The Road to Auschwitz Wasn’t Paved With

Indifference
We don’t have to be ‘upstanders’ to avoid genocides. We just have to make sure not to
help them along.

By Rivka Weinberg
Ms. Weinberg is a philosophy professor.

 Jan. 21, 2020



Credit...Antoine d' Agata/Magnum Photos

Today, even as the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, on Jan. 27,
approaches, our news feeds are teeming with more and more reports of hate
crimes and extreme ideologies. I am alive because my paternal grandfather’s
Spidey sense had him frantically looking for ways out of Germany in 1933.
“When madmen are elected, it’s time to leave the country,” he said. Now I, and
many others I’m sure, worry that a catastrophe is looming, and wonder how we
can guard against it. Schoolchildren are now taught: “Be an upstander, not a
bystander!” History, we’re told, shows that, as Edmund Burke supposedly said,
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
Or in the words of historian Ian Kershaw, “The road to Auschwitz was built by
 hate but paved with indifference.” These aphorisms pithily conjure up images
of wise men stroking their long white beards, but they’re wrong.

How Atrocities Happen

The road to Auschwitz was built by hate but it wasn’t paved with indifference. It
was paved with collaboration. Anti-Semitism was entrenched in Europe for
centuries before the Holocaust, supplying the Nazis with many collaborators.
During the Holocaust, the local population, the police and the army often
helped the Nazis. Not always, of course. There were resisters (heroes) and
bystanders (ordinary people). But one thing is clear: During the Holocaust,
where the local population was more anti-Semitic, they tended toward greater
collaboration, resulting in a markedly higher murder rate.
To kill people living within a population, you have to be told who and where
they are. You don’t just march into Poland or France from Germany and
magically know who to round up and where they live. It’s even more helpful
when the local police do the rounding up for you (as some did in Lithuania,
France and Hungary). The correlation between local enthusiasm and the
genocidal murder rate of the Holocaust is strong and stark, as Raul Hilberg and
Hannah Arendt documented. In Bulgaria and Italy, where the culture wasn’t as
anti-Semitic, the local populations didn’t cooperate with the murder of Jews;
most Bulgarian and Italian Jews survived. Romania and Ukraine, on the other
hand, had virulently anti-Semitic cultures and many Romanians and
Ukrainians actively participated in murdering Jews. Few survived. Poland was
also very anti-Semitic, and although there were Poles who sheltered Jews,
many instead turned them in and looted their property. Some murdered Jews
themselves. Very few Polish Jews survived.
The truth about how massive moral crimes occur is both unsettling and
comforting. It’s unsettling to accept how many people participated in appalling
moral crimes but comforting to realize that we don’t have to be heroes to avoid
genocides. We just have to make sure not to help them along.

Upstander vs. Bystander Realities

Upstander ideology directs us to “stand up” to bullies and hate. Upstanding can
be effective and inspiring, but it’s dangerous. People who intervene to rescue
victims or stop a crime often die in the attempt. It’s hard to be a hero, to risk
your safety and personal commitments in order to help a stranger. That’s a big
ask. And by asking people too much, we make being moral too hard — which,
paradoxically, can make immorality too easy. “Clearly, being moral is too hard,
I’m no hero! Forget it!” we can imagine people thinking.
The incorrect lesson upstander ideology draws from history ignores the fact
that perpetrating vast crimes usually requires lots of help. Instead, it implicitly
blames moral catastrophes on a failure of heroism. Yet heroism is exceptional,
saintly; that’s not who most of us are, nor who most of us can be, so we’re kind
of off the hook. Most of us are ordinary people, neither cruel nor heroic. The
fact is that when people can help others avert disaster at negligible cost to
themselves, most do. That is, unless they’re steeped in hate — in which case
being a bystander is a step up from the role of perpetrator they’ve been primed
for.

Bystanding is not the problem. What we need to guard against is hate and
collaboration with hate. It’s rare for people not motivated by hate to casually
witness a serious crime and do nothing about it. (The notorious case of Kitty
Genovese, the woman stabbed to death in 1964 in her apartment building
vestibule, while supposedly dozens of people within earshot of her screams did
nothing, is a case of false reporting.) Of course, we want to encourage
resistance to injustice. That’s an important part of being human, and when
doing so doesn’t entail outsized risks, we should do our part. But when helping
others is perilous, to help nonetheless is heroic. It’s great to be a hero — and
encouraging greatness has its place — but it’s also important to be realistic and
give moral guidance to ordinary people. People of average moral fortitude, if
history is our guide, should be educated against collaboration with hate and
taught the reality of how widespread, repugnant and powerful that is. Heroism
is aspirational, and worthy of admiration, but it is a pedagogical, moral and
historical error to spend our moral capital insisting on it.
When helping others is risky, the heroes who step forward don’t do so because
of effective “upstander” education. Research shows that heroic acts are usually
done instinctively, without much thought at all. So to whatever extent we want
to encourage heroism, moral upstanding training seems unlikely to help.
Heroism is not morally obligatory, not teachable and not what we must
demand of citizens in order to avoid catastrophic crimes against humanity.
What we must emphasize is the cruelty and destructiveness of hate and the
perils of collaborating with it.

