the courtyard of the town hall. In Tragwein, the butcher’s daughter said, ‘Drive them right inside onto the meat bench, we’ll cut them right up like the calves.’ Afterwards, the local people used to talk of the escape as the ‘rabbit hunt’.4
Many were afraid to help Jews or to speak out on their behalf. Years later, Karl Jaspers wrote:
But each of us is guilty insofar as he remained inactive … But passivity knows itself morally guilty of every failure, every neglect to act whenever possible, to shield the imperilled, to relieve wrong, to countervail. Impotent submission always left a margin of activity which, though not without risk, could still be cautiously effective.5
Most people kept quiet. Inge Deutschkron was a Jewish girl who survived in hiding in Berlin. She later described Berliners’ responses as their Jewish neighbours, paralysed with fear, were pushed into cars and taken away: ‘People stopped in the street, whispered to each other, and then quickly went on their way, back to the safety of their homes, peering out from behind curtained windows to watch what was happening.’6 After a few days all the Jews were gone.
Some Berliners were appalled, both at what was being done, and at the discovery of the limits of their own moral courage. One woman wrote about these feelings in her diary:
‘They are forced to dig their own graves,’ people whisper. ‘Their clothing, shoes, shirts are taken from them. They are sent naked to their death.’ The horror is so incredible that the imagination refuses to accept its reality. Something fails to click. Some conclusion is simply not drawn … Such indifference alone makes continued existence possible. Realizations such as these are bitter, shameful and bitter.7
The Nazis coerced people with moral dilemmas. Critics had a terrible moral choice. They could acquiesce in genocide or they could speak out, but this might add their own family to the victims while saving no one else. The dilemmas for individuals were mirrored by those for groups. In occupied countries the Nazis pursued a deliberate policy of dividing potential opposition. Each fragment of opposition then had terrible choices to make.
In Holland the Nazis never made it clear that they intended to deport all Jews. By a complicated policy of distinctions and exceptions, they deflected some of the resistance into attempts to have particular groups reclassified. They presented Dutch civil servants with a dilemma about collaboration, by asking for a list of Jews who should be exempt because of distinction in science and the arts. They applied the same strategy to the churches. When the deportation of Jews was announced, the Catholic bishops and Protestant leaders joined in a letter of protest, to be read from all pulpits. The Protestant leaders were promised that, if they withdrew from this, Jews converted to Protestantism would be exempted. The Protestant leaders accepted this offer. The public reading of the letter in Catholic churches was followed by a large deportation of Catholic Jews to Auschwitz.8
Collaboration often brought relief in the short term. The Protestant Jews were spared from going in that transport. Those of us who have not been faced with these dilemmas should not be too quick to condemn the Protestant leaders. It is easy to understand how they must have seen things. Where lives are at stake, even temporary protection is something.
But, in the long run, such decisions may have helped the Nazis. There is truth in what Pastor Niemöller wrote:
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out –
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the communists
and I did not speak out –
because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out –
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me –
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
Some Germans and Austrians took risks. Sergeant Anton Schmidt, in charge of a German army patrol in Poland, gave forged papers and the use of military trucks to the Jewish underground until he was arrested and executed. His help was described at Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt wrote of the silence that came over the courtroom, partly in honour of Anton Schmidt, and partly in response to the thought that such help had been so rare.9
Some thought opposition might succeed. In 1943 some Catholic anti-Nazi students were executed for distributing subversive pamphlets in Munich. On the morning of her execution, Sophie Scholl said, ‘What does our death matter if thousands will be stirred and awakened by what we have done? The students are bound to revolt.’ It was not so. There was a huge demonstration that evening in support of the executions, with hundreds of students shouting and stamping to applaud the university beadle, who had denounced Sophie Scholl and her brother.10
