The Holocaust did not create the phenomena of the bystander, but it demonstrated the awful repercussions of apathy and inaction toward the suffering of others. Even though the word was initially imposed on only decent Germans—the unsympathetic people who enabled Genocide via unwavering conformity to murderous dictators. Holocaust fellowship has demonstrated that it pertains to the majority of the universe, such as sections of the population in Nazi-occupied nations, some segments of the foreign Jewish and Christian communities, and the affiliated authorities themselves. This essay compares similarities of three works regarding their approach to being a bystander during the Holocaust, as a German resident, to even a Ukrainian under Nazi Regime. This work addresses similarities of three works by Victoria Bennet, Milton Meyers, and Raul regarding the issue of bystanders of Jewish persecution.
According to Victoria and Raul, bystanders are characterized by their decision: they stood by and preferred passive obedience and inactivity over authority and fairness. Bystanders trod a tiptoe between participation and opposition, stabilizing themselves with assertions of self-interest and existence. They dwelt in the shadows, reluctant to show themselves or their sentiments and views. Witnesses have recounted their actions. People in Germany noticed the disappearance of Jews. When questioned about a tenant in his residential block, a Berlin concierge answered, “the one on the right side?” What do you imply, the Jewess? They arrived and carried her away. Just before yesterday. Oh, around six.” The onlooker is dispassionate, casual, and psychologically unenlightening about somebody he knew.
There has always been a contradiction between legal, political, and scholarly responses to the bystander dilemma. This conflict arose from the difficulties of comprehending (and, in legal contexts, resolving) a collective event via the prism of ethics and standards applicable to an individual activity. Even though the Holocaust was a communally initiated crime against a collaborative team of victims, social standards regulating personal behavior and obligation became the presiding schema for addressing the associated ethical concerns. It was due to rational and practical considerations.
A brief examination of the bystander experience in Holocaust research demonstrates how historiography highlighted and confounded these concerns. According to historians Victoria Barnett, Milton Meyers, and Raul, the word “bystanders” was first applied in Holocaust studies as a communal label for the world society and its members for their inability to prevent the massacre. Notwithstanding historians’ agreement that such a tragedy happened, the scope of that disaster and its causes were disputed. It was partly due to the wide range of “bystanders” under scrutiny, including leaders such as President Pope Pius XII and Franklin D. Roosevelt, multinational banks and enterprises, and diplomatic and philanthropic organizations.
According to Raul, debates about bystanders have always been “marked more by uncertainty, dispute, and claims of moral and political failure.” However, a well-documented account of the deeds of various persons and groups surfaced over the years. Their foundational intentions and the broader contextual considerations were invariably less evident, but at the climax of each day, did intentions and chronological intricacies make much difference when vast numbers of people had already been assassinated? The bystander question was always a moral and a chronological issue, as evidenced by several Holocaust academics’ belief that the Holocaust was not only a part of history but a great moral failing of Western society. The character of the onlooker exemplified this.
The decolonization initiatives established in the backdrop of the 1945 Potsdam Conference were an initial endeavor to resolve German nationals’ guilt and liabilities. Nevertheless, once the Cold War started, the German people’s conduct was believed to have happened under a totalitarian dictatorship. Typical individuals’ choices comprised of either complying or defying instructions. Ordinary folks were not seen to have much freedom or agency; at the bare minimum, it was supposed that their judgments were determined under the immense pressure of a fascist dictatorship.
The focus of these initial writings by the three authors was comprehending the circumstances within which everyday citizens “abided orders,” with the implicit premise being that spectators were individuals who were alternatively on the sidelines and not involved directly in the conception or execution of Nazi philosophy and strategy. Their primary function in history was that of a passive observer. This notion was emphasized by Holocaust victims’ memories of neighbors who declined to aid or turned a blind eye and the comparatively rare incidents of heroic cooperation, rescue, and opposition. Nevertheless, as the discipline of Holocaust studies grew, increasingly nuanced tales regarding the roles of ordinary individuals, corporations, international bodies, and nations arose. Holocaust scholarship demonstrated that, apart from being dormant, numerous organizations and individuals actively participated in the Holocaust. The Genocide of the European Jews (1967), a significant three-volume study by Raul Hilberg, concentrated on perpetrators and victims but thoroughly detailed the involvement and participation of other parties. Offenders, Survivors, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (1992), his following book, delved into further depth, providing an in-depth examination of how individuals reacted to the oppression of Jews in Nazi Germany and across Europe.
Hilberg detailed the various roles of bystanders, outlining the alternatives available to various occupations and the potential importance of their actions. He also classified individuals according to their motivations and the effects of their acts, classifying them as auxiliaries, gainers, conspirators, observers, and spectators. Some spectators, he remarked, “might have remained silent watchers,” while others benefited substantially, for instance, by obtaining Jewish-owned property. It cautioned that the term “bystander” encompasses a wide variety of characters and actions, as evidenced by three books on bystanders released in 1989 as a component of a nine-volume trilogy on the Holocaust directed by scholar Michael Marrus.
