In all likelihood, I would probably rationalized it and tried to get posted elsewhere. If anything, the exposure would have reinforced the terror.

That’s actually a really good point, Liam. We like to think that faced with such horror we would, of course, react. But the truth is that the horror would paralyze most of us. It’s not a question of helping out or walking away. It’s one of helping out or being on the other side of the fence.

The movie “Good” – one of the more morally literate and thoughtful I have seen recently – tackles similar themes, exploring the story of a university professor in Nazi Germany who becomes deeply involved in Nazi atrocities through his own vacillation and ambition. The really interesting part is that he is portrayed as a relatively sympathetic character. Rather than being a wicked man, he is weak, vain, lustful and cowardly. No doubt there were thousands like him in Nazi Germany – and for that matter Stalinist Russia and Mao’s China.
How I would have behaved in a similar situation is a source of constant worry to me.
On a related subject, I once heard an anecdote about the selection process for a British special forces unit. The applicant is asked whether he thinks he could kill a man in cold blood. Those who answer “no” or “maybe” are much more likely to proceed than those who give an unequivocal “yes”. No idea whether it’s true, but I rather hope it is; it shows a certain insight into human nature on the part of senior military men.

If I were a guard I would despair and live, and if I were a victim I would despair and die. To maintain living optimism in the case of being such a victim is heroic, to maintain living optimism while engaged with such evil is monstrous. I don’t know what I would’ve done, but I think that’s how I’d have felt.

I think anyone considering their answer would do well to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent posts on the dangers of claiming retroactive bravery. How easy (and self-assuring) it is to imagine ourselves marching in Selma, fighting in the French resistance, and hiding slaves in our basements and jews in our attics.
What we forget is that every generation has powerful tools of rationalization to make these evils “necessary.” Slavery may look awful to you doe-eyed abolitionists, but it’s necessary for the economy. Also we’re doing those Africans a favor, really, by “domesticating” them and bringing them here. There are even slaves in the bible! Plus, if you set them all free, they’d probably want PAID work, and we all know there aren’t enough jobs to go around.
See! Economic, familial, humanitarian and even a religious justification for all that free labor. That Neibuhr knew what he was talking about. Or if you need a more current example, I’m sure there are folks at the National Review, AEI, and elsewhere who will cheerfully explain why it’s so very necessary for us to torture people.
So what if I was a German in 1942? And I’d been called up to work guard duty in a camp where the “undesirables” were being herded to. I’d probably have been humiliated and disgusted by my country’s defeat in the great war, and all that facist talk about how our society might shine like silver if we only hammered out the impurities. If only we got rid of all those jews and gypsies and papists and gays and retards, then maybe we could build a nation that would last a thousand years. And if it involved taking back some land that should have been ours to begin with? So what? If you can take it, you take it.
I fit the aryan ideal fairly well (though Der Furher would probably want me to do a few situps first), but my brother is the sort of person who would have ended up in the camps as an unideal specimen of the master race. I hope he would have been enough to keep me from taking the easy way out. Maybe I should have more faith in myself, but having never really been tested, I can’t say for sure.

I can say with some certainty if my family’s safety were at stake I could not resist. I’m pretty certain I couldn’t do it. This, incidentally, is how North Korea controls its people – they punish your whole family for any disloyalty. Ever wonder why you don’t see every North Korean who leaves the country defect?

Did many people really have to be concentration camp guards? I mean; as opposed to being regular soldiers in the Wehrmacht? I thought the competition to join the SS was quite stiff?
However, this issue actually applies to Christianity itself, as we discussed a few weeks ago. The world in which Christianity started ran on slavery like the modern world runs on gasoline, and neither Jesus nor Paul had the slightest objection. But what else should the early Christians have done? Advocate a slave revolt??
Slavery is actually a better example than the Holocaust, because it was immemorially old, and must have seemed like it was part of the bedrock of reality. Even in the Americas, to illiterate people, having existed for 200 years, it must have seemed like that.
Endoftheworld: “and papists”
Where did that one come from?

