None of my ten friends ever encountered anybody connected with the operation of the deportation system or the concentration camps. None of them ever knew, on a personal basis, anybody connected with the Gestapo, the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service), or the Einsatzgruppen (the Occupation Detachments, which followed the German armies eastward to conduct the mass killing of Jews). None of them ever knew anybody who knew anybody connected with these agencies of atrocity. Even Policeman Hofmeister, who had to arrest Jews for “protective custody” or “resettlement” and who saw nothing wrong in “giving the Jews land, where they could learn to work with their hands instead of with money,” never knew anyone whose shame or shamelessness might have reproached him had they stood face to face. The fact that the Police Chief of Kronenberg made him sign the orders to arrest Jews told him only that the Chief himself was afraid of getting into trouble “higher up.”
Sixty days before the end of the war, Teacher Hildebrandt, as a first lieutenant in command of a disintegrating Army subpost, was informed by the post doctor that an SS man attached to the post was going crazy because of his memories of shooting down Jews “in the East”; this was the closest any of my friends came to knowing of the systematic butchery of National Socialism.
I say none of these ten men knew; and, if none of them, very few of the seventy million Germans. The proportion, which was none out of ten in Kronenberg, would, certainly, have been higher among more intelligent, or among more sensitive or sophisticated people in, say, Kronenberg University or in the big cities where people circulate more widely and hear more. But I must say what I mean by “know.”
By know I mean knowledge, binding knowledge. Men who are going to protest or take even stronger forms of action, in a dictatorship more so than in a democracy, want to be sure. When they are sure, they still may not take any form of action (in my ten friends’ cases, they would not have, I think); but that is another point. What you hear of individual instances, second- or thirdhand, what you guess as to general conditions, having put half-a-dozen instances together, what someone tells you he believes is the case—these may, all together, be convincing. You may be “morally certain,” satisfied in your own mind. But moral certainty and mental satisfaction are less than binding knowledge. What you and your neighbors don’t expect you to know, your neighbors do not expect you to act on, in matters of this sort, and neither do you.
Men who participated in the operation of the atrocity system—would they or wouldn’t they tell their wives? The odds are even in Germany, where husbands don’t bother to tell their wives as much as we tell ours. But their wives would not tell other people, and neither would they; their jobs were, to put it mildly, of a confidential character. In such work, men, if they talk, lose their jobs. Under Nazism they lost more than their jobs. I am not saying that the men in question, the men who had firsthand knowledge, opposed the system in any degree or even resented having to play a role in it; I am saying, in the words of Cabinetmaker Klingelhöfer, that that is the way men are; and the more reprehensible the work in which they are voluntarily or involuntarily engaged, the more that way they are.
I pushed this point with Tailor Marowitz in Kronenberg, the one Jew still there who had come back from Buchenwald. On his release, in 1939, he was forbidden to talk of his experience, and, in case he might become thoughtless, he was compelled to report (simply report) to the police every day. Whom did he tell of his Buchenwald experience? His wife and “a couple of my very closest friends—Jews, of course.”
“How widely was the whole thing known in Kronenberg by the end of the war?”
“You mean the rumors?”
“No—how widely was the whole thing, or anything, known?”
“Oh. Widely, very widely.”
“How?”
“Oh, things seeped through somehow, always quietly, always indirectly. So people heard rumors, and the rest they could guess. Of course, most people did not believe the stories of Jews or other opponents of the regime. It was naturally thought that such persons would all exaggerate.”
Rumors, guesses enough to make a man know if he wanted badly to know, or at least to believe, and always involving persons who would be suspected, “naturally,” of exaggerating. Goebbels’ immediate subordinate in charge of radio in the Propaganda Ministery testified at Nuremberg that he had heard of the gassing of Jews, and went to Goebbels with the report. Goebbels said it was false, “enemy propaganda,” and that was the end of it. The Nuremberg tribunal accepted this man’s testimony on this point and acquitted him. None of my ten friends in Kronenberg—nor anyone else in Kronenberg—was the immediate subordinate of a cabinet minister. Anti-Nazis no less than Nazis let the rumors pass—if not rejecting them, certainly not accepting them; either they were enemy propaganda or they sounded like enemy propaganda, and, with one’s country fighting for its life and one’s sons and brothers dying in war, who wants to hear, still less repeat, even what sounds like enemy propaganda?