People were, to different degrees, moved by sympathy and by conceptions of their own moral identity. There is evidence that both of these had roots going back to childhood. Samuel and Pearl Oliner studied people who had helped to rescue Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe and compared them with similarly placed people who had not given such help. They found, unsurprisingly, that the rescuers cared more than the others about people outside their families.11 Less obviously, the rescuers’ upbringing had been different from that of the others. The parents of the rescuers had set high standards for their children, especially about caring for others, but had not been strict. The emphasis was on reasoning rather than discipline. It was virtually the exact opposite of the upbringing of the leading Nazis. Upbringing was mentioned by Emilie Guth, who hid Jews in Marseilles. Her mother, although not rich, had always given food and help to people in need: ‘When children see people in the house helping others, it makes them want to help. The things you learn in your own house are the things you grow up to do.’12
For some the first step was a small human gesture towards the victims. Even a friendly face made a difference. Prisoners in Mauthausen working away from the camp noticed people who looked at them sympathetically. Austrian workmen used their position on top of scaffolding to warn prisoners when they needed to work hard and when it was safe to let up. Some villagers put out glasses of water for the passing prisoners and threw them apples.13
Jews in Germany had minimal rations, but most Berlin Jews had friends who helped them. Inge Deutschkron describes how her family were given fruit and vegetables by the grocer Richard Junghans. Their old butcher, Mr Krachudel, sold them the same meat as before, without ration stamps. Mrs Krachudel would ask, as politely as ever: ‘What will it be today? Stew meat, or maybe a roast?’14 These small gestures called for courage. A story circulated in Berlin about a Jewish woman, with the Gestapo at her door, throwing lemons and apples out of the window to protect the shopkeeper who sold them to her.
Jean Améry remembered cigarettes. After he had been tortured in Breendonk, one soldier tossed him a lighted cigarette through the cell bars. Later, in Auschwitz-Monowitz, he shared the last cigarette of Herbert Karp, a disabled soldier from Danzig. Jean Améry remembered a few other people who made human gestures. They included Willy Schneider, a Catholic worker from Essen, ‘who addressed me by my already forgotten first name and gave me bread’. There was the chemicals foreman, Matthäus, who on 6 June 1944 said, ‘Finally, they have landed! But will the two of us hold out until they have won once for all?’ But Jean Améry did not overlook how rare such gestures were: ‘My good comrades are not to be blamed, nor am I, that their weight is too slight as soon as they stand before me no longer in their singularity but in the midst of their people … My Willy Schneider and Herbert Karp and Foreman Matthäus did not stand a chance of prevailing against the mass of the people.’15
Civil courage could come from the sense of being a certain kind of person: of living by some standards rather than others. Sometimes the standards were professional. Some people in Germany refused to participate, even indirectly. Karl Wilhelm, a director of the Reichsbank, turned down a request to help distribute the property taken from murdered Jews, saying that ‘the Reichsbank is not a dealer in secondhand goods’. Sometimes a lawyer would display commitment to traditional professional standards. One judge, Dr Lothar Kreyssig, made an accusation of murder against one of the euthanasia programme’s leading directors. He refused to accept that Hitler’s authorization made the murders legal.
Sometimes the integrity was an academic or scientific commitment to truth. An anthropologist at the University of Munich, Karl Sailer, attacked the concept of a fixed Nordic race and said that modern Germans were racially mixed. Reinhard Heydrich banned him from teaching. Sailer lost his chair at Munich. His fellow university teachers did not protest, instead they started to avoid him.
Sometimes patriotism played a part. One of the French nuns who hid and sheltered Jewish children, responding later to mention of her courage, said, ‘Mais je suis Française, à la fin.’16
Religion often played a part. The response of the Christian churches to the Nazis was mixed. The Pope’s muted public response to the Nazi murder of the Jews has rightly received much adverse comment. But often the values which led people to take risks to help came from religious commitment. All over Europe nuns gave shelter to Jewish children in their convents.
Sometimes people spoke out against the Nazis from their Christian beliefs. In Germany there were public protests against the euthanasia programme from certain Christian leaders. The Protestant Bishop of Württemberg wrote in protest to the Minister of the Interior. In Berlin the Catholic Bishop Preysing preached against it in St Hedwig’s Cathedral. Pastor Braune, Vice-President of the Central Committee of the main Protestant welfare organization, wrote a long personal letter of protest to Hitler, which led to his arrest by the Gestapo.