Slavery is actually a better example than the Holocaust, because it was immemorially old
Correction: is immemorially old. I don’t think we’ll ever be rid of it.
One reason Jesus and Paul didn’t specifically speak against slavery was that, like the poor, slaves will always be with you. Their focus was to alleviate the plight of the neighbor; but slaves are also your neighbors.

To Rombald:
I was refering to the catholic clergy who were sent to the concentration camps for not going along with the party line. I used the ephithet “papist” to try and reflect the way a man living in that era might reconcile having a priest sent to Dachau. I meant no offense by the term, and apologize if any was taken.

Well, actually serving as a concentration camp guard would probably mean you were already corrupt to some degree. I assume the real question here is ‘what would you do if you were drafted to be a concentration camp guard?’
I don’t think I would have actually followed orders and become a concentration camp guard (or, for that matter, a Nazi soldier). Though on my part that could owe as much to squeamishness as to genuine moral courage. What’s less clear to me though is whether I would have actually done the courageous thing and joined the resistance, or whether I would have taken the ‘easy’ way out through suicide. (I guess the super easy way out would be to do what they told me and become a camp guard, but I can see myself tempted into commiting suicide more easily then I can see myself working in a concentration camp). I guess you never really know until you’re actually in such a situation.

“Slavery is actually a better example than the Holocaust, because it was immemorially old, and must have seemed like it was part of the bedrock of reality. Even in the Americas, to illiterate people, having existed for 200 years, it must have seemed like that”
The majority of pro-slavery tracts were authored by christian ministers. One of of recurring arguments in favour of it sounds eerily familiar today: if we deny the clear biblical teaching on slavery, we deny the moral authority of the bible as a whole, which would result in the utter ruin of society itself.

We are letting these people off the hook. First of all, being a guard was a sought after position. Second, most Germans subscribed to this disturbing idea of German nationalism, that Hitler’s efforts were part of protecting Germany from the sort of ethnic contamination that led to their WWI defeat.
You have to be a certain kind of person to buy into that. Those who rose through the ranks were the early adopters, or at least those who converted at the slightest hint of social stigma.
I certainly wouldn’t be one of those people. It just isn’t in my blood to be so. But what about Nazi soldiers?
Remember, it was our nation that went to Europe to go kill the early adopters, the thought-slaves, and those who were cowed by fear into murdering innocents. And, make no mistake, those people needed killing.
Anyone who would resort to genocide (which again, it wasn’t so much resorting as it was leaping at the opportunity) in order to preserve their themselves, their family or their social status needed to suffer the grave consequence of their weakness. Americans brought those consequences to bear. It’s no coincidence that Germany never started a third World War.
Would I join the resistance in this case? Almost certainly, yes, not least of which because I am not predisposed to hyper-nationalism and group-think. If you cannot make sacrifices for what is right, then you are not right.
If you do not think you could withstand the pressure to become a Nazi, I am somewhat terrified to live in a country with you.

“One of of recurring arguments in favour of it sounds eerily familiar today: if we deny the clear biblical teaching on slavery, we deny the moral authority of the bible as a whole, which would result in the utter ruin of society itself.”
Ugh… Here we go. If this turns into a discussion on gay rights, have we arrived at the inverse of Godwin’s law?
But, I’ll bite…
The bible is silent on the question of whether slavery ought to be allowed. It is silent even while discussing the topic of slaves. Anyone who used the bible to suggest that slavery is necessary to the survival of society was simply lying about the texts. Nowhere does the bible advocate legal slavery. Nowhere.

