Interesting discussion of the Holocaust and how much the average German was complicit in it over at First Things – here’s the bit I’d like to discuss:
The Holocaust may be the only universally agreed upon icon of absolute evil, but we deceive ourselves if we insist upon its utter singularity. Kershaw concludes on the sobering note: “So far, with great effort, the combination [that produced the Holocaust], which would be truly dangerous if marshaled by a powerful state entity, has been held in check. Will it continue to be?” Neither divine promise nor our knowledge of the human capacity for good and evil warrants a certain answer in the affirmative.
During the Third Reich, ordinary Germans “had many more things on their minds.” That’s a chilling phrase. We might easily say, and many do all too easily say, that during the era of slavery or during current horrors such as the genocide in Sudan or the daily killing of thousands of unborn children in the abortuaries around the country, most ordinary Americans “had many more things on their minds.” That’s a moralistic cheap shot. The truth is that we all have many more things on our minds, and necessarily so. Such as families, jobs, dealing with sickness, and warding off despair. Not to mention, for many, the distinctly unnecessary hours every day spent surfing and chatting on the blogosphere.
The Third Reich is rightly viewed as an icon of evil. This does not mean, as Ian Kershaw reminds us, that the ordinary Germans of the time are the icon of moral indifference or complicity in great evil. Then it was the Jews, the Slavs, and the gypsies. At other times, it is another class of human beings. Given the requisite mix of circumstances, which is not beyond imagination, it is an idle conceit to think that ordinary Americans would behave more nobly than did the Germans of Hitler’s day. Among any people of any time, moral courage is the exception and not the rule. There are heroes and heroines who contend against the great evils of their time, but even they must be selective. You may be devoting your life to helping the people of Sudan, but what are you doing to help prisoners of conscience in China, or to stop international sex trafficking, or to feed the hungry of Zimbabwe, or to relieve the loneliness of old people in the nursing home within an easy drive from your home? The list goes on and on.
“They had many more things on their minds.” And so do we all. Contemplating monstrous evils, such as the Third Reich, is not an occasion for preening in our supposed moral superiority but for humility, for self-examination, for renewed discernment of our duty, and for more earnest prayer for the coming of the promised Kingdom.
If you read Manchester’s The Arms of Krupp, you’ll find that average Germans slipped easily into the role of slave-master over the Slavs and Jews imported into Germany for drudge labor. While many acts of kindness were done by individual Germans for the captives, the plain fact of the matter is that most Germans didn’t act upon any sense of moral obligation towards their fellow human beings, and a very large number took extreme pleasure in their ability to dominate and harm. The question really boils down to this: do the people, on average, just follow along with their government, or does the government always tend to respond to the basic desires of the people? Did, that is, the Nazis convince the Germans to be evil (or at least turn a blind eye to it) or was the evil done by the Nazis latent in the German people from the start? My view is the latter – the evil was built in, and the Nazis just exploited it.
We all have it in us, you see? Only a routine adherence to first principles prevents any of us from slipping into varied forms of evil – and evil, of course, doesn’t require a death camp. Just to have a cold heart towards another human being is evil – and only by continuing to remind ourselves that the other person is due all the love and respect that we feel is our due prevents us from becoming cold hearted. For far too many people, this necessity of keeping on the proper track is forgotten, or left aside as inconvenient. It is much easier to separate one’s self from the evil than to stand up and be counted against it – faced with someone doing something horrible (like, say, gangsters terrorising a neighborhood) it is much easier to just close one’s eyes and walk past, pretending that it is someone else’s problem and, at any rate, why should I risk my neck for people I don’t know personally? In this attitude, of course, is the forgetfullness that if any one of us were terrorised by gangsters, we’d want the entire community to rise up as one to defend us.
There is also the second part of evil – that human desire to be on the winning side. When someone is despised, it is much easier to join those doing the despising than to join the despised. From large to small, it works the same – the Nazis despised the Jews and as the Nazis seemed to be the winners, many Germans simply wanted to be on the winning team; down at the smaller level, it could be merely joining in on some malicious gossip about someone disliked at the office. The actual effects are different, but the evil is the same.
In the end, the people are responsible for what is done in their name – there can be excuses for being under duress, but at the end of the day a government can only do what it convinces people to accept, at least in the sense of a tacit acceptance based upon silence. This does not argue in favor of the collective punishment of a nation if its leadership does wrong, but it does educate us on the need to be ever vigilant – an unguarded moment can be the ruin of a person, or of a nation. And so when someone does suggest even the slightest evil is ok because it is more convenient, that is the moment to stand firm against it – when the snake is just out of its shell, that is the easiest time to kill it…wait until it is full grown, and it becomes a much larger problem and a much larger threat.
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