Good people can be induced, seduced, initiated into behaving in evil . . . ways . . . that challenge our sense of the stability and consistency of individual personality, character, and morality. . . . Thus any deed that any human being has ever done, however horrible, is possible for any of us to do.
—PHILIP G. ZIMBARDO
It may well be that one of the latent consequences of the pioneering . . . study [of rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe] is its challenge to many of the assumptions of philosophers and social scientists about the character of human nature.
—RABBI HAROLD SCHULWEIS
In none of the cases [of the Polish rescue of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust] was it a conscious decision [by the rescuer] in which its possible implications were systematically considered.
—NECHAMA TEC
For a number of years I have been teaching a course on the Nazi Holocaust. I tell my students that it’s not hard to understand the victims—anyone can imagine him- or herself as an innocent victim—but to really understand the perpetrators is another matter altogether. I’ve developed an exercise, a group drama project to enable students to get a small inkling of what the emotions of perpetrators might feel like. I have students form groups with a hierarchy from perpetrators to victims arbitrarily assigned, with some victims serving as agents of the perpetrators, as they did in the concentration camps. I then have the students enact over dinner in the dining hall a perpetrator-collaborator-victim situation: perpetrators control what victims can eat, how they are going to eat what they eat (with their hands or which utensils they may use), and when they eat; how and when they sit, stand, and talk; what they can say; when and if they can go to the bathroom, and other things of that kind. Causing any kind of physical pain or even the slightest harm is strictly prohibited. The exercise lasts for about an hour and is carried out entirely in public. Within very clearly defined limits, students get a small taste of upper-level perpetration, midlevel collaboration, and bottom-level complete victimization. Sometimes I have them reverse their places in the hierarchy and do it again. Later they meet to reflect together upon the experience, they write a diary of their emotional reactions, and we discuss in class what happened and how they felt. Students often talk about their own unexpected willingness to lord it over victims, even over “victims” who are classmates they’ve sat next to for weeks and some who have been in their weekly small discussion groups. How unexpectedly easy it is to engage in perpetration, they say. For many it comes far more easily than they had anticipated. Some find themselves, against all expectations, enjoying being on top, controlling the victims’ behavior and humiliating the victims in small ways. Students playing the victims express surprise at how painful these restrictions and directives enforced by the perpetrators were to them and how under the thumb of the perpetrators they felt, how angry and belittled. Within an hour, the relationship of equal classmates getting together for a class group assignment in a liberal arts college in a bucolic setting begins to fade and the outlines of another reality begin to creep in, one of winners and losers: the entitled powerful, the weak and powerless, and the reviled victim-collaborators. Upon reflection, good kids begin to recognize how easy it could be to get carried away and become gratuitously cruel.
I introduced this brief sociodrama exercise into my Holocaust course some years ago as a result of a chance meeting. A father stopped by to pick up his daughter, who had been doing homework with my daughter, and we got to chatting as we waited for the kids to finish up. I told him about the course I was teaching on literature and films about victims, perpetrators, collaborators, resisters, and rescuers during the Nazi Holocaust and how hard it was to get students to imagine themselves not just as victims but even more as perpetrators or collaborators. They all romantically envisioned themselves as rescuers or resisters, hiding Jews in their attics or basements like the rescuers of Anne Frank and her family, or as fighting partisans like those of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. I knew that this father was a psychologist, but he told me that he was also an expert in psychodrama, and he offered to come to my class that year and try out an experiential exercise in what he called “sociodrama,” a way to bring up, in a very small way, some of the feelings of what being in the Holocaust contexts we were reading about might be like, and not just the heroic ones. In subsequent years I took over the exercise and shortened it as well as absented myself from it so that my neutral role as teacher (and neither quasi-victim nor quasi-perpetrator nor quasi-collaborator) would remain untainted. It is a powerful experience for students even with all the further limitations and caveats that I have added. The sociodrama exercise with the students perhaps hints that there may be more continuity between normal life and the Holocaust than we would like to think. Is one of the important lessons of the Holocaust that ordinary individuals can all too easily slip into participation and collaboration in harming others; is it perhaps all too real in our own world? Of course I do not mean collaboration in mass murder like the Nazi genocide, but perhaps in subtler ways and much lesser forms collaboration is all around us.
My course always fills and has a long waiting list, a familiar phenomenon among those who teach courses in Holocaust history or literature. The fascination is both warranted and also at times suspect. I wonder about how thin the veneer of morality might turn out to be even in our own society. Does the Holocaust have something to tell us generally about moral psychology? About how ethics functions in an individual, in a group, between groups, and within hierarchies? Or are its lessons anomalous because of the extremity of the conditions in which they were played out, so any insights gained are relevant only to conditions so extreme as to be without import in normal life and ordinary society? We can think of other genocides: the systematic slaughter of 800,000 to 1 million Tutsis (and the rape of many more) by Hutus in Rwanda within a three-month period in 1994; the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, committing the genocide of approximately 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979; the ethnic cleansing and rape in the Balkans in the 1990s; the systematic murder and rape of Mayans by the Guatemalan government for two years in the early 1980s; the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in 1915–17 (a precedent the Nazis took to heart); and the Nazi genocide of the Gypsies and their earlier attempt at the genocide of the disabled, to name a few of the most familiar cases. Are these rare (or even not so rare) anomalies, or are psychological and social forces operating here that are closer to everyday life than we would like to think?
Perhaps the psychologist who suggested the sociodrama exercise to me and led the first round of it so many years ago had in the back of his mind the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, a well-known social psychology experiment devised and implemented by Philip Zimbardo, now professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University. That experiment has been all over the news and public interest shows again of late because Zimbardo waited till 2007 to publish a full-length book, one geared to the general public, about the experiment and its aftermath. The Stanford Prison Experiment raised questions and provided some provisional answers about why and how people in perpetrator-victim situations turn brutal and even vicariously sadistic and also about the range of responses of both perpetrators and victims. Zimbardo devised the experiment because he wanted to determine whether the way to prevent vicarious evil is to prevent certain types of people—those who are sadistic, weak-willed, or of brutal character—from holding positions in which they would be tempted to commit acts that result in gratuitous suffering or even atrocities, or whether normal people, those without marked sadistic or brutalizing tendencies, become perpetrators simply because they are in power in situations that enable perpetration and victimization, such as prisons. In other words, how powerful is the situation to mold moral behavior versus how stable is character across all kinds of situations and how powerful is the moral will to control a person’s own actions and to resist the temptation to cause gratuitous suffering? Zimbardo’s experiment was devised to test the relative power of situational forces versus personality (moral character traits and free will) as causes of moral or immoral behavior. The question arose for Zimbardo because he had been researching the psychology of prisons, visiting many prisons, and team-teaching a course on the subject with a former prisoner. But studying actual prisons could not answer his questions about whether brutality was a consequence of the kind of people attracted to prison work because of their underlying sadistic personalities, which could be given freer rein in a prison setting, or whether instead the context was itself out of control and brought out the worst in everyone, prisoner and guard alike, and produced brutality rather than was the result of the brutal characters of prisoners and guards, their lack of moral compass or self-control. Zimbardo cleverly captures what he set out to test in the phrase “bad apples”: were brutalizing guards “bad apples” or was the situation a “bad barrel” that corrupted “good apples”?
Although there were at that time extant psychological studies of prisons, Zimbardo decided to devise an experiment to test the relative strength of character versus situation as cause of brutalizing behavior—something the study of actual prisons couldn’t tell him because the prisons’ populations, both guards and prisoners, were already enmeshed in patterns of behavior whose causal threads could not be disentangled. So in devising the Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo pointedly controlled for sadistic and brutal psychological tendencies by eliminating any of the applicants to his study (all college students) who displayed those characteristics on a battery of psychological tests; in fact, participants were chosen for their stable personalities. The twenty-four young men selected were divided arbitrarily and randomly into prisoners and guards who would enact a simulated prison that Zimbardo and his grad students would set up for two weeks in the Stanford Psychology Department building basement. Zimbardo’s book The Lucifer Effect follows in extraordinary detail what transpired in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department, practically hour by hour, between prisoners, guards, the warden, the head of the prison (a role into which Zimbardo cast himself with chilling consequences), and various visitors who played roles from prison chaplain to defense lawyer to member of a parole board. Even the parents and families of the young men who were playing the role of prisoner came one evening for a “prison visiting hour” to see their sons. After his blow-by-blow description, Zimbardo lays out the implications of the experiment for social psychological theory—that is, what we can conclude from the experiment about human nature, especially about human moral nature. He then briefly describes the many popular magazines and TV shows that have featured the Stanford Prison Experiment over the years as well as various replications and extensions of the experiment by psychologists across a number of different cultures, and also how his findings have been applied in the last thirty-five years to minimize brutalizing conditions in all kinds of contexts.