If you do not think you could withstand the pressure to become a Nazi, I am somewhat terrified to live in a country with you.
Kevin, do you really think all of Germany leapt at the opportunity to become Nazis because they couldn’t wait to kill Jews and “undesirables”? Isn’t it far more likely that because of latent social prejudices, environmental pressures (the experience of hyperinflation and the humiliation of the loss in the Great War), mass media and other things, Germans fell for it. I think none of us should think ourselves immune to the power of cultural and social pressure. I would love to believe that I would have become a Dietrich Bonhoeffer in that situation, or taken the heroic side in any number of similar situations of oppression. It is, alas, much more likely that I would have collaborated to some degree, and found a reason to justify it. I hope not, but unless you believe most of humanity is deeply wicked, evidence suggests that people take the path of least resistance. You should rent “The Sorrow and the Pity,” Marcel Ophuls’ long documentary about French collaboration with the Nazis. It tells us something dark and important about human nature. (I just posted an excerpt from an old Crunchy Con post I put up about the film.)

I think Kevin has a point, and that decent people would have resisted the pressure to join the Nazi party, army, secret service, etc. What’s not so clear is whether we would be able to really do the courageous thing and join the resistance. I suspect a lot of decent (but weak) people would simply try to stay uninvolved, run away, leave the country, or whatever else.

Hector: As I said, I thought the competition to join the SS and thus become a concentration camp guard was quite stiff. Anyone have more accurate knowledge?
If by “Nazi soldier”, you mean a regular German soldier in the Wehrmacht, I don’t think we should regard someone who fought in that capacity with particular moral hostility – no more than German civlians who probably had some inkling about the Holocaust but preferred not to think about it. It isn’t even as though, on the whole, German soldiers behaved in an exceptionally atrocious manner to civilians or PoWs, the way that Japanese soldiers, for example, did.
When I was a barfly in working-class Tokyo dives, I used to keep getting into conversations with nice old men who told me about fighting in Burma, China, the Philippines, etc. – I always found that difficult to reconcile, but I don’t really see that about German soldiers. On the tram in Vienna once, trying to remember my schoolboy German, a man told me, laughing, that he’d been to England once – as a PoW.
End: I didn’t pick up on “papist” as an offensive word, but because there was no wholesale extermination of Catholics by the Nazis. I thought you might be trying to claim an illegitimate victim status.

Most of the commentors know nothing of the history. Guards werent hired. Men sought membership in the SS because of status and benefits. Within the SS, there were several branches, one particular unit – Der Totenkaufen or Death’s Head. These made up the Sonder Kommando – Death Squads- and the Concentration Camp units.They consisted of both men and women. They were not selected for exhibited brutality but there willingness and zeal and it was overlooked and in most cases praised. You did not “Quit”. You did not resign. You did not request transfer. They also had units assigned to minister instant punishment to “traitors” – those who did not want to fight or support the Reich. This involved instant execution. So, being a concentration camp guard was not, in most cases, a hardship for the individuals but a status sought for. There are those who, after the war, bemoaned their activities but it was only because they had been caught. Most, but not all, Germans knew about the atrocities and supported the drive to exterminate the Jew but ALL deny it, deny shouting deliriously SIEG HEIL, waving and cheering as Der Fuhrer drove by, arm in the air.

David, I don’t think the point of posing the question was to speak to historical accuracy; it was to point out that it’s a more difficult (or at least more interesting, for purposes of debate) moral quandary to be a person of conscience who benefits tangibly by the cruelty the system he’s working for inflicts on others, than to be the victim of that system.

David: Thanks for the detailed info about joining the SS, erc. I thought it was something like that.
“Most, but not all, Germans knew about the atrocities and supported the drive to exterminate the Jew but ALL deny it, deny shouting deliriously SIEG HEIL, waving and cheering as Der Fuhrer drove by, arm in the air.”
My guess is that some willingly supported and celebrated the genocide, some genuinely did not know, and a few opposed it, but most vaguely knew something was happening, and tried not to think about it. It’s like those gentle characters in Jane Austen novels, all getting their income from the West Indies. The slave system in the West Indies was worse than in North America, and, at its worse, in Barbados, for example, was on the level of Nazi labour/death camps, with new imports from Africa not usually surviving more than a couple of years.
Anyway, I don’t think sweeping anti-German statements are all that helpful in this context – glasshouses, stones, and all that.