A month after Braune’s letter, the Catholic Bishop of Münster, Cardinal von Galen, preached against the euthanasia programme in forceful and highly specific terms. He spoke of reports that, on orders from Berlin, psychiatric patients were being killed. He had brought a charge of murder against those responsible, and had asked both the State Court and the Police President to protect the patients. In a sermon he said that, since he had received no reply, ‘we must assume that the poor helpless patients will soon be killed’.
Bishop von Galen drew attention to the values behind what was being done:
The argument goes: they can no longer produce commodities, they are like an old machine that no longer works … What does one do with such an old machine? It is thrown on the scrap heap … No, we are dealing with human beings, our fellow human beings, our brothers and sisters. With poor people, sick people, if you like unproductive people. But have they for that reason forfeited the right to life? … even if initially it only affects the poor defenceless mentally ill, then as a matter of principle murder is permitted for all unproductive people …17
Copies of the sermon were widely read. Nazi leaders suggested the Bishop should be hanged or sent to a concentration camp. To avoid conflict with the Catholic Church, Hitler did nothing, but said he would settle with the Bishop after the war.
On the murder of the Jews, the Church leaders were less impressive, but there were striking individual cases of Christian protest. Just before the round-up of Jews in Berlin, one Catholic priest, Bernard Lichtenberg, publicly prayed in St Hedwig’s Cathedral for the Jews. He was imprisoned and died on his way to Dachau.
People could find themselves drawn into mild but increasing collaboration. They might gradually lose the self-respect which gave strength to their opposition. There is terrible danger in taking the first small step in collaboration and there is great value in early protest or refusal. Holland provides an instance. The Dutch people were not able to prevent transports of Jews to the death camps and many died. But large numbers of Dutch people gave help and support to Jews. Louis de Jong estimates that 25,000 Jews were hidden in Dutch homes, and that at least 2,000-3,000 resistance workers helped Jews with hiding places, papers, food coupons and money.
This record of opposition was present right at the beginning, before the corrupting effects of creeping collaboration could set in. In 1940 the German authorities started by saying that no more Jews should be admitted to the Dutch civil service. This was met by an immediate protest from all university student organizations and by a letter of protest signed by half of all the university teachers. The next step, the dismissal of all Jews from the civil service, was met by student strikes. The brutal rounding up for deportation of 400 Jews in Amsterdam was met with a virtually total strike in Amsterdam and nearby towns.18 The self-respect maintained by these responses must have helped the many Dutch people who kept up resistance and gave shelter.
Sometimes whole communities acted out of religious solidarity. In France the Protestant village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon gave refuge to Jews. The pastor, André Trocmé, his wife Magda and the villagers had together created a community in which it would be unthinkable to turn away a refugee.
André Trocmé was a pacifist and a strong anti-Nazi. His sermons emphasized resisting evil. The resistance started when Marshal Pétain proposed schools should have a daily ceremony of saluting the flag. In Le Chambon there was none of the intended compulsion. Those who wished to salute the flag could do so. The numbers saluting dwindled. Then Trocmé and the school staff refused to sign an oath of unconditional loyalty to Pétain. The Mayor passed on to Trocmé an order from Pétain to ring his church bell as part of some Vichy celebration. Trocmé ignored the order. Amélie, the bell ringer, was part of an old dissenting Protestant tradition. When some visiting women tried to order her to ring the bell, she told them the bell belonged not to the Marshal but to God.
The village gave refuge to Jews. When the first, an old German Jewish woman, arrived on the doorstep, Magda Trocmé invited her in and gave the help she could. As she later put it, ‘I do not hunt around to find people to help. But I never close my door, never refuse to help somebody who comes to me and asks for something. This I think is my kind of religion.’19 Other refugees followed.
When Georges Lamirand, the Vichy Minister for Youth, visited the village, he was presented with a letter of protest about French police arresting Jews in Paris:
We feel obliged to tell you that there are among us a certain number of Jews. But, we make no distinction between Jews and non-Jews. It is contrary to the Gospel teaching. If our comrades, whose only fault is to be born in another religion, received the order to let themselves be deported, or even examined, they would disobey the orders received, and we would try to hide them as best we could.