The upshot of the 1971 experiment was that situational forces easily turned normal college kids who were playing guards into sadistic perpetrators who humiliated the other college kids acting as prisoners. They progressively instituted degrading practices, including sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, making some prisoners humiliate and psychologically abuse other prisoners at the guards’ behest, and the like, as the experiment went on and the guards’ control and desire for further control escalated. Despite the participants’ awareness that they were all in a psychology experiment and were in real life similar college students, the simulated prison reality took hold: even though no physical violence toward the prisoners was allowed, the humiliation and sadistic control of prisoners by the guards reached such a height that the experiment had to be terminated within six days, instead of continuing for the planned two weeks. By that time four students (of nine) who enacted the role of prisoner had had emotional breakdowns and been released, the first within thirty-six hours of the beginning of the experiment. What my sociodrama exercise in my Holocaust course pointed toward, the Stanford Prison Experiment proves with a force that astonished even its devisers. Zimbardo and his grad students never anticipated the kind of deliberate psychological humiliation and extreme methods of control that the guards engaged in, nor how quickly it would develop and escalate. And they were incredulous that students playing prisoner had the kind of extreme emotional reactions (emotional breakdowns) that several did, and within such a short time. But that is exactly what happened. Good people had turned evil and with little encouragement and no prior training—only with some general rules that set some limits for what they could do to their prisoners. Knowing that they were acting in and enacting a pseudo-situation, that it was not a prison but actually the basement of an academic building on a college campus, that the situation was of short duration, that they were under no threat or compulsion, that little was at stake, and that those taking the roles of guards and prisoners were actually indistinguishable in terms of class, social group, and status, they nevertheless created a situation of tremendous psychological pressure and even torment for the prisoners. The participants were good kids from good homes; they had plenty of opportunities, and many had social and political ideals. Yet they quickly became perpetrators, in some cases merciless ones. Not one student acting as a guard walked out; not one openly criticized what they as guards were doing or objected openly to the brutality and humiliation and psychological torture inflicted by a fellow guard upon a prisoner. They all, to varying degrees, caused gratuitous suffering to victims.
I will come back to Zimbardo’s experiment later to present his survey of the par tic u lar situational and social forces that he identifi es as operative in the experiment. Suffice it to say at this point that the extent of the power of the situational forces to override any character traits or exercise of free moral will surprised even the social psychologists, Zimbardo and his graduate students, who were testing for exactly that effect. Most disturbing of all perhaps was Philip Zimbardo’s own realization that he, too, in his role as head of the pseudo-prison, found himself increasingly concerned with order in the “prison” and at one point took extreme measures to avoid the possibility of a prisoner rebellion, including going down to city hall to try to persuade the city to let him use real jail cells in an unused jail to ensure that the “prison” would remain intact in the event of students storming it from the outside. (Zimbardo thought that one student who had broken down emotionally and been released might come back to spring his fellow prisoners from their pseudo-jail.) The city wouldn’t agree for insurance reasons, and Zimbardo, still in his head-of-prison state of mind, instead dismantled the entire prison setup and removed the prisoners to the attic of the psychology building. Zimbardo found himself succumbing to a kind of paranoia—even he was losing perspective on what was really happening. The experiment ended when a psychology graduate student who had not been involved with the project dropped by and saw the state of the student-prisoners as they were being walked blindfolded to the bathroom. It was she who, from her outsider perspective, blew the whistle by confronting Zimbardo, telling him that the student-prisoners were in fact being tormented and that the entire experiment had to be immediately terminated on ethical grounds. All those involved, and not only those playing guards and prisoners, had gotten caught up in the pseudo-reality and lost perspective on what was really happening. By the next day, Zimbardo had regained enough perspective to disband the project, realizing that his own reactions were as distorted by the situation as anyone’s else’s—they were, in fact, a very personal demonstration of the theory he was testing about whether social processes could overwhelm individual (moral and other) character traits and judgment. Even being fully aware of the kinds of social psychological situational forces that could take hold did not prevent the social psychologist himself from succumbing to them.
The lessons about the power of situational forces to engage people in destructive and gratuitously cruel behavior exposed by the Stanford Prison Experiment have been widely noted—all the branches of the U.S. military have developed simulated situations based on the experiment to train American soldiers to resist the pressures exerted upon them by the enemy in prisoner-of-war camps if they should be captured. The U.S. Navy first applied the Stanford experiment for that purpose in the development after the Korean War of its Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program, in which mock prisoner-of-war camps are simulated in order to train soldiers to resist coercive interrogation and abuse. The navy’s training program also serves as a warning against the excesses that prisoner-of-war situations can bring out on our side as well as on the enemy side; the point is to make sure that any prisoner-of-war camp that the navy might set up will minimize any risk of our soldiers brutalizing enemy prisoners. The navy has taught this Stanford Prison Experiment lesson for more than thirty years. SERE has since been adopted by all the other branches of the military; however, recently a number of human rights critics and investigative reporters have claimed that since the start of the war in Iraq in 2003, rather than using the program to guard against abuses as the navy does, the army at its training facility in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, has been using the same SERE program in reverse, turning it against its original intentions and using it to teach soldiers to harness the power of brutalizing situational forces in enemy interrogations. Rather than serving as a warning of the ease with which the prison situation can devolve into torture and hence as a stopgap to restrain excesses, the army at Fort Bragg has apparently turned the SERE program into a how-to exercise (rather than a how-not-to exercise) by using techniques derived from the Stanford experiment to train soldiers in techniques of psychological and physical “soft” torture. Moreover, these techniques have been taken from Fort Bragg and applied at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba and from there transferred to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
During the military trials of the soldier-guards who were caught abusing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Philip Zimbardo was brought in as consultant by the lawyer of one of the accused guards who had been directly in charge and who was brought to trial by the military once the incriminating pictures were leaked (by a whistle-blowing soldier) of naked prisoners wearing dog collars being led around by guards and of other sexually humiliating poses and photos of torture. Zimbardo includes a lengthy chapter in the book about his investigation of the torture at Abu Ghraib and of who was responsible for the torture of Iraqi prisoners there. Was it a few “bad apples,” as the American military and U.S. government claimed repeatedly, or was it a “bad barrel” in which normal American kids found themselves and succumbed? Or, more specifically, what proportion of blame ought to be assigned to the “bad apples” versus the “bad barrel,” and how big ought the “barrel” to be and who ought to be included in it? The Abu Ghraib torture scandal and the debate over the use of “soft” torture techniques advocated by the Bush administration, especially by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who called the Geneva Conventions against torture of prisoners-of-war as an interrogation technique “obsolete,” suggests that we Americans ought not automatically exempt ourselves from the possibility of succumbing to being “evil” and put infinite distance between ourselves and the evil of, for example, even the Nazis—or the Iraqis, for that matter. Zimbardo quotes law professor Jordan Paust, who was a former captain in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps, as saying that “not since the Nazi era have so many lawyers been so clearly involved in international crimes concerning the treatment and interrogation of persons detained during war,” and first and foremost on that list of lawyers is then attorney general Alberto Gonzales.1
In Abu Ghraib we can see the exploitation for nefarious purposes of research into the psychology of evil that was sparked by the study of the Holocaust. Some historians and psychologists, and even some victims (the Italian Jewish writer and chemist Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, comes to mind especially), have explored the Holocaust as a great laboratory of human nature, of the conditions under which ordinary people commit evil. After the war significant social psychology agendas and experiments arose in an attempt to explain the bureaucratized and institutionalized mass murder that the Nazis carried out; among these were the obedience experiments of Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo’s high school pal and later colleague, and the investigations by Theodor Adorno and others of the psychology of authoritarian personalities and prejudice.2 But there is much to learn from detailed examinations of the Nazi Holocaust itself. How do people come to do evil, and was it indeed ordinary people who turned evil, or made individual evil decisions, or were the monstrous acts committed by monstrous people unlike ourselves in every way or in significant ways? Without widespread complicity, how could the Nazis have enlisted all branches of government and industry and the society at large in the killing process?
We are all potential murderers, Zimbardo concluded from his research. Two particularly telling cases revealing how normal people turned evil during the Holocaust come from an in-depth study by the psychoanalyst Robert Jay Lifton of the Nazi doctors who oversaw and put into effect the program of systematic murder in Auschwitz and from an equally sobering study by historian Christopher Browning of middle-aged army reservists in the Hanover, Germany, area who were called up to active duty in order to carry out mass roundups and murder of Jews behind the lines as the German army moved eastward. In both cases, people who before the war had been engaged in work appropriate to the normal activities and ends of their organizations and professions became murderers. Lifton and Browning investigate in detail how this could happen, showing that there was little or no coercion or retaliation that could be used to explain or excuse these perpetrators.
Lifton begins his study of Nazi physicians with the observation that historically there have been other regimes that have used physicians for evil rather than for good: he mentions the Soviet use of psychiatrists to certify and then imprison political dissidents as mentally ill, doctors brought in as torturers in Chile, medical experiments and vivisections performed by Japanese physicians on prisoners during World War II, and the CIA’s use of American physicians and psychologists in experiments with drugs and mind manipulation. Nevertheless, to date only the Nazis have made physicians the “high priests,” so to speak, of what Lifton calls their “biomedical vision,” the racial ideology at the center of their genocidal project. National and racial “healing” was to be undertaken through “medicalized killing”; Lifton coins the phrase “killing in the name of healing” for the Nazi project, which placed physicians in a central role in genocide. While the phrase “Auschwitz doctor” may bring to mind most easily the demonic experiments of Mengele, the physicians at the heart of the genocidal mass murder taking place at Auschwitz and other killing centers are more Lifton’s concern and are remarkable for what Lifton calls their “ordinariness.” What Lifton means by this, in part, is that their engagement in mass murder, which is at the extreme end of human behavior, does not seem generally to be motivated by the demonic emotions that one would usually associate with that kind of behavior, such as frenzy, rage, or sadism. A friend to whom Lifton confided this responded perceptively, “But it is demonic that they were not demonic.” Indeed. The normality of the doctors both suggests that evil became the norm and also hints that evil was not only normalized but perhaps even is or can be normal and hence be all around us yet beneath our radar. That is also what Lifton’s introduction suggests in its title, “This World Is Not This World,” taken from the words of a Jewish survivor who spent three years at Auschwitz and whom Lifton interviewed decades later in his home in Haifa, Israel, where he was a dentist. “This world is not this world,” the dentist remarked, sighing deeply as he looked about the comfortable room with a beautiful view of this seaside city on the slopes of Mount Carmel. Lifton takes his words to mean that underneath the normal lurk “darkness and menace.” The normal or ordinary can disguise a dark underbelly—perhaps one of the most important lessons of the Holocaust.