In the back of one’s mind in these questions is the hope, not so much an assumption, that if one had acted, one would have made a difference. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we want to believe that individuals can and do make a difference. This is a defense mechanism, because we have great difficulty coming to grips with the fact that many outcomes in life are functionally random, at least to the extent that they are beyond our control. There were many people that resisted the Nazis. There were many people that resisted the communists. For the most part they were killed or imprisoned and forgotten.
To put things in perspective, there was massive resistance in this country to our entry into World War I. Many cities were not only against our entry into World War I, but supported the Germans. Even after Victor Berger was convicted under the Espionage Act, he was still elected to Congress on the Socialist ticket. Even after Congress refused to seat him, he was chosen once again in the special election that followed. If that level of social organization wasn’t sufficient to keep us out of World War I, why do people think that a person or even just a few people could have prevented the Holocaust? Our country for crying aloud sent back to Germany a boat load of Jews, a literal ship, whose fate we had little doubt would be dire.

With the Third Reich and Soviet experiences, we probably have a large enough to sample size to figure out how people would react.
- The vast majority would rationalize away their culpability, seeking out roles in which they would not personally be required to perpetrate crimes, keeping their mouths shut and not rocking the boat. Almost everyone who has a family of their own would be in this category.
- A significant minority would participate actively in the crimes, either out of ideological conviction, sociopathic personality traits, desire to settle personal scores, or simple careerism.
- A vanishingly small minority, maybe 1 out of 10,000 people, would overtly refuse to cooperate and thereby put themselves and their loved ones at personal risk.

“If you do not think you could withstand the pressure to become a Nazi, I am somewhat terrified to live in a country with you.”
Well, I’m terrified of people in free, peaceful, prosperous countries who have so much confidence in their own personal goodness that they cannot even imagine that they might act differently were they living a very different kind of life in a genocidal, totalitarian dictatorship with mass popular support.
But seriously. I am not saying that I would not have been able to resist the pressure to become a Nazi; I am trying to be realistic about the dark aspects of our fallen human nature. This isn’t a debate about SS death camp recruitment policy, it’s a debate about collaboration – there were plenty of people who collaborated in more indirect ways that would have been easier to rationalise than actually putting bullets into Jewish bodies.
What about the clerks who did the paperwork? What about the ordinary soldiers who knew what was happening but fought for the Reich nonetheless? The train-drivers? The railway-signalmen? The locals who knew what was going on but did nothing? What about the guys who made breakfast for the death squads? What about the drivers? What about the people who noticed that all the Jews from their neighbourhood had vanished but rationalised it and convinced themselves to believe – against all reason and common sense – that they had all “settled in the east”?
Those are the guys in whose shoes I can perhaps see myself, knowing my own weakness of will, self-deception and ability to rationalise of things I know to be wrong.

BTW, I assume the reason Rod asks this question isn’t factual. The Milgram experiments settled that – most of us would have obeyed. Even the bits about protecting our families and so on are probably irrelevant. We would have just done what we were told to.

FWIW, I think that the best way to equip yourself to resist something like Nazism is to admit to yourself that you might not resist it, and have enough self-knowledge to know why.