When the Prefect told Trocmé that he would have the Jews examined, Trocmé said, ‘We do not know what a Jew is. We know only men.’ When the authorities sent motor-cycle police and buses, the villagers warned the Jews to hide and Trocmé preached a sermon about the duty to protect the innocent. The search yielded one Jew. All the others were saved. Trocmé and two friends were arrested and spent about a month in an internment camp, before being released. At the time of the arrest the villagers brought gifts and sang hymns as the police and the arrested men were led away. The French policeman who arrested them was almost in tears.
During and after the internment, the policy of refuge went on. Documents were forged. The refugees were spread through the village and the houses of the surrounding country. Eventually 5,000 Jews, including many children, were in hiding in the village.
This stand must have had many sources. Among them were the Christian moral commitment to refuge, and the rapport between pastor and villagers. The warm responsiveness to people in need played a part. And the great rescue perhaps grew out of small things: the early refusals to salute the flag, to take the loyalty oath and to ring the bell for Pétain. These small things must have strengthened the sense of moral identity as surely as the opposite decisions would have weakened it. Emilie Guth worked in Marseilles, hiding Jews until they could be taken to Le Chambon. She found that an act of rescue would lead to further requests: ‘Once you started to do one thing you couldn’t stop because people came to you and begged for help. Even if you had just a little bit of feeling and were very afraid, you had to keep doing it.’20
There is another way in which the rescue may have grown out of small things. The people of Le Chambon did not think of themselves as heroes, but simply as doing the duty of any decent Christian. Laurence Thomas suggests that what they did fell into two stages, each of which seemed to them natural. Their Christianity made refusal of food and warmth to needy strangers impossible. And, having taken the needy strangers in, it became unthinkable to turn them out to their death.21
But, as Laurence Thomas also points out, it was important that the village was a community with a high moral base line. People who wanted to retain their self-respect could not depart far from the community’s shared commitment to Christian charity. The capacity to resist is not only a matter of individual psychology, but also of a shared moral culture.
In 1943, at the Jewish New Year, the Gestapo planned to round up all Jews in Denmark. An official at the German embassy leaked the plan to Danish politicians, who told the leading rabbi. He warned everyone to leave the synagogue and to tell all Jews to hide until transport to Sweden could be arranged. The Danish people gave massive support. Jews were stopped on the streets and given keys to people’s homes. One ambulance driver went through the Copenhagen phone book and drove to the houses of people with Jewish names to take them into hiding. Doctors and nurses produced false medical records and hid Jews in hospitals. Taxis, ambulances, fire engines and other vehicles were used to take them to the coast. Of the 7,800 Jews in Denmark, 7,200 were hidden and helped to escape. Sweden made it clear that Jews would be welcomed and that boats in the rescue could fly the Swedish flag.
The rescue of the Danish Jews was helped by the fact that their numbers were relatively small, by the closeness and co-operation of Sweden, and by the warning. There is also reason to believe that the German authorities in occupied Denmark were not keen on the round-up and that a body of opinion in Berlin thought it would be unwise,22 partly because of the likely Danish response. Immediately after the occupation, the German authorities sent a report to Berlin that steps against Jews would paralyse or seriously disturb economic life.23
Most countries are not monolithic and there were cases of betrayal of Jews by Danes. There was also a Danish Nazi Party of about 22,000 people. Despite these qualifications, the large number of Danes involved in the rescue suggests that much was owed to the climate of civil courage among the Danish people.