Who wants to investigate the reports? Who is “looking for trouble”? Who will be the first to undertake (and how undertake it?) to track down the suspicion of governmental wrongdoing under a governmental dictatorship, to occupy himself, in times of turmoil and in wartime with evils, real or rumored, that are wholly outside his own life, outside his own circle, and, above all, outside his own power? After all, what if one found out?
Suppose that you have heard, secondhand, or even firsthand, of an instance in which a man was abused or tortured by the police in a hypothetical American community. You tell a friend whom you are trying to persuade that the police are rotten. He doesn’t believe you. He wants firsthand or, if you got it secondhand, at least secondhand testimony. You go to your original source, who has told you the story only because of his absolute trust in you. You want him now to tell a man he doesn’t trust, a friend of the police. He refuses. And he warns you that if you use his name as authority for the story, he will deny it. Then you will be suspect, suspected of spreading false rumors against the police. And, as it happens, the police in this hypothetical American community, are rotten, and they’ll “get” you somehow.
So, after all, what if one found out in Nazi Germany (which was no hypothetical American community)? What if one came to know? What then?
There was nichts dagegen zu machen, “nothing to do about it” Again and again my discussions with each of my friends reached this point, one way or another, and this very expression; again and again this question, put to me with the wide-eyed innocence that always characterizes the guilty when they ask it of the inexperienced: “What would you have done?”
What is the proportion of revolutionary heroes, of saints and martyrs, or, if you will, of troublemakers, in Stockholm, Ankara, El Paso? We in America have not had the German experience, where even private protest was dangerous, where even secret knowledge might be extorted; but what did we expect the good citizen of Minneapolis or Charlotte to do when, in the midst of war, he was told, openly and officially, that 112,000 of his fellow-Americans, those of Japanese ancestry on the American West Coast, had been seized without warrant and sent without due process of law to relocation centers? There was nichts dagegen zu machen—not even by the United States Supreme Court, which found that the action was within the Army’s power—and, anyway, the good citizen of Minneapolis or Charlotte had his own troubles.
It was this, I think—they had their own troubles—that in the end explained my friends’ failure to “do something” or even to know something. A man can carry only so much responsibility. If he tries to carry more, he collapses; so, to save himself from collapse, he rejects the responsibility that exceeds his capacity. There are responsibilities he must carry, in any case, and these, heavy enough under normal conditions, are intensified, even multiplied, in times of great change, be they bad times or good. My friends carried their normal responsibilities well enough; every one of them was a good householder and, with the possible exception of Tailor Schwenke, a good jobholder. But they were unaccustomed to assume public responsibility.
The public responsibilities which Nazism forced upon them—they didn’t choose to assume them when they chose to be Nazis—exceeded their capacities. They didn’t know, or think, at the beginning, that they were going to have to carry a guilty knowledge or a guilty conscience. Anti-Nazism of any sort, in thought or in feeling (not to say action), would have required them, as isolated individuals, already more heavily burdened than they were accustomed to being, to choose to burden themselves beyond their limit. And this, I think, is always the case with public responsibilities of a volunteer nature—in Germany, America, anywhere—which promise, at best, a deferred reward and, at worst, an imminent penalty.
The American is much better accustomed than the German to responsibilities of a volunteer character, but the principle of rejection is operative here in the United States, too, although the load limit is greater. The greater the combined load of my private and required public responsibility, the weaker my impulse to take volunteer public responsibility; if I’m building a new house and I have to enrol in Civilian Defense, my work with the Boys’ Club will suffer. And anti-Nazism in a Nazi dictatorship was no Boys’ Club.
Responsible men never shirk responsibility, and so, when they must reject it, they deny it. They draw the curtain. They detach themselves altogether from the consideration of the evil they ought to, but cannot, contend with. Their denial compels their detachment. A good man—even a good American—running to catch a train on an important assignment has to pass by the beating of a dog on the street and concentrate on catching the train; and, once on the train, he has to consider the assignment about which he must do something, rather than the dog-beating about which he can do nothing. If he is running fast enough and his assignment is mortally important, he will not even notice the dog-beating when he passes it by.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, with its fantastically rapid development of a central record of an ever increasing number of Americans, law-abiding and lawless, is something new in America. But it is very old in Germany, and it had nothing to do with National Socialism except to make it easier for the Nazi government to locate and trace the whole life-history of any and every German. The German system—it has its counterpart in other European countries, including France—was, being German, extraordinarily efficient. American tourists are familiar with the police identity cards they fill out pro forma at Continental hotel desks. Resident nationals don’t fill out a card when they come to live in a German town or leave it; they fill out a life-history for the police.