It is not surprising that the Nazi project of mass killing began before the war, in 1939, with the rounding up and murder of the disabled, especially children, a program the Nazis called “euthanasia,” thus implying that the death was to the benefit of the patient by lessening suffering—which of course it was not. And even before that there had been a program of forced sterilization instituted as soon as Hitler took power in 1933. The Nazis did not, however, invent the biological rationalizations for sterilization and murder of the disabled and of those deemed racially inferior according to pseudo-biological ideologies. In the 1920s the United States was the worst offender in forced sterilization of the disabled and criminals and in the legal prohibition of interracial marriage, all done ostensibly in the name of biological imperatives. In Germany, The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life, written by two highly regarded academics, the jurist Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, a professor of psychiatry, was published in 1920 and called for the killing of the disabled, the deformed, the mentally ill, and the incurable as a therapeutic goal, as “purely a healing treatment” and “healing work.”3 Lifton points to an earlier embrace of direct medical killing by Adolf Jost in his 1895 book The Right to Die, a right that Jost saw not as the individual’s but as the nation’s over the individual. It was in this ripe atmosphere and with this history that Nazism took root and took over. To implement the program of sterilization of the disabled and other biological “unworthies,” the Nazis put into effect a system of “hereditary health courts,” manned by two physicians and a district judge, to determine who should be defined as “hereditary sick,” a category that included people with various hereditary and non-hereditary diseases and mental conditions, and sterilized on the grounds of the biological “purification” of German “blood.” Physicians were required by law to report to these courts any patients who fit any of these categories, and so from the beginning of the Nazi regime doctors were enlisted to serve a kind of policing function for the bio-state. It is estimated that somewhere between 200,000 and 350,000 people were sterilized as a result. During the height of the implementation of the sterilization policy, the 1935 Nuremberg Laws prohibiting and dissolving marriages between “Germans” and Jews were also instituted. I put Germans in quotes here because Jews in Germany were German citizens and hence the introduction of such a distinction and opposition is in itself a mark of complicity with the Nazi racial program. Thirteen percent of physicians in Germany were Jewish, and in a number of major cities the figure rose to 50 percent, some of whom were among the most distinguished and prominent doctors in Germany, some of international repute. The Nazi medical policy of racial purification included at this early stage the intimidation of Jewish doctors, a propaganda campaign against them as “anti-healers,” and the gradual institution of limitations on their practice of medicine (by 1939 an amendment had been added to the Nuremberg Laws revoking the medical licenses of all Jewish doctors).4 Jewish doctors had to be pushed out of the profession if medicine was to be turned away from its professional integrity as the healing of individuals and co-opted, politicized, and Nazified toward the purpose of the “healing” of the Volk as a single racial biological organism.
Lifton says that the majority of Nazi doctors whom he interviewed approved of the forced sterilization laws at the time they were passed, and hence their early enlistment in the Nazi state was easily won. (There is a slippery slope here, to which I shall return when we discuss the social processes at work in perpetration.) Lifton quotes deputy party leader Rudolf Hess proclaiming at a mass meeting as early as 1934 that “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”5 Lifton suggests that the Nazi genocide is the only mass murder that began with a program of sterilization as a first stage; from this we can infer the centrality of the biomedical rationalization for murder. That the crimes of the state were to be camouflaged by the use of doctors as its executioners was there from the beginning. The “euthanasia” project, despite the secrecy and deception with which it was carried out, came to public attention and, unlike the forced sterilizations, was ordered stopped due to an outcry both from the public and from several prominent Protestant and Catholic clergy who would not go along with the Nazi redefinition or rationalization (although the killing of disabled children was not actually discontinued, and, of course, there was no such outcry from the public when it came to the murder of Jews). Hence the centrality of the biological rationalization or ideological lie in effecting the corruption of doctors to serve a pivotal role in the system of murder. It was not physicians who protested against the killing of the disabled but religious leaders and the public at large. The Nazis’ placing doctors in the position of killers served as an enactment of the subterfuge that were engaging in the biological improvement of the species rather than straight-out murder. Lifton suggests that what he calls the “medicalization of killing” in the Nazi biological and racial ideology of “killing [the biologically inferior] in the name of healing [the race or the species],” in its choice of language brings to mind the imagery of engaging killing in a legitimate healing process, thereby “destr[oying] the boundary between healing and killing,” and thereby redefining killing as “a therapeutic imperative.” Lifton describes the process of the Nazi takeover and reorganization of medicine, and the introduction of the slippage of the meaning of medicine from the healing of individuals to the focus on the alleged health and healing of the German Volk as a mystical entity, a Romantic notion of the merger of all in an imagined racial body, the Volk, to whose national “cure” all were to be dedicated. Jews were redefined as the “disease” of this national body, or the cause of the “disease.” He quotes one Nazi physician as saying that it was necessary to develop “a totality of the physicians’ community, with physicians having total dedication to the Volk,” in what this doctor termed “biological socialism.”6 Of all the professions, doctors in Nazi Germany had one of the highest percentages of party membership and of representation in the SS and SA. But all professions and institutions, not only medicine, were redefined, politicized, in terms of the Nazi totalitarian vision and interpretation of its interests.
Such biological-ideological linguistic formulas and their institutionalization marked the difference between the historical violence of anti-Semitic pogroms such as Kristallnacht, with which the Nazi murder of the Jews began in 1939, and the subsequent Nazi genocidal system that enlisted all the organizational structures of German society itself in the murder project. The desired routinization and psychological numbing were also part of the reason that the organized roundup and mass shooting of Jews into mass graves as the German army moved east (sometimes by units such as Reserve Police Battalion 101, but more often by the Einsatzgruppen, special forces of the SS), in which all told 1.5 million Jews died, eventually was replaced with the even more impersonal and routinized death by gas and disposal of the bodies in the crematories of the six death centers set up by the Nazis in eastern Europe. That routinization and bureaucratization, the dividing up of the components of the sequence of murder into discrete parts performed by different organizational sectors, induced an emotional tenor of (false) calm, a false normality and legitimacy and diffusion of responsibility. The characterization of the murderers as “ordinary” and of the carrying out of genocidal murder as “normalized” function as part of the lie, for via the lulling of the anticipated feelings that murder is assumed to express, they enact the lie that what was going on was not murder but something else. Even today it is possible to catch ourselves inadvertently seduced by the Nazi language and (what must be called, I think) their system of rationalization, and therefore we begin to slip into accommodation and complicity. Nevertheless, when we think of doctors succumbing to linguistic sleights of hand that equate healing with killing via a metaphorical use of language that defines Jews as an evolutionary parasite or a “cancer” on the German nation’s “body” that needs to be cut out or as vermin that need to be gassed via a pesticide (that’s what the Zyklon B gas used in the chambers was), we wonder how this could have happened.
One is almost incredulous when Robert Jay Lifton quotes a Nazi doctor as saying, “I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.” Now that we see the linguistic sleight of hand involved in the question, we wonder why anyone, especially doctors who were educated people, would believe this rather absurd lie. More broadly, how do people come to hold beliefs, and under what circumstances do they adopt or reject a belief? And who goes along and who refuses to do so? We will return to these questions in the discussion of those who risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. But what we can already point to is the role of language, which is to say the interpretation of situations and of people’s actions in those situations, as crucially important in both perpetration and rescue.
The evidence seems to suggest that it is the uncritical adoption of a particular interpretive frame for a given situation that is at the center of perpetration when it comes to normal people. Acceptance of the implicit social meaning and rules of a situation involves the passive acceptance of the authority of those defining and redefining social (and institutional) reality through language and enactment. Normal people are potential followers, rather than architects, of evil. Lifton returns often to the normality, the ordinariness, Hannah Arendt’s “banality,” of the perpetrators but qualifies that judgment in two ways. First, Lifton proposes that while the men who committed the atrocities may have been banal, their evil was certainly of extraordinary proportions. Second, that kind of acting out of evil, no matter what language was used to disguise it, nevertheless changed those who committed it. No longer were they ordinary, nor did they have simply ordinary motivations. As a result, there is also, he suggests, a limit to our capacity to understand them completely, which is to say to reconstruct and relive in imagination the perpetrators’ inner lives. Nevertheless, we can come to a much greater understanding.
Robert Jay Lifton calls the Nazi state a “biocracy,” a sort of theocracy for which the Nazis claimed divine sanction and which put in the place of a theology a biological ideology of a sacred racial order, namely, themselves. The use of doctors was an attempt to legitimate Nazi genocidal ideology and murder by giving it the authority and respectability of science, but the Nazis did not engage in the legitimate discoveries of science in any honest way. The Nazi strategy was to enlist and corrupt physicians and other experts—Lifton points to physical anthropologists, geneticists, and racial theorists of all kinds—in an attempt to give their racism scientific legitimacy and authority. It was what we might call part of the cover-up, and what Lifton calls “a pretense of medical legitimacy.” The corruption of doctors and the medical establishment as well as the corruption of other professions—perhaps law was second only to medicine in the Nazis’ enlisting of it to legitimate discrimination and finally genocide—was a strategy to gain the veneer of legitimate authority for their policies and actions. That strategy used first and foremost the distortion of language to deny the obvious meaning, especially the moral meaning, of the actions undertaken.