“Kevin, do you really think all of Germany leapt at the opportunity to become Nazis because they couldn’t wait to kill Jews and “undesirables”?”
Moreso, they leapt at the opportunity to defend the idea of a pure Germany, which is problematic on it’s face. As for the rest, I’m not sure it’s accurate to say they “fell” for the rest.
When someone falls for something, they are embracing a conceit. The Germans were not embracing a conceit per se. They certainly got their “purer” Germany.
I agree that many take the path of least resistance, which is a manifestation of our inherent wickedness. But many nations did resist. To chalk that up to random chance is to deny that it we have a moral imperative to resist.
We cannot hope to do the right thing, to overcome our prejudices and refuse the path of least resistance. We have to plan for it, and embrace the opportunity.
I understand the responses on this thread. Nobody wants to come off as one who has no secrets hidden underneath the floorboards. But at a certain point, I hope this is false humility. Our democracy is no assurance that we will never be tested by a dictator in our lifetimes, and we should steel ourselves to the possibility.
“You should rent “The Sorrow and the Pity,” Marcel Ophuls’ long documentary about French collaboration with the Nazis.”
I will do so. Au Revoir Les Enfants, now one of my favorite films, touches on this from a different perspective. France, obviously, has a very unique relationship to the Holocaust, and to anti-Semitism broadly.

Cultural conservative: What about the clerks who did the paperwork?
In the preface to The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis uses that exact analogy in describing demons. He said that we tend to get distracted by the more spectacular stuff like concentration camps, while forgetting that they and those who staff them are there in the first place because of the quite, mild-mannered bureaucrats who set them up in the first place, sign the papers that send hundreds of thousands to them, and then go home and sleep undisturbed sleep. Something to think about.

Simon probably has it pegged. We all assume that, of course ‘WE’ would courageously join the resistance and pull out all the stops against an obvious moral evil like the Holocaust, but history suggests otherwise.
Were most people abolitionists in America? Probably not. Were most Germans/French etc…members of the resistance? Doesn’t seem that way (although ask them now and they all were).
We all jump on the bandwagon, in safety, well after the fact and wonder why anyone would let something like this happen and not really do anything about it. I could easily envision a similar situation happening about abortion 50 or 100 years from now if that is ever outlawed (not that I want to turn this into an abortion thread). A lot of normal people just rationalize it away and go on with their lives.

“The bible is silent on the question of whether slavery ought to be allowed. It is silent even while discussing the topic of slaves. Anyone who used the bible to suggest that slavery is necessary to the survival of society was simply lying about the texts. Nowhere does the bible advocate legal slavery. Nowhere”
I do not want to hijack the thread either, but the point remains that as clear as you see the answer now, christians saw the answer then. It’s just that the both of you see different answers.
My point was not to hijack the thread, but to reiterate how easy it is claim moral superiority in retrospect. Would I have stood up for the jews? I hope I would have, but I don’t know. Throughout Europe at the time, and for centuries, antisemitism was the rule. Pretty much everybody considered jews to be inferior and a danger to society at some level. So in considering how we would of acted, it isn’t fair in retrospect to think of what we would have done to protect a jewish family. You need to substitute another type of person for the jews, someone for whom institutionalized discrimination and violence is still the norm, still widely tolerated, even accepted and encouraged by the moral leaders of today.
The answer, at least for me, is scary.

Turmarion,
Have you read ‘The Dream of Scipio’, by Iain Pears, by any chance? Your reference to clerks doing the paperwork put me in mind of a quotation towards the end of that book.
The book itself isn’t ‘about’ Nazism, it’s about collaboration with evil more generally, and how we respond to circumstances in which civilisation appears to be falling apart, and it’s in part about the Albigensians and the Jews of southern France. It involves three separate stories at three different periods of history- the fifth century, the thirteenth, and the twentieth- in Provence, but one of the storylines involves a French literary intellectual who becomes an unwilling collaborator with Petain’s regime, and manages to persuade himself that he’s doing so for good reason.
You should really read it.
Kevin,
Good point. We shouldn’t forget that there were plenty of people, and even nations, who did resist heroically. The Greeks, for example.

And for the record, I don’t agree with Mr. Anthony Eden. I suppose I can have some sympathy for the ordinary person who was drafted or coerced into serving a horrible regime, and who did so hating every minute of it, but in fear for his life and his family. I can’t have any such sympathy for Marshal Petain, who was either a monstrous coward or a monstrous fascist sympathizer, take your pick. He deserved to hang at the end of the war, and the French government’s decision to spare his life was a betrayal of everyone who had died fighting the Nazis.