After the attempt to round up the Jews, the faculty and students at the University of Copenhagen agreed to suspend all classes ‘in view of the disasters which have overtaken our fellow citizens’. The Danish Church was equally uncowed. The Bishop of Copenhagen issued a statement on behalf of all the bishops of Denmark, who had it read from the pulpit in the churches. Part of it read:
Wherever Jews are persecuted because of their religion or race it is the duty of the Christian church to protest against such persecution, because it is in conflict with the sense of justice inherent in the Danish people and inseparable from our Danish Christian culture through centuries … Our different religious views notwithstanding, we shall fight for the cause that our Jewish brothers and sisters may preserve the same freedom which we ourselves evaluate more highly than life itself. With the leaders of the Danish church there is a clear understanding of our duty to be law-abiding citizens who will not groundlessly rebel against the authorities, but at the same time our conscience bids us to assert the Law and protest against any violation of the Law. We shall therefore in any given event unequivocally adhere to the concept that we must obey God before we obey man.24
Perhaps the civil courage displayed in that public statement, and in the whole rescue operation, was not just a matter of individual psychology, but had its roots in Danish culture. Doubts have been expressed about thoughts of this kind. Steve Paulsson has said:
The differences between nations are for the most part differences in their situations and not of intrinsic moral or other qualities; and one must not believe otherwise except on evidence much more rigorous than the historical discipline is capable of providing. Romanticism expressed along national lines is dangerous; to hold up whole nations to praise or blame is not only a questionable practice, it may even represent a subtle triumph of the Nazi ideal.25
To treat whole nations as collectively responsible for episodes is indeed objectionable. And to talk about ‘intrinsic’ moral qualities of nations is dubious, not least because the word ‘intrinsic’ is so vague. But the idea that people are to some extent shaped by the history and traditions of their culture need not be either romantic or subtly Nazi.
There seems no reason to disbelieve the account in the bishops’ statement of some of the cultural roots of the rescue: a sense that Danish citizenship is bound up with ideas of freedom and of equal rights, and a Christian moral commitment which comes before obedience to men. The Nazis were not up against a resistance movement pulled together out of nothing, but one which drew on character that had been growing a long time. The culture had shaped the characters of those who took part, but in turn what those people were like was part of what made the culture. The Danish rescue brings particularly strongly to mind what Socrates said about societies not being made of sticks and stones, but of people whose individual characters turn the scale.
The Nazis expected the Italians to co-operate in rounding up Jews for deportation. When Nazis demanded this from the Italian forces in Croatia, Mussolini wrote ‘nulla osta’ (no objection) across the paper about it; but other Italians often had different ideas.26
The Italian forces in Croatia interned the Jews for their own protection. General Roatta told the people interned at Kraljevice that, if he had submarines at his command, he would take them to Italy, where they would be safe.
When the Croatian Ustase were carrying out massacres, the Italian army sometimes saved the victims. Against orders, Lieutenant Salvatore Loi, with a corporal and two soldiers, saved 400 Serbs about to be killed, and protected a fleeing column of Serbs and Jews. Colonel Umberto Salvatores disobeyed orders by turning a blind eye. General Ambrosio invited refugees to return: ‘The Italian armed forces are the guarantors of their safety, their liberty and their property.’
Baron Michele Scamacca, of the Italian Foreign Office, rejected a suggestion that Jewish refugees should be driven back to Croatia ‘for obvious reasons of political prestige and humanity’. Jonathan Steinberg, who describes these events, comments on the way this ‘obvious’ reaction goes all the way up from Lieutenant Loi and his soldiers to the high officials of the Foreign Office, and rightly says that this chapter of glory in Italian history makes up for a good many defeats on the battlefield.
The Italians made masterly use of bureaucratic obstruction. The Office of Civilian Affairs of the Second Army had a document about how to seem to comply without actually doing so. And large complications were created about judging the ‘pertinence’ of Jews in occupied territory. One document said that the region would ‘respond (without too much haste) to the Supreme Command’. There were endless delays while local commanders told the Germans that they had not yet had orders. When the Germans went higher up, the senior officials expressed surprise that their instructions had somehow not got through.
Italians occupying part of France blocked French efforts to implement the Nazis’ Jewish policy. The Italian High Command, backed by the Foreign Office, forbade the French to intern Jews or to impose the yellow star. And so it went on. To the constant exasperation of the Nazis, the Italians used every kind of obstruction and delay, combining deviousness with insistence on their rights as an occupying power.