“The Nazi doctor knew that he selected,” Lifton writes, “but did not interpret selections as murder. . . . Disavowal was the life blood of the Auschwitz self.”7 So taking a role in the social drama, using its language and enacting its meanings, gave away the store. In the case of the institutions and professions corrupted by the Nazis, taking part in them could never be innocent but entailed unavoidable complicity and falsification; no person who took part in them could remain in any way an innocent bystander, untainted.
Perhaps the single best portrayal of the way that familiar language, daily encounters, and common institutions were corrupted by the Nazi regime can be found in Bertholt Brecht’s play The Private Life of the Master Race: A Documentary Play (also called Terror and Misery of the Third Reich). The play is a series of vignettes of the first five years of the Nazi regime, documenting how each institutional and personal context was politicized so that the winners would be German Christians and the losers would be Jews. Situations were redefined to cast Jews as the villains and German Gentiles as the innocent victims of Jewish perfidy. A stunning example is captured by Brecht in a scene called “Augsburg 1935: In Search of Justice.” In it a Jewish small businessman named Arndt, owner of a jewelry store, is trying to collect money from an insurance company for the destruction of his business by three Nazi storm troopers. In a scene in the judge’s chambers, the police inspector and the judge, who are in collusion, conclude that the case must be reconfigured as the provocation of the storm troopers by the Jewish businessman Arndt; hence the Nazi thugs are the victim and it is they who are due restitution from the Jew. Later the prosecutor comes in and says to the judge, “But your national instinct must tell you, my dear Goll, whom you should do right by.” He goes on, “I must stress one thing: I’m advised—and my advice comes from the highest circles in the S.S.—that by now somewhat more backbone is expected from German judges.” Then the prosecutor continues, “But our Minister of Justice made an excellent remark which might give you something to hold on to: ‘Whatever’s useful to the German Folk is just.’” The judge concludes, “I see it as merely an obvious case of Jewish provocation and nothing else.” Later, speaking of the case to another judge, Judge Goll says, “My God, I’m willing to do anything, please understand me. . . . I decide this and I decide that as they require but at least I must know what they require. When you don’t know that, there is no justice anymore. . . . I must be told which decision is in the interest of the higher authorities. . . . After all I have a family, Fey. . . . I’m willing to do anything.” The Jewish victim ends up as the defendant as the court decides to make him pay for the destruction of which he was the victim. In the Brecht play we see how in the initial phase of Nazification the motives of fear and greed were completely on the surface and the lies self-conscious and deliberate. Living and telling lies over time, however, induced self-deception and rationalization, a knowing that hid behind a pretense of not knowing—Lifton’s life of “disavowal.”
Brecht’s play brings out the moment of the corruption of institutions, the first lies. By the time of the Nazi doctors’ committing and overseeing mass murder in the death camps, those lies were embedded in ongoing institutions and daily social relations. Nevertheless, that they were lies could still become apparent from any wider perspective, that of history, cultural meanings, the professional ethics of medicine and law that predated the Nazification of universities, religious teachings, and so on. Even if one pretended that killing was healing, and called it so, killing could not completely match the actual experience of healing, nor could the corruption of justice do anything but masquerade as justice. Experiences that doctors and judges would have had both in prior life and in other parts of their lives exposed the lie. As a consequence, there could be no naive use of the Nazi language of rationalization and subterfuge. Its very use made a person complicit, a sellout, part of the cover-up. Yet the ability (and courage) to discern and openly confront the lie as a lie took a highly developed and well-tuned capacity for self-reflection along with a broader perspective; alternatively, it took belonging to a different social group or community with which one had such a profound identification and for which one had such deep respect that its interpretation of the situation trumped the Nazi one. As Spinoza would have known, the people who could resist social forces and have independence of mind were either those who were rigorously trained in self-reflection and who also identified with a much wider and more pluralistic world and a longer-term perspective (as his Ethics aimed to provide), or those who came from and profoundly identified with a different community, one that had a different (and most likely critical) interpretation of the situation. I have just described (and anticipated) who the rescuers were: they were either social outliers, people who in some sense were and felt apart from the Nazified situation (like Zimbardo’s graduate student who happened upon the scene of the disoriented, blindfolded prisoners and blew the whistle), or members of other groups in the society that opposed or were critical and contemptuous of the Nazis (for example, the underground partisan resistance or local religious minority groups).
I suspect that one of the purposes of the corruption of language was to make everyone complicitous, implicated in the guilt of the regime even if only to a small degree, so as to weaken everyone’s capacity for resistance. Guilty behavior contributed to creating a fanatical identification with the group. It led to an embrace of the Nazi distortion and deception about the meaning of the situation, for going along with a situation produces belief in it ex post facto, especially when there is little extrinsic reward, such as payment, for doing so. Perhaps this helps to explain the lack of emotion appropriate to the reality of the enormity of the crimes that Robert Jay Lifton found in the physician-perpetrators to a man. In the Brecht play, implicit in the act of giving in to the use of the language was fearful submission to a veiled threat. The language served as a kind of litmus test of loyalty and an aggressive invitation to comply. Gaining even the prisoners’ complicity in the concentration camps by engaging them in tasks that contributed to the system of murder was part of a deliberate strategy to render them passive and submissive. It was a strategy aimed at reducing their self-respect and breaking their will by putting prisoners (let alone guards and everyone in the system) in situations in which moral compromise was unavoidable, inducing guilt. Moral compromise, inducing guilt, was the weapon of choice, the means of mass social control, and it infected all aspects of Nazi society and institutions. Hence the lie could never be innocent, for innocence would leave people too autonomous and ready to rebel even at the cost of their lives. The inducement of guilt makes people not just passive in the face of authority but also in need of the very rationalizations that the Nazi ideology and distortions of language provided. Here we are getting a glimpse of the negative side of social processes. The social motivations that contribute so much to success in life can, in contexts of perpetration, make us collaborators and even murderers. Perhaps the point is that to be human is to be a social animal, as Aristotle so presciently put it, but the glorious human capacity of social intelligence comes not only with all its beauty of relationship and attachment and exquisite attunement to social cues but also with its concomitant of collusion and collaboration. That is certainly part of the story of many of the Nazi doctors at Auschwitz whom Robert Jay Lifton studied.
The ordinary men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 whom Christopher Browning reports upon were in most respects at the other end of the social spectrum from the Nazi doctors. They were not in any sense “high priests” of the killing process, neither offering an ideological cover-up nor legitimating murder by their respectability and social authority. They were not movers and shakers but local people enlisted and caught up in unexpected and vast evil to which, however, they voluntarily contributed. I think they are analogous in some respects (although not in the magnitude of the mass murders they committed or in the organized and clearly instituted system of murder they contributed to) to the low-level American soldiers caught up in torture at Abu Ghraib prison, for both groups were swept up in a system of evil beyond their understanding and anticipation. Nevertheless, humiliation and torture, even leading at times to death, are not systematic mass murder of tens of thousands, so the cases are different in the magnitude of evil and in its organization. Moreover, there is a stark moral clarity about the obviousness of the evil of the murder of children, old people, families, even whole villages, while the situation of torture in Abu Ghraib prison was not quite so crystal clear—but yet clear enough. It was because of that clarity that Browning chose to study this particular battalion, as it starkly reveals how far normal people will go in complying with, or being guided by, social situational forces even when they are not coerced and even when the social system engaged in involves murder. Reserve Police Battalion 101 represents a warning about the limitlessness of the possibility of engaging and enlisting normal people in evil through framing (interpreting) the situation in certain ways and defining the roles that those involved will take. By the men’s “voluntary” willingness to commit mass murder I simply mean that they were not externally coerced; in fact, perhaps one of the most shocking things about their engagement in murder was the repetition by the leadership of the battalion just before mass murder operations were to begin that participation was optional and no repercussions would ensue from refraining. Nevertheless, murder they did.
Browning begins by pointing out that most of the mass murder of Jews in the Holocaust took place within an eleven-month period from March 1942 to February 1943. Yet 20 to 25 percent of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust had already perished by March 1942 (including those remnants of my father’s family who had not settled in either the United States or Israel but were still in Lithuania when the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators killed them in late 1941), and within the next year almost all of Polish Jewry would be murdered. So the mass murder of Jews was, as Browning put it, a kind of blitzkrieg operation: not incremental or gradual but a massive mobilization using vast numbers of shock troops. Of the 3.5 million Jews living in Poland before the war, only fifty thousand survived. Poland was the central locus of the mass murder of Jews; it was where five of the six killing centers were built to which Jews from all over were brought by train, as well as the locus of a great deal of the mass shootings before the killing centers were fully operational. There was also the rounding up and imprisonment (and starvation) of Jews in vast ghettos prior to the killing, especially in Polish cities. The manpower needed to do all this was staggering, particularly during a time of war.