“FWIW, I think that the best way to equip yourself to resist something like Nazism is to admit to yourself that you might not resist it, and have enough self-knowledge to know why.”
You are trying to have it both ways, expressing humility and confidence at the same time. It doesn’t take much self-knowledge to know why one might acquiesce to evil demands. The answer to that question is obvious.

“The bible is silent on the question of whether slavery ought to be allowed. It is silent even while discussing the topic of slaves. Anyone who used the bible to suggest that slavery is necessary to the survival of society was simply lying about the texts. Nowhere does the bible advocate legal slavery. Nowhere”
I…. what? Have you read the Old Testament, in which there are specific instructions about who you can legally enslave and why?

“You need to substitute another type of person for the jews, someone for whom institutionalized discrimination and violence is still the norm, still widely tolerated, even accepted and encouraged by the moral leaders of today.”
Not sure you need to replace the Jews in your hypothetical, but you would like me to do so, and I will oblige.
As it applies to my beliefs, I don’t think government should recognize or not recognize any marriage. If the public feels that it is important to codify marriage, they are free to decide what constitutes marriage, and I am free to help make that decision, based on my scriptural conviction that Gays should not marry.
I do not tolerate nor encourage violence toward homosexuals.
Really, you’re not making a lot of sense. You accept, a priori, the equivalency between slavery and the Holocaust. From there, you insinuate that religious affiliation blinds us to egregious acts of evil committed on a grand scale, as it supposedly did during slavery.
The first premise is flawed. Slavery subjogated a class of citizens to that of permanent employee. They were part of the social structure of the South. That this argument was often made on religious grounds is beside the point. The purpose of the Holocaust was to cleanse the population of imperfect Germans. One of the expressed goals was to eliminate the social hierarchies slavery helps to create.
From this, you arrive at an absurd insinuation: Religious tracts were used to justify slavery, and therefore homosexuality should be protected because religious tracts are also used to justify it, else one does not have the authority to claim that they would not participate as a guard in the Holocaust.
That’s clumsy thinking, to put it mildly. Here is another syllogism that follows your logic.
1) The Holocaust = American slavery
2) American slavery was supported with scripture
3) Scripture commands us to feed the poor
4) To feed the poor is to behave like a Nazi.
See the problem?

“I…. what? Have you read the Old Testament, in which there are specific instructions about who you can legally enslave and why?”
Yes, have you? Or have you just read selected verses?
The Bible sets conditions for slavery (unmet by plantation owners in the South), but nowhere mandates it for nations where it does not yet exist. The scriptures clearly take slavery as a given, which stands to reason in a society where most were slaves.

Kevin: “Slavery subjogated a class of citizens to that of permanent employee. They were part of the social structure of the South.”
You’re being far more mealy-mouthed about slavery than others here are being about the Nazis.
“permanent employee”: Are you being serious? You make them sound like life-time salarymen in a Japanese company, or maybe something in the Warsaw Pact countries during their more benign phases. Slaves were legally things, to be bought and sold. They weren’t citizens either.
And yes, at its worst, New World slavery was as bad as the Holocaust. Admittedly, the worst phases were not in the USA or British North America, mainly because of the crops grown, but parts of the Caribbean and Brazil were, quite literally, death camps, where people were worked to death within a year or two.
The New Testament doesn’t advocate slavery, but nowhere does it even suggest that there is anything wrong with the institution. The Roman Empire ran on slavery the way the modern world runs on gasoline.

“You are trying to have it both ways, expressing humility and confidence at the same time”
Or to put it another, less snarky, way: I am trying to articulate one of the strange paradoxes of human nature and sinfulness.