The Jews in Italian-occupied Croatia had not been made to wear the yellow star. Mussolini was pressured to agree that they should be treated just as they would be in the German-occupied part of the country, but this was resisted right down the line. Count Luca Pietromarchi, the senior diplomat responsible for occupied territories, wrote in his diary that he had agreed with the liaison officer with the Second Army ‘ways to avoid surrendering to the Germans those Jews who have placed themselves under the protection of our flag’. One colonel argued that ‘our entire activity has been designed to let the Jews live in a human way’, and that handing them over was impossible ‘because we would not be true to the obligations we assumed’. The army’s attitude was expressed in another document which said that ‘the Italian army should not dirty its hands in this business’. The German authorities said they wanted the Jews in Mostar thrown out of their homes to provide houses for German mining engineers. The reply came that it was ‘incompatible with the honour of the Italian army to take special measures against Jews’.
Jonathan Steinberg comments on how, in the Italian culture, the primary virtue of humanity so visible in these episodes is often surrounded by secondary vices found hardly at all in Germany: unpunctuality, bureaucratic inefficiency, evasiveness and corruption. He says that no sane person who has ridden a German bus or used a German post office would voluntarily use the Italian equivalents.27 But at that time in Germany the secondary virtues of efficiency and incorruptibility were harnessed to inhuman ends. In Italy the secondary vices were in service to the primary virtue of humanity.
As with cultural comments about Denmark, there are reservations to make. Just as there were those in Germany who put humanity first, so there were Italians who did not. And atrocities were carried out by Italian forces in Abyssinia in the 1930s. But, taking account of exceptions and of the instability of national characteristics, the contrast with the Nazis does suggest something about the Italian culture of that time. The norm seems to have been for the human responses and the sense of moral identity to have been interwoven. For the Italian army to hand over Jews to their death would be to ‘dirty its hands in this business’.
People living under Nazi rule often needed great courage to resist, sometimes risking themselves and their families. But this does not apply to ‘free bystanders’: those who lived outside Hitler’s empire, and who had opportunities to help the victims of the Nazis.
Free bystanders were also sometimes presented by the Nazis with coercive moral dilemmas. This happened to the Red Cross. The World Jewish Congress asked the International Red Cross to say that Jews under Nazi rule in ghettos and concentration camps would be recognized as prisoners of war and so protected by the Geneva Convention. The request was refused because the Nazis had more than a million Allied prisoners of war, and they threatened to abandon the Geneva Convention if the Red Cross included the camps under it.
There were several occasions when British ministers and their officials had a chance of helping Hitler’s Jewish victims. In judging the response, allowance has to be made for the fact that they were very occupied with the urgent need to defeat Hitler and help might have been given at the expense of the war effort. But, even allowing for this, the record is dismaying.
One conflict between the war effort and the chance of giving help was presented in May 1944 by Adolf Eichmann. He offered the Allies the lives of a million Jews in exchange for ten thousand trucks. Joel Brandt was allowed to take this offer to the British. He went to Aleppo, where the British authorities arrested him. Brandt said, ‘Please believe me: they have killed six million Jews; there are only two million left alive.’ British officials rejected the proposal. They said he could not return to Hungary. His reply was: ‘Do you know what you are doing? This is simply murder! That is mass murder. If I don’t return our best people will be slaughtered! My wife! My mother! My children will be first! You have to let me go! … I am here as the messenger of a million people condemned to death.’28
Even with hindsight, the decision was a difficult one. Suppose the trucks made it easier for Hitler to win the war? Suppose the blackmail was repeated and turned into a regular source of Nazi war supplies? Could Eichmann be relied on to keep his word?
Any adequate decision about the offer would have to be taken with the seriousness appropriate to what was at stake: the lives of a million men, women and children. It still might be right to turn down the deal, but with full emotional appreciation of what this meant such a decision would be agonizing.