The Lessons of History

Some people unwittingly help atrocities occur by cooperating in an attempt to

mitigate a monstrous situation. History demonstrates that this is nearly always
a miscalculation. During the Holocaust, Jewish councils organized life in the
ghetto and compiled lists of Jews for deportation, often thinking that they were
helping Jews manage a nightmare. Ultimately, they helped the Nazis murder
Jews by maintaining order and providing the Gestapo with the names of people
to be deported and murdered. In his memoir, “Legislating the Holocaust,”
Bernhard Lösener, a lawyer in the Third Reich’s Ministry of the Interior, relays
how he hurriedly traveled through the night to get to Nuremberg in time to
write the Nuremberg race laws so that the rule of law would be preserved, and
how he fought to have the race laws written to count as Jewish those with three
Jewish grandparents rather than those with one drop of Jewish blood. He too
made the mistake of participating in the atrocity in an attempt to minimize the
damages caused by its perpetrators.
Lösener remains the lawyer who wrote the Nuremberg race laws, lending a
veneer of legality to a crime. Maybe someone else would have ignored the rule
of law or written more draconian laws if he hadn’t, but maybe not. What we can
decide is whether we will be a participant in terrible things done by terrible
people. It never works to participate in the terrible thing in order to try to make
it less bad. It’s tempting, and can seem like the right thing to do: Lösener’s race
 laws included fewer people than a one-drop rule would (though that had
negligible effect). Adolf Eichmann reasoned similarly: “If this thing had to be
done at all, it was better that it be done in good order.” History shows that
when you participate in an atrocity together with the perpetrators, in an
attempt to make it somehow a little less horrible, in the end you’re still
participating in the atrocity — and it is no less horrible.

Morality and My Mother

Like so many other things about me, my perspective on bystanders horrifies my

mother. She is appalled that I could think we aren’t morally obligated to rescue
each other, even at great personal sacrifice. To her, the obligation is obvious.
“Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor!” she exclaims, channeling
Leviticus. Heroic acts of upstanding have shaped my mother’s life. She is alive
because of someone’s heroism, and she lost her job, prematurely ending a
treasured career, because of her own. My mother was saved from the Holocaust
by Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul who ignored orders and issued
several thousand transit visas to Lithuanian Jews, allowing them to flee the
advancing Gestapo. Many years later, when a colleague was unfairly fired, my
mother organized senior employees to speak out against the injustice, even
though she knew not only that she would be likely to lose her own job as a
result but also that she was unlikely to get another job at her age. She did lose
her job, and did not get another one. The loss profoundly affected the trajectory
and quality of her life, but she still says she doesn’t regret what she did and
would do it again.
Listening to my mother, I feel somewhat ashamed. I think I feel the shame of
the ordinary person in the face of those who are morally greater than us; my
mother is a much better person than I am. But I doubt the average person can
be as heroic. Luckily, that is not necessary to avert moral catastrophe.

The Takeaway

The belief that atrocities happen when people aren’t educated against the evils
of bystanding has become part of our culture and how we think we’re learning
from history. “Don’t be a bystander!” we’re exhorted. “Be an upstander!” we
teach our children. But that’s all a big mistake. All of it: It’s false that doing
nothing creates moral catastrophes; it’s false that people are generally
indifferent to the plight of others; it’s false that we can educate people into
heroism; and it’s false that if we fail to transmit these lessons another
Holocaust is around the corner.
Instead, the facts are more quotidian: Terrible things happen when people
collaborate with terrible perpetrators; most people are generally helpful to the
extent that their circumstances and temperament allow (unless they’ve been
taught to hate); being a bystander is often morally permissible; being a hero is
exceptional and instinctual (not taught); and what history teaches us is both
easier and harder than the supposed dark dangers of bystanderdom. What
history teaches us is: Don’t perpetrate; don’t collaborate. If you can be heroic,
that is laudable. Those lessons are hard to learn, but effective and easy enough
to follow to avert most vast moral crimes.
Next time the murderers come, it’s understandable if it’s too much to ask for us to
risk our lives, our children, or even our jobs, to save others. Just don’t welcome the
murderers, don’t help them organize the oppression or make it “less terrible” (that
won’t work anyway), and don’t turn people in. That will usually be enough.

Rivka Weinberg is a professor of philosophy at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif.

Have something philosophical to say? Enter The Night of Philosophy and Ideas essay
contest. Just submit an op-ed of 800 words or less by Jan. 30 to jwhitney@bklynlibrary.org.
Winners will be notified by email by Feb. 1. For more information, visit the event website.
And you can find last year’s winner, “The Good Enough Life,” here.

Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments,” and “The Stone Reader: Modern
Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and
Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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