The rank and file of the reserve police battalion were middle-aged and either working-class or lower-middle-class family men, with limited geographic mobility and little education except for vocational training that had ended at age fourteen or fifteen. At an average age of thirty-nine (more than half were between thirty-seven and forty-two), they were too old to be in the German army and so were drafted instead into the order police as raw recruits with no experience in occupied territory. All had grown up before the Nazi era, with the morals and norms of that prior era. Most came from Hamburg, one of the least Nazified areas, and from a social class that, according to Browning, had been anti-Nazi in political culture. They hardly seemed a likely group to recruit to engage in mass killing in the name of Nazi anti-Semitic ideology. Like Zimbardo’s college students, who showed no evidence of sadism or other tendencies toward brutality or instability, the recruits of Reserve Police Battalion 101 gave all the indications of being unlikely to commit acts of gratuitous cruelty, torture, or murder. The battalion members are perfect examples to highlight the power of situational forces in motivating evil versus character traits and the freedom of the will to refrain from evil. Of course, that that was the case, unlike in Zimbardo’s experiment, was completely inadvertent.
Reserve Police Battalion 101 was first charged with rounding up the Jews of the Hanover region and deporting them to the east. The battalion had been in occupied Poland for less than three weeks when they were presented with their first “action” to engage in the mass murder of Jews. That was at Józefów in July 1942. The head of the battalion, Major Wilhelm Trapp, a career policeman, addressed the unit about rounding up the eighteen hundred Jews of this small village, separating out the able men, who would be sent to a work camp, and shooting the others—women, children, and the elderly—and dumping their bodies into a mass grave. At the end of his address, Trapp remarked that any members of the battalion, especially the older members, who were not “up to” taking part in the assignment could remove themselves, giving potential decliners a ready, face-saving excuse. Trapp emphasized how “unpleasant” the task was for him and for the group but added that the assignment came from the highest authorities. In order to encourage participation in what would be for the battalion an “unpleasant” task, he included in his pep talk some anti-Semitic propaganda about Jews in the village being allied with anti-Nazi partisans and Jews in general being the cause of German misfortunes. This first instance of mass murder became prototypical of what was ahead.
The order police were at the disposal of the SS and the police leader in the Lublin District, Odilo Globocnik. Globocnik was put in charge of the extermination of the Jews and the disposal of their property in the entire General Government area of Poland, which had about 2 million Jews, of whom nearly 300,000 resided in the Lublin district. There were SS units of security police, Gestapo, and Kripo, but the three order police battalions in the Lublin area provided the greatest available police manpower in the area, with about 1,500 men. Gassing began at the Chelmno death camp in early December 1941, at Birkenau in February 1942, and at Belzec in March. Sobibor began its killing operations in May, and Treblinka in July. Between mid-March and mid-April 90 percent of the 40,000 Jews of the Lublin ghetto were murdered, either by being shot on the spot or by transport to Belzec. By mid-June 100,000 Jews of the Lublin district had been murdered, along with 65,000 from Krakow and Galicia, the neighboring districts. While the murder of the Lublin-area Jews was going on, Jews from Germany, Austria, and other areas under Nazi control were being transported to the Lublin district, some directly to the death camps but others to the ghettos for temporary housing before extermination. Reserve Police Battalion 101 arrived in the Lublin area on June 20, 1942. When they arrived, there is no indication that the members of the battalion knew what they were going to be used for. Globocnik had called a temporary halt to gassing in the death camps in mid-June due to temporary logistical problems, and as a result he decided to institute mass murder by firing squad as a substitute just as Battalion 101 was arriving in the area. They were immediately assigned that function, beginning with the massacre at Józefów.
When Major Trapp gave his speech to the men of Battalion 101 just before they set out for their first mass murder of Jews at Józefów, he told them for the first time that they would be rounding up Jews, and then murdering by firing squad the old, women, and children, and sending the men for slave labor. Upon hearing what they had to do and that they could refrain if they “were not up to it,” about thirteen men (of the roughly five hundred) immediately took Trapp up on his offer not to participate in murder but to be reassigned, without repercussions, to some other aspect of the job. A company was ordered to surround the village; another was ordered to round up the Jews and take them to the central marketplace, but killing on the spot babies and anyone who could not walk there. In the marketplace the young male Jews for slave labor were taken out of the group and the rest were loaded on battalion trucks to be taken to the forest to be murdered by firing squad. Trapp himself did not go to the forest but stayed in the village talking to its local priest and mayor. Some men complained later that Trapp never went to the forest to witness the killings. Trapp was said by one of the policemen to have announced on one or more occasions something to the effect of, “Such jobs don’t suit me. But orders are orders.” He was also observed by several on various occasions weeping, on one occasion saying that “everything was terrible.” His driver reported that he had confided to him, “If this Jewish business is ever avenged on earth, then have mercy on us Germans.”8 Nevertheless, Trapp did nothing to stop the killing, nor did he refrain from arranging all the details and doing all the organizing and implementing of them so that the mass murders were carried out. When the roundup was completed, it was the battalion doctor and the company’s first sergeant, according to Browning, who instructed the men in the murderous task ahead in the forest and how it was to be carried out.9 Another policeman in the battalion later gave the following testimony about what precisely the physician had instructed them to do:
I believe that at this point all officers of the battalion were present especially our battalion physician. . . . He now had to explain to us precisely how we had to shoot in order to induce the immediate death of the victim. I remember exactly that for this demonstration he drew or outlined the contour of a human body, at least from the shoulders upward, and then indicated precisely the point on which the fixed bayonet was to be placed as an aiming guide.10
The policemen were instructed by the doctor to deliver neck shots to their victims. This policeman remembered the physician well because they had become friends as fellow musicians—he was a violinist and the doctor an accordionist—and they would entertain together on social evenings.
The shooting of Jews in the forest took place in the following way. The Jewish victims, in groups of about thirty-five to forty at a time, were paired face-to-face with policemen. Together executioner and victim walked down into the forest to the place that the other SS captain, Julius Wohlhauf, had spent the day looking for as the best spot for the mass murder. The Jewish victims were then ordered to lie facedown in a row. The policemen were placed directly behind the heads of the victims, and they all fired in unison at their Jewish victims. Then a second group of policemen and victims walked together to a slightly different location so that each group of victims would not see the bodies of the previous group. The first group was then paired with their next round of victims, and they shot again. The two contingents alternated as Jews were brought to be killed in groups of about forty at a time. This rotation went on all afternoon until there was an alcohol break for the shooters. Then the systematic shooting resumed and went on without a break till nightfall.
When the doctor gave his instructions in the marketplace about exactly how to kill the Jewish victims, just as the policemen in the firing squad were to be sent off to the forest, several members of the battalion who had not previously opted out of killing decided at that point to withdraw themselves. One said that the task of murdering Jews in this way was “repugnant” to him and he asked for reassignment. He was immediately reassigned to guard duty without reproach or repercussions. Another group, after it had been shooting for a while, asked to be released from shooting, and they were immediately reassigned to the trucks, again without reproach or repercussion. Others were released at midday when they asked to be. Others, although not asking to be released or reassigned, passively resisted simply by shooting past their victims; a couple hid in the garden of a Catholic priest or remained in the marketplace to evade firing squad duty, while others procrastinated with their searches of Jewish homes to avoid being assigned to the firing squads. Everyone was aware that opting out was possible and that no reprimand, shaming, or repercussions would ensue. There were no negative consequences for those who managed to avoid shooting or stopped after a while.11 Browning estimates that of those assigned to the shooting squads, about 10 to 20 percent either withdrew openly or evaded shooting in one way or another. So he concludes that at least 80 percent of those assigned to shooting did so and continued to do so until 1,500 Jews from Józefów had been murdered.
The men of the battalion had every opportunity to refrain from killing: they had backgrounds that did not dispose them to be enthusiastic Nazis; they had unenthusiastic leadership; they had repeated opportunities to withdraw without retribution; they had multiple occasions within a killing operation to absent themselves; they were not convinced anti-Semites. Nevertheless, the unlikely men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were directly responsible for the mass murder of 83,000 Polish Jews, over time shooting 38,000 and rounding up 45,000 and putting them on trains to the nearby death camps.
The chilling implications of Browning’s research suggest the extraordinary ease with which the situation brings forth individual behavior. Reserve Battalion 101 brings to mind the Stanford Prison Experiment and Zimbardo’s description of the Abu Ghraib prison. It is not that individuals are not responsible; they surely are and should be held accountable. In the second half of the book I will propose how and why individual responsibility is both possible and necessary. Clearly, those who shape situations and their meaning and institute implicit rules and standards bear a great deal of responsibility, too. The degree to which people lack independence of mind and moral viewpoint stands out here as perhaps the most salient and glaring moral problem that needs to be anticipated and for which mechanisms must be put in place to address. If this is not the failure of moral character and the ethical resolve of the free will, I don’t know what is. Human beings are not who or what we think they are.
Now for the good news. The largest-scale operations to rescue the Jews of Europe were also driven by social and situational forces, forces that enabled people to climb to heights of nobility and self-sacrifice despite terrible threats of torture and death not only to themselves but also to their loved ones. Here we find unexpected goodness in unexpected places. Not only did neighbor save neighbor and nations save their own, but at times the deepest empathy could be seen across the starkest human differences. There were whole nations whose political, religious, and social leaders came together to rescue their Jewish populations from the Nazis; there were small communities and organizations, religious, political, and philanthropic, that bucked the larger society and set up networks of Jewish rescue; there were great heroes who took it upon themselves to lead personal efforts to save as many Jews as they could; and finally there were individuals who almost invariably were asked by a Jewish friend, neighbor, or acquaintance to help, often in initially small ways, but who over time came to do acts of extraordinary kindness, risking their lives at every turn not only for friends but also for Jewish strangers and their families and other victims. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem, gives formal recognition to these righteous Gentiles. Who rescued and why? Were rescuers made of different stuff? Are there common features of rescuers that distinguish them from perpetrators? Can we predict who in another Holocaust would fall into each group? Were all rescuers brought up well and taught to be good, while perpetrators lacked moral training and good parenting and schooling? A more subtle version of this line of thinking raises the question of whether those who went along and committed atrocities in the Holocaust, such as the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, were more inclined than other people to have authoritarian personalities, submissive to their betters in the hierarchy and ruthless with those beneath them, and hence more likely to submit to authority whether right or wrong. Were the rescuers, by contrast, noble loners who defied the herd, stereotypic Romantic heroes all?