It is hard to see that the actual decision was made with this seriousness. In June 1944 representatives of the Jewish Agency met the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. They asked for some signal to be sent to Germany that the rescue of the Jews could be discussed. Eden said he could not act without the agreement of the American and Soviet governments. He said he ‘doubted’ that the deal was possible and expressed his ‘profound sympathy’.29 Someone imaginatively and emotionally engaged might not have offered this conventional condolence.
The impression that on this question Eden had a stunted moral imagination is reinforced by his earlier response to a plea to rescue the Jews of Bulgaria: he said, ‘Turkey does not want any more of your people.’ His imagination seems to have been stunted partly by anti-Semitism. His private secretary said that he loved Arabs and hated Jews. And Eden himself wrote in a private note that ‘if we must have preferences let me murmur in your ear that I prefer Arabs to Jews’.30
And, where British ministers were responsive, they sometimes had to work against the anti-Semitism of their officials. The Colonial Secretary proposed to try to rescue Jewish children from Bulgaria. One of the Colonial Office’s officials, J.S. Bennett, commented: ‘It is difficult to prevent a convincing case on security grounds against letting in children as proposed here; particularly in view of our reception of Greek (non-Jewish) children … What is disturbing is the apparent readiness of the new Colonial Secretary to take Jewish Agency “sob stuff” at its face value.’ Mr Bennett’s response to eye-witness reports of what the Nazis were doing was to write: ‘Familiar stuff. The Jews have spoilt their case by laying it on too thick for years past.’31 One wonders what the Nazis would have had to do for Mr Bennett to find Jewish anguish justified.
Sometimes the political inadequacy seems to have come, not from anti-Semitism, but from the human responses being shrivelled by bureaucracy. A Foreign Office official, R.T.E. Latham explained the refusal to allow entry to some more Jewish refugees: ‘I am afraid there is next to nothing we can do … in any case we simply cannot have any more people let into the UK on merely humanitarian grounds … Furthermore these refugees, pitiable as is their plight, are hardly war refugees … but simply racial refugees.’32
Bystanders who looked away did so often because of the dangers of trying to help or protest. Rescuers often risked their lives. It is difficult for those of us who have not been in their position to be very condemnatory. We all hope we would be like the villagers of Le Chambon, while fearing we might be like the people Inge Deutschkron saw peering out from behind curtained windows.
The ethical position is fairly unproblematic if left vague. When people’s lives are at risk from persecution, there is a strong moral obligation to do what is reasonably possible to help. It is not enough to seal up the windows against the smell. The world would be a terrible place if the whole truth about this aspect of us was what Norman Geras has called ‘the contract of mutual indifference’: we leave other people in peril unrescued and accept that others will do the same to us.33 The problems start when we try to make the ethical position less vague. There is room for disagreement over what degree of risk it is reasonable to expect people to run for others. Particularly if rescuing a stranger means putting your family at risk, good people may divide about what morality requires.
Except in cases of coercive moral dilemmas, it is harder to find things to say for the free bystanders who refused to help. What comes over most strongly is the contribution made to their failure by distance and by lack of moral imagination. People immersed in bureaucratic rules easily forget what is at stake. A code of ethics for officials should include having the imagination to look through the rules to the human reality. This might undermine the thought that saving people’s lives is ‘merely’ humanitarian.
Those bystanders under Nazi rule who protested or helped were people whose human responses and sense of moral identity had not been eroded or overwhelmed. Sometimes the sense of moral identity was bound up with the human responses. And a great difference could be made by the outlook prevalent in a community, whether a country or only a village.
Those who responded in more inspiring ways than sealing the windows sometimes did quite small things. They still made a difference. The small act of respect (Mrs Krachudel the butcher’s wife still courteously asking what meat their Jewish customers wanted) mattered enough to be remembered. The same was true of the small gesture of sympathy: Herbert Karp sharing his last cigarette with Jean Améry. The small act of defiance (Amélie the bell ringer refusing to ring the bell because it belonged to God, not to Pétain) and the small act of generosity (Magda Trocmé telling the first Jewish refugee to come in and have a meal) can be enormously important. These small acts reinforce the ordinary, everyday human decencies, out of which the large heroic acts grow.