The Marrus collection explored bystanders ranging from global humanitarian groups to states to people to the populace of colonized nations. Scholars have also begun to investigate the many scenarios in which bystanders engaged in or benefited from Nazi atrocities. From 1996–to 1997, the Senate Finance Committee held the United States Proceedings on the “Nazi treasure” topic concerning the behavior of Swiss firms that benefited from Nazi atrocities. In certain instances, these banks neglected to tell Jewish relatives about savings accounts belonging to kin who had been slain; in others, the banks generated considerable earnings by dealing in gold looted from conquered territories by the Third Reich throughout the wartime.
Studies of civilian behavior in Nazi-occupied nations after 1939 have found comparable, if more intricate, tendencies of participation and compliance. Historian Tim Cole, for instance, investigated the conduct of local communities in Hungary amid the formation of the slums and the following evacuation of their Jewish compatriots. Cole found that the native civilian population which possessed horse-drawn wagons were paid a fixed wage to transfer their Jewish peers from the slum to the expulsion train lines in the neighborhood of Nyregháza. Cole was able to retrieve the conduct of Nyregháza residents by investigating receipts forwarded for reimbursement, accounts in municipal records, and survivor witness statements about the actions of the non-Jewish inhabitants.
The three works examine what can be termed as “active collaboration,” examining how “bystanders” and “offenders” interacted. This has sparked controversy regarding the word “bystander,” implications of inactivity and noninvolvement. As a result, academics have begun to delve further into the methods by which individuals who started as spectators become increasingly active over time. Victoria and Raul, for instance, analyzed the reactions of the Jewish population and non-Jewish Hungarian people, representatives of the local administration, and others in research on the formation of the ghetto in 1944. Victoria and Raul developed a triangle model that depicts the participation and interaction of victims, onlookers, and offenders.
The model demonstrated how diverse reactions to increased anti-Jewish tactics might cause a spectator to become a casualty (if engaged in rescuing or defiance) or a culprit. Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity is the title of Victoria Bennet’s book. During the Holocaust (1999), she used a complicated, multimodal approach to comprehending the matter, first by investigating the varying facets (personal, organizational, and global) of “bystander actions” and then by highlighting the variables that molded the sequential progress of such actions. All the studies portrayed “bystander conduct” throughout the Holocaust as a dynamic process with a progressive shift towards collaboration or opposition over time. These historical advances have resulted in an uncomfortable deadlock over the best acceptable word to represent the behavior patterns of people who were neither survivors nor offenders during the Genocide. A “bystander” is defined as “someone who is there when an incident occurs but is not physically engaged in it.” Based on Hilberg’s early divisions, several academics have proposed descriptions of actual activity, such as “onlooker” or “trailer.”
The clearer the moral conclusion, the more accurate the description. Even when defining a single activity (such as participation in Nazi atrocities or profiting monetarily from them), the actions and reasons associated might be complicated. Over the Third Reich’s twelve years, individuals performed various roles. Any conversation of the bystander occurrence during the Genocide necessitates a more complex and confusing chronological and moral evaluation of the behavior of groups and individuals, one that recognizes the complete independence, and thus greater accountability, of several groups and individuals earlier classified as “bystanders.” This, in essence, served as the basis for later legal and ethical initiatives to resolve the issue.
Even though they were designed to identify offenders and accomplices, the affiliated denazification procedures in initial postwar Germany might be viewed as one such endeavor because they extended widely into the realm of spectators. The difficulties that occurred during denazification exemplify the intricacies that later perplexed Genocide academics and others who attempted to confront such concerns in the aftermath of incidents of atrocity and enormous massacring. Denazification may be viewed as a political and legal endeavor to resolve most of the ensuing problems surrounding bystander conduct. The reality that Allied powers tried such an extensive plan demonstrates that these concerns were significant. Everyday social habits in Nazi Germany and the broad backing of the Nazi government that caused so many to engage in or gain from Nazi atrocities had ramifications for German national discourse and prosperity after Nazism.
In their books, Victoria, Raul, and Meyers argue that, even where legal accountability appeared to be easy, the political and social procedures for dealing with ethical concerns were tremendously convoluted. The Nazi dictatorship had enacted a variety of programs that were entirely legal under Democratic Socialism, despite being recognized as illegal worldwide and ruled unlawful in Germany after 1945. The majority of the German people agreed to and benefited from such policy initiatives. The Allies quickly understood that they couldn’t put the majority of German civilians on trial or prohibit them from their occupations.
The chronological precision of bystander collaboration has led to increased moral precision, which has been a critical feature in the post-genocide national discourse of Germany and other countries where the Atrocities happened. “In the years following the Genocide, moral contemplation and chronology have kept pace,” argues Barnett. “History, performed effectively, serve to keep people morally truthful by putting the reality of the history out there.” This has been demonstrated more successfully in Germany via administrative, sometimes metaphorical, actions than legislative measures. Debates on commemoration can spark national dialogues about moral quandaries from the past, paving the way for new methods to integrate new contextual conceptions into the sociopolitical culture.
References
Barnett, Victoria, and Victoria J. Barnett. Bystanders: Conscience and complicity during the Holocaust. Greenwood Press, 1999.
Hilberg, Raul. “Perpetrators victims bystanders: The Jewish catastrophe 1933-1945.” (1992).
Mayer, Milton. “They thought they were free.” In They Thought They Were Free. University of Chicago Press, 2021.
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