There were three nations that saved their Jewish populations, and they did it as whole societies, by collective action from leaders down to the person on the street. Denmark is the most well-known case, while that of Italy is somewhat less well known, and the case of Bulgaria is surprising and largely forgotten. Of these three countries, two were allies of the Nazis, and the third, Denmark, was in many ways a special case and different from other European countries conquered by the Nazis. Nechama Tec, in her excellent study When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland, points out that across Europe rescue was directly proportional to the absence of direct Nazi control; within indirect control, the leeway a country had to maneuver was crucial in whether or not it saved its Jews. Where the Nazis had control of the governmental machinery, Tec says, they would do whatever it took to exterminate the Jewish population and would brook no interference. So two of the countries that saved the Jews were Axis allies and hence nations whose internal affairs were not directly controlled by Germany. Even so, Italy, at Nazi insistence, introduced its own Nuremberg-like laws in November 1938 disenfranchising Italian Jews and removing them from all the professions and the workplace. Nevertheless, even with the isolation of Jews from Italian society and the gradual discrimination set in place, Italians not only saved Jews within Italy but made an all-out effort to save Jews who came under their jurisdiction in the countries they came to occupy, including parts of Yugoslavia and areas of Greece and southern France.
Denmark was a special case: the Danes refused to hand over Danish Jews, who numbered only eight thousand, to the Nazis, and the Danish underground, with the knowledge and help of the people and the king of Denmark, arranged the rescue of the Jews by boat to neutral Sweden. Denmark had surrendered to the Nazis on the very day it was invaded, April 9, 1940, and had promised loyal cooperation. Perhaps because of the declaration of cooperation and also because of the Nazi racial ideology that stipulated that Scandinavians were of the highest Aryan racial rank, Denmark retained a great deal of autonomy, and the Nazis left it virtually alone as a model protectorate of the Reich. Danish officials insisted to the Nazis when they brought up the matter that Denmark had no “Jewish problem.” Meanwhile, Danish courts continued to give stiff penalties to those who participated in outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence and even to those who published or spread anti-Semitic propaganda. Eventually the rising resistance of the Danes and the reprisals of the Nazis led to the end of the “model protectorate” when the Nazis took one hundred prominent Danes hostage, including a number of Danish Jews, among them the country’s chief rabbi. In protest the Danish government resigned, and the Nazis instituted direct control of the Danish government on August 29, 1943. At that point Hitler decided to enforce the Final Solution in Denmark, and the Germans began immediate plans to round up the Jews of Denmark to send them to death camps. An unlikely friend, a German diplomat in Denmark, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, secretly made sure that Sweden would accept and grant asylum to the Danish Jews, then leaked the news of the German threat to the Danes. At that point Danish civil servants began to make individual efforts to warn the Jews and also arrangements to hide them. The operation was organized by the Danish underground and paid for in large part by wealthy Danes. Jews were placed in hiding and then transported clandestinely, mostly by small fishing boats but some by larger vessels, over the Oresund Strait from Zealand to Sweden, with the cooperation of the Danish harbor and civil police. Some Jewish refugees were smuggled on the regular ferries between Denmark and Sweden in freight cars that had been stolen by the underground after being inspected and sealed by the Germans. The Danes managed to rescue even the 472 Jews who had already been rounded up by the Germans and put in a detention camp before being sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. More than 99 percent of Danish Jews survived the Holocaust, the largest percentage of any country in occupied Europe.
Like the Danes, the Italians acted with a kind of universal tacit understanding among important military and diplomatic leaders and also among the lesser leaders and the rank and file within the bureaucracies and the military, who together took common action to save Jews. In the 1987 documentary film The Righteous Enemy, Joseph Rochlitz tells the story of his father’s rescue by the Italian military by piecing together the larger story of the Italian rescue of between 25,000 and 30,000 Jews under their jurisdiction in occupied southern Europe: the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia, southern Greece, and parts of southern France. Rochlitz managed to interview a number of the Italian bureaucratic officials, diplomats, and military leaders who participated in the rescue, as well as a Yad Vashem historian, the French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, and several survivors, including his father. Between these interviews he interposes extraordinary footage of the Italian camps where Jews were protected and pictures of the important figures in the story during the war. Rochlitz’s father, Imre, an Austrian Jew, was a child of thirteen when he fled with his family to Zagreb, Yugoslavia, after the Anschluss, the 1938 annexation of Austria by Germany. When Yugoslavia fell to the Nazis in April 1941, the Adriatic coast of Croatia was put under Italian military control, where it remained until 1943. In Croatia the Nazis installed the fascist Ustashe, who began a campaign of murder that rivaled the Nazis’ own. The Ustashe murdered some 750,000 people in their death camps, mostly Serbs but also Gypsies and Jews. The Ustashe set up death camps along the river Sava, and it was to one of those camps that Imre Rochlitz was sent just before his seventeenth birthday. His job was to go with other prisoners and guards each morning to pick up the dead, about four hundred corpses a day, and dig mass graves. Through the intervention of an uncle who was a decorated World War I veteran, Imre was released after three weeks in the Jasenovac camp.
The interior of Yugoslavia was under the Ustashe but the coast was under Italian control and occupation. Thousands of Jews tried to get into the Italian zone, and by mid-1942 between 3,000 and 4,000 Jews had managed to go by train to Split in Dalmatia and to safety under the Italians. The Italians were under increasing pressure to expel Jews and hand them over to the Ustashe to then be turned over to the Germans, but the Italian diplomatic officials and the Italian military repeatedly refused to comply. Once Auschwitz was functional the Germans put increased pressure on the Italians to give up the Jews who had taken refuge in Dalmatia, but the local Italian commander, Negri, responded to the Nazi demand by saying that it would be “contrary to the honor of the Italian army” to take measures against the Jews. When the Germans, in frustration, took the matter up with Mussolini himself in August 1942, Mussolini agreed to the deportations.
An Italian count, Luca Pietromarchi, was the Foreign Ministry official in charge of the Italian occupation of Croatia. He was of the papal nobility, and his wife was of Jewish descent. He had orders from Mussolini to participate in the Nazi Final Solution, yet he knew that the Italian army had already taken it upon itself to protect the Jews. Nevertheless, because he could not openly defy Mussolini, he developed with others in the Foreign Ministry and in the military an elaborate system of bureaucratic delay and other means of subterfuge to protect the Jews. Pietromarchi kept a detailed personal diary of how he subverted the orders to hand over the Jews, a diary that was discovered after the war and is a major source of knowledge about how the Italians saved the Jews under their jurisdiction in Croatia.
When asked in 1987 for the film why they saved the Jews, diplomat Roberto Ducci replied, “We happened to be human people and Christian people, so we protected because we did not share at all the idea of eliminating all the Jewish race. And therefore we did all, whatever was possible not only in Croatia but in other zones that were under the Italian occupation, were occupied by Italian forces in order to refuse the request by the Germans.” Joseph Rochlitz persisted and asked why the Italians defied the Germans, who were their allies, after all. Ducci then replied, “One can be an ally but not become a criminal.” That says it all. The Italians, that is, significant leaders in both the military and the bureaucracy, had complete clarity in their interpretation of the situation, never denying that mass murder was the German goal and policy, and they acted without any hesitation in engineering creative ways to save the Jews. As time went on, they took increasingly daring actions and also extended their saving strategies into more and more areas, trying to save Jews even in areas contiguous to those they controlled—for example, in Salonika, where the majority of Greek Jews lived. Some of the most dramatic rescues took place within southern France after the Germans removed from the control of the Vichy government parts of the Riviera and turned them over to the Italians in November 1942 in order to prevent an Allied invasion. When the Italians took over control, Marshal Philippe Pétain had already handed over 42,000 Jews (mostly not French) to the Nazis. Things changed dramatically with the arrival of the Italians. When the Vichy police tried to continue to round up Jews to deliver to the Germans, the Italian military stood in their way. The local Italian military commanders, for example, blocked the train tracks in Grenoble, so that no Jews could be transported, and forced the French to release the Jews who were already being held. The head of the Nazi SS in France was furious, as was the Vichy government, which was incensed at the Italians asserting their authority within their own country. The Vichy government tried to gain favor with the Nazis by exposing the Italian protection of the Jews to them and promising that if they regained control they would hand over many more Jews. As the Germans kept stepping up the pressure, the Italians created a Racial Police force under Guido Lospinoso, inspector general. But Lospinoso interpreted his mandate as saving the Jews of southern France rather than delivering them to the Germans, and he had as his adviser on Jewish affairs a prominent Italian Jew, Angelo Donati. In March 1943 Lospinoso developed a plan to transfer the Jews of the Italian zone of southern France to a region inland with the ostensible reason that there they could not pose a security risk in the event of an Allied invasion but where they would be protected. The Italians requisitioned private residences and numerous hotels to house the Jews. Serge Klarsfeld, who was saved in Nice as a child and later became a major Nazi hunter (capturing among others Klaus Barbie, head of the Gestapo at Lyon), remarks that the Jews in the Italian zone in France felt they were in the Promised Land. Fifteen thousand Jews were saved by the Italians in Nice alone.