Policeman Hofmeister explained to me, with enthusiasm, how thoroughly the identity system meshed in Germany, before Nazism, during Nazism, and since Nazism. Every town has a criminal registry which contains, always up to date, the record of every person born in the town (no matter where he now lives) who has ever been in “trouble”; in addition, the registry contains the whole record of any person who has ever committed a crime (or been arrested) in the town, no matter where he was born. “Consider,” said Policeman Hofmeister, an unenthusiastic Nazi, “how nearly impossible it is, and always has been, in Germany for anyone to escape or ‘lose’ himself. In such a country, my friend, law and order rule always.”
How nearly impossible it is to escape, once a man has come into conflict with the police. Better, far, if you have ever before come into conflict with them (or if you suspect that you have ever come under their suspicion), to come into contact with them on their side; best of all, never come into contact with them at all. Don’t see the dog-beating on the street or the wife-beating or the Jew-beating or anything. You have your own troubles.
Everyone everywhere has his own troubles. Two hundred miles from Kronenberg was the great chemicals plant of Tesch & Stabinow. In 1942, the manager—he is not a “little man,” like my friends, but a manager—gets his first government order for Cyclon-B gas, which could be used as an insecticide but wouldn’t be likely to be (especially since the order is “classified,” secret). Now Tesch & Stabinow has been producing poison gases for the Army’s chemical warfare service, which has a colonel of engineers attached to the plant for consultation. But this order is not for the Army, and there has been no consultation. The manager may have heard, or guessed, that the famous “final solution of the Jewish problem” was to be mass death by gas; Cyclon-B would be the most suitable preparation for this limited purpose. We learned at Nuremberg that the entire extermination program was directed without written orders, a remarkable fact in itself; still, a big man whose business is poison gas for the government may have heard, or guessed. Perhaps the manager shows the order to the colonel, who is not a “little” man, either.
What did these two big men—not little men, like the Nazis I knew—do then, at that moment, with the government order on the desk between them?
What did they say?
What didn’t they say?
That is what we did not find out at Nuremberg. That is what we never find out at Nuremberg. That is what we have to imagine. And how are we to imagine it?—We are not colonels or plant managers or Nazis, big or little, with a government order on the desk between us, are we?
Everyone has his own troubles.
None of my ten Nazi friends ever knew—I say knew—of these great governmental systems of crime against humanity. None of them except possibly (quite probably, I believe) Tailor Schwenke, the SA Sturmführer, ever did anything that we should call wrong by the measure we apply to ourselves. These men were, after all, respectable men, like us. The former bank clerk, Kessler, told his Jewish friend, former Bank Director Rosenthal, the day before the synagogue arson in 1938, that “with men like me in the Party,” men of moral and religious feeling, “things will be better, you’ll see.” And Hildebrandt, the teacher, thought that it had to be expected, under the conditions that obtained in Germany just before Nazism, that the movement would be proletarian and radical, with fools and villains in positions of leadership, “but as more and more decent citizens joined it, it would certainly change for the better and become a bürgerlich, bourgeois development. After all, the French Revolution had its Robespierres, nicht wahr?”
My friends meant what they said; they calculated wrong, but they meant what they said. And the moral and religious bank clerk was, on the basis of that mortally wrong calculation, to preach the most barbarous paganism. And the decent bourgeois teacher was to teach “Nazi literature” from Nazi textbooks provided by the Nazi school board. Teachers teach what they are told to teach or quit, and to quit a public post meant, in the early years of the Third Reich, unemployment; later on, when one had an anti-Nazi political past, it meant concentration camp. “Once you were in the Party,” said Baker Wedekind, who doesn’t say he ever wanted to get out, “you didn’t get out easily.” A man who had always been nonpolitical might get away with “dropping out”; a political man, a man who had assumed the political responsibility of citizenship, never. Policeman Hofmeister, who had done his duty in Kronenberg since 1908, did his duty in 1938 when he was ordered to arrest Jews for being Jews. One of those he arrested, the tailor Marowitz, calls him “a decent man”—anständigis the word he used.
All this in no degree reduces the number and awfulness of Nazi evils; it reduces the number and awfulness of Nazi evildoers. It took so few to manage it all, in a country fabled for the efficiency and faithfulness of its civil servants. Policeman Hofmeister was sworn to fidelity to the Führer in a mass-loyalty-oath ceremony at the Kronenberg Town Hall early in 1933. The whole civil service participated and heard the message from Field Marshal Göring himself: “The Führer knows that every civil servant is faithful to the oath.” And so they were, to the holy oath by which Germans (more so than men of either freer or lighter consciences) bound themselves so mortally that the ultimate resistance to Hitler, which exploded July 20, 1944, lost in advance many bitterly anti-Nazi Army officers who would do anything except violate their sworn word. The decision of the resistance conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, rather than arrest and convict him, was made for this very reason; sworn fealty to the Führer bound hundreds of thousands until he was dead.