Within Italy proper 85 percent of the 40,000 to 50,000 Italian Jews were saved. Italian Jews had been deeply integrated into Italian society since the nineteenth century and there had been a Jewish community in Rome since before Christianity. Approximately 8,000 Italian Jews were rounded up by the Nazis and their Italian Fascist collaborators in areas of Italy they directly controlled after Italy surrendered to the Allies on September 8, 1943. Rochlitz admits that from 1943 to 1945 the Italian Fascist persecution of the Jews within Italy was worse than that of Vichy France. Nevertheless, that does not erase the Italian rescue of between 25,000 and 30,000 Jews within occupied Europe and the rescue of most of the Italian Jews; despite the Vatican’s tacit support of the Nazis and of the Final Solution, hundreds of Jews were hidden within the Vatican itself, and thousands more in convents and monasteries throughout Rome; the cardinal of Florence publicly asked for Jews to be sheltered and found convents willing to take Jewish refugees.
Bulgaria was, like Italy, an ally of the Nazis, and Bulgaria saved its Jews even though the character of the Bulgarian Jewish community and its place in the society were quite different. Bulgaria had joined forces with Germany quite early and had instituted anti-Jewish policies. Like Denmark and Italy, Bulgaria had been rewarded by the Nazis for its cooperation with a great degree of autonomy in governing its own country. In 1941 the Bulgarian government had introduced a package of anti-Jewish laws to identify Jews, expropriate their property, and concentrate them. But the Bulgarian public objected, and as deportations grew nearer, protests erupted from a number of different powerful groups: the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, the intelligentsia, the Communists, the underground, and some sectors of the government itself. The Jews of Bulgaria, while having had full economic rights and citizenship before the Holocaust, had been a culturally isolated minority (a mere 1 percent of the population) and were not assimilated and integrated into the society as the Jews of Italy and of Denmark had been. The community had played no significant role in Bulgarian political or cultural life. Nevertheless, the Orthodox Church hierarchy adamantly and forcefully protested anti-Semitic persecution and defied the government’s anti-Jewish policies. Orthodox priests conducted mass (mock) conversions of Jews and issued false identity papers with much earlier dates of conversion; some performed marriages of convenience between Christians and Jews to help shelter Jews from persecution; and finally in September 1942 the metropolitan (a rank above archbishop in the Orthodox Church) Stefan of Sofia delivered a powerful sermon pronouncing that Jews had been punished enough for the death of Christ by their wandering and that their fate should be in God’s hands, not human hands. When the government decided to cede to the Nazis only “foreign” Jews living in Bulgaria in the newly annexed areas of Macedonia and Thrace, the head of the Orthodox Church intervened on behalf of the Jews, as did the vice president of the Bulgarian parliament. And when the protests of these prominent figures did not stop the deportations, an order from the Bulgarian king prevented the deportations of Bulgarian Jews from Bulgaria proper.
Nechama Tec was surely correct in citing the level of control that the Nazis exerted in a country as the most important factor in whether or not Jews were saved. It is a common misconception (even in the Netherlands itself), perhaps because of the popularity of The Diary of Anne Frank, that Dutch Jews did not perish in large numbers in the Holocaust because they were saved by their fellow Dutch. Yet 75 percent of Jews in the Netherlands perished. Of approximately 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands before the Holocaust (1.5 percent of the population, including some 25,000 German Jewish refugees), only 35,000 survived. After the German victory in 1940 over the Dutch, a top Nazi official, Artur Von Seyss-Inquart, was placed in power in the Netherlands, and he immediately set about ruthlessly carrying out anti-Semitic policies. An early rebellion against the Nazi government, in which the Dutch called a general strike in 1941 to protest the Nazis’ anti-Jewish measures, was put down ruthlessly with reprisals against both Christians and Jews, many of whom were deported to concentration camps. A climate of resignation ensued and there was little Dutch opposition of any magnitude until 1943. The Nazis began to deport Dutch Jews to death camps in 1942 and made Camp Westerbork, originally set up to shelter Jews fleeing from the Nazis, into a transit camp for the death camps in Poland. The collaboration of the Dutch with the Nazis was high—it was the Amsterdam city government, the Dutch municipal police, and the local railway workers who engineered the roundup and deportation of the Jews. Holland also had a strong Dutch Nazi Party and a local branch of the SS. After the war, trials in the Netherlands convicted 50,000 Dutch citizens of collaboration with the Nazis.12 Tec concludes, “Whatever the reasons, the Dutch did not succeed in saving many Jews”; the evidence suggests that most Dutch Jews perished in the Holocaust because saving actions were limited.13 And while the German implementers were extremely ruthless, the Dutch on the whole, both the general public and government officials, were at best indifferent and at worst collaborative bystanders.14
Even in Poland, a nation with a long history of virulent anti-Semitism, a large and poorly integrated Jewish community, and a central role in the Final Solution, there were still Poles who endangered themselves to hide, help, and save Jews. Of 3.5 million Polish Jews, only about 150,000 survived the war; 40,000 to 60,000 of these passed as Christians within Poland. Their survival took tremendous effort on the part of some Poles to hide and house them, to feed them when food was scarce, to find medicine and medical care when they became ill, to help them rid themselves of identifiable Jewish dress and other markers that would give them away, to make sure that neither their children nor their neighbors betrayed the Jews and the Christian rescuers, and more. The danger was extreme for the Polish rescuers, whom the Nazis saw as members of the “Slavic race,” which they considered above the Jews but still inferior and to be made into a slave caste to themselves. Indeed, the Nazis waged a war against the Polish elites, murdering large numbers of the professional, clerical, intellectual, and political classes. Three million non-Jewish Poles perished as well as 3 million Polish Jews.
Who were these rescuers and why did they help? Rescue was a collective affair, depending on situational factors and social belonging as much as perpetration did. The Oliners’ ten-year study of rescuers of Jews, in which they interviewed more than seven hundred rescuers and nonrescuers who had lived in Poland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy during Nazi occupation, emphasizes the many groups and networks that were dedicated to aiding Jewish rescue. In Poland, Zegota, the Council of Aid to Jews, was formed by Catholic intellectuals and members of moderate and leftist Polish political parties; in Holland, it was the National Organization for the Assistance to Divers. In France, various religious groups helped Jews, including the Protestant Comité d’Inter-Mouvements Auprès des Evacués and the Hugenot congregation of Pastor André Trocmé, both in the Haute-Loire region of France; Father Marie-Benoît’s network in Marseilles; and L’Amité Chrétienne. In Germany there were the Caritas Catholics; in Italy there was the Assisi Underground. Many secular resistance movements, such as Franc-Tireur, France Combattante, Libération, and Liberté, also participated in Jewish rescue.15 And there were a number of Jewish assistance, rescue, and resistance organizations as well as significant Jewish membership in the aid and resistance organizations mentioned, but they are not our current concern. In the partisan and resistance movements, Jews and Christians were on an equal basis, with Jews often taking the initiative and leadership in rescue and resistance, whereas in rescue alone, Jews were victims and the Christians powerful givers of aid.16 The Oliners concluded that “although [the rescuers] often acted in secret, they did not act in a social vacuum. . . . Rescuers lived in a world apart from others, but they were simultaneously embedded in relationships with others. Their activities were secret, but they were not socially isolated.”17
Nechama Tec found in her study of Polish rescuers that what they had in common was one form or another of outsider identity, a less than full sense of belonging. “Being on a periphery of a community,” she writes, “means being less affected by the existing social controls. With individuality, then, come fewer social constraints and more freedom. . . . [F]reedom from social constraints and a high level of independence offer the opportunity to act in accordance with personal values.”18
The rescuers interpreted the situation in ways that defied and countered the Nazi interpretation and that of its anti-Semitic sympathizers. Being a perpetrator, a collaborator, or a rescuer depended largely on which group one was in or primarily identified with as well as on other factors such as a higher level of optimism that one would not be caught, a kind of derring-do, as well as on opportunity and location. For none of these rescuers did rescue seem to be a matter of thought-out, conscious choice. Instead they characterize rescue as arising from social interpretation, from “characteristic ways of attending to routine events,” characteristic ways of understanding them that led to action. And in fact most rescuers said that “they had no choice” and that it was the “ordinary” thing to do.19 Rescue was the obvious action that resulted from viewing the situation in the way they did, and in the way that those like themselves with whom they identified and with whom they acted in concert did, too.
In the case of the Italians, Susan Zucotti has suggested in her study The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival that an important contributing factor was the Italian penchant to be skeptical and even contemptuous of authority, as well as a general warmth and humaneness.20 So Italians, too, rescued according to situational factors, the group context, and an alternative (anti-Nazi) interpretation of the situation. The availability and social authority of a standpoint other than the Nazi one, or an anti-Semitic one that agreed with the Nazi viewpoint, seem to have been crucial conditions for rescue. Essential to the possibility of rescue was the presence of minority groups who could be independent of the groupthink or totalism of the dominant society and of the seduction of the Nazi influence despite the latter’s violent attempts at stamping out anything but the official interpretation through language and enactment of that language in institutions, roles, and actions. Pluralism was the only antidote; hence in Poland and places like it that were dominated by the murderous ideology and plans of the Nazis and their collaborators, what saving actions there were came from the barely functional social outsiders the Nazis and their Polish followers had not managed to terrorize into silence and inaction. If some few individuals retained independence of mind, it was nevertheless the independence of minority social groups from the dominant one, and of the differences in their history and group experience from those of the dominant group, too, that primarily provided possible alternative interpretations of events from which rescue could arise. One clear indication of the validity of this theory of rescue during the Holocaust is the nearly ubiquitous matter-of-factness of the rescuers’ explanations of their behavior. Tec mentions both this and the unplanned, spontaneous nature of the rescue as salient characteristics that fit across the board.21 Rescuers would reply to questions about why they rescued with the answer that it was the obvious, natural thing to do, the only thing to do. As the Italian diplomat Guelfo Zamboni, who saved hundreds of Jews in Thessaloniki, put it, “But faced with pleas for humanity what would you have done? . . . How else was I to save them?” His words are a perfect example of the felt obviousness of rescue under the circumstances, circumstances that the Nazis tried to enforce as an equal obviousness to murder. The alternative interpretations offered by the social and situational contexts of the rescuers entailed the actions they took. Just as perpetration flowed from Nazi language and its institutionalization, so did rescue from the alternative perspectives and social identities. Of course, perpetration and rescue are neither equivalent nor parallel: the experience of lying and murder is not the same as the experience of rescue. The emotions are not the same, and rescue produces heroes while perpetration produces villains, even if the individuals involved in them began once upon a time in similar innocence.
So we can see that one of the important lessons of the Holocaust is that social systems can be good or evil and rope people into good and evil. They are not mere aggregates of good people or bad people. In a social system everyone bears responsibility, but those who created and maintain the system bear the most responsibility. This is Zimbardo’s “bad barrel.” Zimbardo identifies three levels: the systemic, the situation, and the individual. Good and evil are characteristics of all these levels, not just of individual people or their decisions. In fact, the systemic level is the most important for ethics, for it is there at the structural level that ethics is mostly determined. So we need to bring our moral valuations to that level first and foremost. Zimbardo likens the shift in viewpoint in psychology to a shift in medicine from an individual health model to a public health model—for example, how systems of clean water and modern sewage reduce disease or the distribution of health resources fairly and equally across the society produces the most widespread improvements in health. The systemic view is what I am advocating, too. But that systemic viewpoint cannot be like the Nazi shift from healing individuals to healing a metaphorical corporate body that is the nation. Instead, the proof of the moral quality of the system has to be in the individuals it produces. The criterion is the benefit to individuals, on one hand, and the moral quality of individuals, on the other. A good system will benefit all the individuals and also produce individuals who do good rather than evil. And that’s exactly what we found in Denmark and with the Italians, especially in the areas they occupied during the Holocaust. Both systems were good for the many and the weak, and both produced good, humane individuals who did more good than they ever would or could have done on their own. Of course we must realize that the capacity to do good is sometimes limited by the gun at one’s head; such is the case for those extraordinary Poles who were contending with an evil social system.
It is not that individuals do not bear responsibility for their actions. They do. Yet responsibility must also be more widely shared by going up the hierarchy of the situation and the system. The producers of the social system—the architects of its implementation, its overseers—bear more responsibility than its lowest-level functionaries who carry out its effects through their actions. These last in many respects have the least freedom of action in the entire setup.
If we look back at character education in schools, the model was flawed in many ways. The basic bearer of moral valuation is the school as a social system. And everyone in that system is part of the system’s own moral character as a system of relations and purposes. So the whole idea of inculcating into kids a kind of polite overlay that distracted from and masked the moral nature of the school itself, whether good or bad, was flawed. A school is not an aggregate of individuals being nice and making morally good personal choices; its moral character is fundamentally in the social world it constructs and which shapes the roles people take, how those fit together, what kinds of relations are produced by the incentives the system puts in place, how those incentives are played out (competition versus cooperation, for example) and the moral value of the purposes they enact, and the ways power and hierarchy are established and distributed.
But what are these mysterious social and situational forces that drive so much of our behavior, making of us heroes and villains, often against our best intentions and with so little awareness of their hold upon us? The next chapter addresses just these questions by offering a survey of what social psychology has discovered about the situational and social shaping of action. I’ll end here with a description of the small remote rural village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in southern France, which became a refuge for Jews after the fall of France to the Nazis. The story is important because it brings together and illustrates in sharp outline the several factors that came together to produce an instance of extraordinary goodness in a time of peril. This community of approximately five thousand opened their homes, hiding Jews in their houses, farms, schools, and public institutions for months and even years and then finally getting them over the Alps to Switzerland. They saved around five thousand Jews.
Le Chambon is about 350 miles from Paris in what was then an isolated area of south central France, a poor farming area. By 1940 France was home to approximately 350,000 Jews, half of whom had fled to France as refugees as the Germans advanced. France had traditionally been a place of asylum, and Le Chambon had a history of granting safety to those in need, sheltering refugees from the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. Within a few months of Marshal Philippe Pétain becoming head of the Vichy government after the surrender of France to the Nazis in June 1940, a set of anti-Semitic laws was signed into law removing Jews from French public life. An official anti-Semitic propaganda campaign was also put in place. In 1941 the French police under Vichy orders began the roundup of “foreign” Jews, who were imprisoned in internment camps before being handed over to the Nazis for extermination.
The village of Le Chambon was home to a minority community of French Huguenots, the descendants of Calvinists who had converted to Protestantism in the sixteenth century and had a long history of persecution and discrimination within Catholic France. In 1934 the village hired a new pastor, André Trocmé. Trocmé was a conscientious objector and a pacifist whose views were unpopular not only in general in France but even within the Protestant community. He and his wife, Magda, an Italian, were worldly, highly educated people who found themselves relegated to this rural spot because of the marginality of their views. Trocmé founded a private boarding school, the Collège-Lycée Cévenol International in 1938, bringing in fellow pacifist minister Edouard Theis as director. The Trocmés had been wildly unpopular for opposing the French fight against the Nazis, and once France had fallen they were equally unpopular for their outspoken opposition to Vichy’s collaboration with the Germans. In Le Chambon they insisted that Pétain’s was a “dishonorable armistice” and viewed the Vichy regime and Pétain at its head with utter contempt. The day after France signed the armistice, the two pastors, Trocmé and Theis, delivered a Sunday sermon to rouse the community to action. A copy of that sermon survives, and in a 1989 film, Weapons of the Spirit, a section of it is read aloud in English translation by the Trocmés’ daughter, by then middle-aged: “The duty of Christians is to resist the violence that will be brought to bear on their consciences through the weapons of the spirit. We will resist whenever our adversaries will demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the Gospel, and do so without fear but also without pride and without hate.”
Magda Trocmé, in her interview in the film, offers this explanation for their opposition to Vichy and for the actions to save Jews that she and her husband spearheaded:
If we didn’t obey Pétain or believe what the Germans were saying, it’s not because we were so clever. We just had different pasts. I was Italian. I’d known the rise of fascism. My husband’s mother was German. We had many relatives there. . . . We’d seen Nazism develop. So we reacted not just as Christians but also because of our backgrounds. In a way we were prepared and the village was prepared by its Huguenot history.
The Huguenot history was important in several respects. First, it was a history that emphasized the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), and the Calvinists read themselves into the history of the Jews and identified, I think, with the persecuted Jews. One of the simple rural rescuers speaks in the film of how, when speaking to other rescuers, they referred to the Jews as “Old Testaments” to hide from public disclosure what they were doing. One or another would say, for example, “I have room for three Old Testaments.” Second, as a minority community with a long history of discrimination and marginality, the Huguenots were skeptical of normative French authority and viewpoints. Third, they had their own alternative sources of moral authority and of authoritative opinion and interpretation of the situation and of the world. Finally, they had a history of granting asylum and a system of rescue that was already in place. And of course they were blessed with outstanding, inspirational, and courageous moral leadership—that was incredible luck. All these factors came together to produce the conditions for rescue. The interviews that Pierre Sauvage had with the rescuers forty-five years later also reflect the matter-of-factness with which these extraordinary rescuers describe what they did. This, too, is crucial, because it indicates that this community had a different but to them obvious and natural way of interpreting events, which automatically led to the actions they took. One woman who ran a boardinghouse for children at the time comments in the documentary, “It happened so naturally. We can’t understand the [present] fuss. It happened quite simply. I didn’t have that many. Usually they were passing through. They’d often arrive at night . . . they slept on the floor. We’d manage somehow. We gave up our beds when nothing else was left. . . . I helped simply because they needed to be helped.” Another rescuer comments, “The Bible says to feed the hungry and visit the sick. It was a natural thing to do.” And another rescuer, in response to Sauvage’s question of why they rescued, shrugs and says, “I don’t know. We were used to it.” The case of Le Chambon clearly indicates that if a society is to be humane and decent, it is absolutely vital that it nurture minorities and support the broadest pluralism. Because of their history, the people of Le Chambon could see what others could not and act differently when others went along. They had clarity of interpretation, of moral vision, when most others were taken in.
Le Chambon brings to the fore a crucial insight about why people do good and commit evil: people interpret the world through others’ eyes. Interpretation of the world is a social phenomenon, and not for the most part a private one. (As Spinoza said, in de pen dence of mind is a private virtue—and a rare one, too, he believed.) So the crucial questions become: Whose eyes? Which authority structure? Which authoritative interpretation of the world? We are inevitably informed by our contexts, and generally act as they induce us to.
Looking at ethics through the lens of free will decision making assumes that situations are objective and that it is the choice of action that is good or bad. But the evidence from the Holocaust—and from social psychology—suggests otherwise. It suggests that situations are subject to different interpretations and that interpretations are largely driven by community and social authority.