With the civil service and the military safely “faithful,” it took so few at the administrative level and so few more, a million at most, of a population of seventy million, to carry out the whole program of Nazi persecution; a million ex-convicts, future ex-convicts, poolroom hoodlums, disheartened young job-seekers, of whom every large country has its million. And Germany had, especially in the north and east, a whole class of recruits better known in eastern Europe and Asia than elsewhere, the brutally bred young Bauernknechte, the quasi-serf farm hands, over whom the landowners up to the end of the first World War had had almost absolute feudal jurisdiction.
The “democratic,” that is, argumentative, bill-collector, Herr Simon, was greatly interested in the mass deportation of Americans of Japanese ancestry from our West Coast in 1942. He had not heard of it before, and, when I told him of the West Coast Army Commander’s statement that “a Jap is a Jap,” he hit the table with his fist and said, “Right you are. A Jap is a Jap, a Jew is a Jew.” “A German a German,” I said. “Of course,” said the German, proudly. “It’s a matter of blood.”
He asked me whether I had known anybody connected with the West Coast deportation. When I said “No,” he asked me what I had done about it. When I said “Nothing,” he said, triumphantly, “There. You learned about all these things openly, through your government and your press. We did not learn through ours. As in your case, nothing was required of us—in our case, not even knowledge. You knew about things you thought were wrong—you did think it was wrong, didn’t you, Herr Professor?” “Yes.” “So. You did nothing. We heard, or guessed, and we did nothing. So it is everywhere.” When I protested that the Japanese-descended Americans had not been treated like the Jews, he said, “And if they had been—what then? Do you not see that the idea of doing something or doing nothing is in either case the same?”
“Very early,” he went on, “still in spring, ’33, one of our SA leaders protested against the dismissal of the Oberbürgermeister, a Social Democrat, a good, really nonpolitical man. The SA leader was arrested and taken away. And this, mind you, was when the SA still had great power in the regime. He never came back. His family is still here. We heard he was convicted, but we never heard for what. There was no open trial for enemies of the State. It was said it wasn’t necessary; they had forfeited their right to it.” “And what do you think?” “That’s a legal question. If the courts say it’s so, it’s so, gell?” Gell? is dialect for the rhetorical “isn’t it so?” “nicht wahr?” “n’est-ce pas?” and Hessian townsfolk love to use it.
A few hundred at the top, to plan and direct at every level; a few thousand to supervise and control (without a voice in policy) at every level; a few score thousand specialists (teachers, lawyers, journalists, scientists, artists, actors, athletes, and social workers) eager to serve or at least unwilling to pass up a job or to revolt; a million of the Pöbel, which sounds like “people” and means “riffraff,” to do what we would call the dirty work, ranging from murder, torture, robbery, and arson to the effort which probably employed more Germans in inhumanity than any other in Nazi history, the standing of “sentry” in front of Jewish shops and offices in the boycott of April, 1933.
And all the other millions?
They had only to go on as they were and keep out of trouble. What could be easier? “Only Communists were in trouble,” said Herr Simon.
“And in Russia,” I said, “only anti-Communists.”
“That’s the way it is,” said Herr Simon.
“But,” said I, “besides the Communists, there were the Socialists and the Jews and the religious opponents of the regime. They were ‘in trouble,’ too, weren’t they?”
“Oh, yes,” said Herr Simon, ingenuously, “but that came later. I meant at first.”
Only Communists were in trouble. And all the other millions of Germans? The SA and the Hitler Youth and the German Maidens marched up the hill and down again on State occasions, which, in such a State, and especially in Germany, are frequent. The workers were dismissed by the Arbeitsfront, the State employer-employee agency, to watch the SA march, just as the government workers in Washington are given a half-day holiday to swell (or, rather, comprise) the crowd that lines the capital’s streets to welcome the President of Turkey or the Emperor of Ethiopia; in Nazi Germany swelling the crowd was compulsory. Those who had uniforms strutted in them on Sundays and came home from their Friday night Storm Troop meeting to tell their wives that they had passed a Jewish acquaintance on the street and only nodded to him. And their wives said, “Gut,” which, in German, may mean “Good” and may mean “Yes.”