Kevin, do you really think all of Germany leapt at the opportunity to become Nazis because they couldn’t wait to kill Jews and “undesirables”? Isn’t it far more likely that because of latent social prejudices, environmental pressures (the experience of hyperinflation and the humiliation of the loss in the Great War), mass media and other things, Germans fell for it.
Read “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” by Daniel Goldhagen. It makes a rather strong case for the former.
In general, I do think the “made good Germans fall for it” argument is pretty weak. As early as the 1920s, Hitler would write and publicly say that if he ever took power his first initiative would be killing all the Jews. Hang them all in Munich–”as long as hygienically possible” was his exact phrase–then move on to the next city, until every German Jew was dead. That is what the Hitler voter voted for.

That’s rather like saying that the bible doesn’t advocate private property because it doesn’t actually MANDATE it. It just gives all the rules for whose property is whose.

Victor Frankl’s book, “Man’s Search for Meaning” explores some of the points you raise, Rod. It really is a must read. Martin Gilbert’s “History of the 20th Century, Vol. 2,” provides a terrific account of the Nazi years up through the early 50s. I am still haunted by an account of a Polish working man shot in the head by a German officer as he was on his way to work. His crime? He was whistling what the German officer took as a patriotic song. And another of the doctor’s and nurses of a German hospital for handicapped and mentally disabled kids. This hospital was closed down and the kids were swept up and sent to a concentration camp as part of Hitler’s efforts to rid the country of “undesirables.” Some of the staff decided to accompany these kids to the camp knowing full well that it would be a death sentence for them, as well. I don’t know any names, but I am still awe struck by the story, and I wonder if under similar circumstances, I would have been as brave and loving.
Best regards,
Mike

It’s all but impossible, really, to know what any of us would have done had we had the misfortune to be born in a place and time where whole classes of human beings were dehumanized, called less than human, considered disposable, and ruthlessly exterminated.
Luckily, we live in 21st-century America, where this kind of archaic evil has been wholly rooted out. We don’t define any human beings as less than human. We don’t make it legal to kill people for the crime of existence. We’re so, so much better than the people of Germany during the Third Reich.
What’s that? Abortion? Oh, don’t be insulting. Embryos and fetuses aren’t *people.* They’re not even 3/5ths of one. Besides, just like one target of the Nazis–the mentally unfit–they don’t have any self-awareness or realize they’re being killed, so it doesn’t count. And if we couldn’t kill them then we couldn’t have the kind of society we want–so it’s really an important social value to make sure the unborn can be exterminated by their mothers. And besides, unwanted unborn children are just a drain on their mothers and on society, so we’d better get rid of them while they’re too small to count than have to deal with them later, when they might be criminals. And anyway, the unborn are really more like attackers, forcing their poor mothers to carry them for nine months–they are burdens, and unless the mother freely chooses to allow one to occupy her body then the unborn child is merely a life unworthy of life–but certainly not the kind of human life with intrinsic worth, and legally not a *person* at all.
One every 24 seconds. 2.5 every minute. 3,700 each day. More than 1.3 million every year. But they aren’t people; our society has its values, and it has declared that human persons don’t exist until birth. Up to that moment, it’s legal to kill the products of conception and both desirable and good to do so–unless the mother actually *wants* the baby.

Erin, for that analogy to work, anybody who chose NOT to work in an abortion clinic would have to be under real threat of being jailed and executed.

Well, TTT, not if those various people on this thread who’ve corrected the history are right.
Which, in itself, is interesting–it’s so much easier for us to imagine a terrified guard forced to work at a concentration camp under constant threat of execution than to recognize that these were elite and sought-after positions.
It’s so hard to fathom the banality of evil–the every-day, ordinary, dullness of it. We can make stereotypes out of concentration camp guards: terrified and compliant on the one hand, or villainous and sadistic on the other. But the evil of the suburban ob/gyn moonlighting as an abortionist, killing a few hundred unborn children a week, using the cash payments to add a pool to his back yard–that’s what we can’t see, and why we fall for evil again and again in our fallen human state.
The truth is, the evil of the concentration camp guard, overseeing a few dozen executions before sitting down to his evening meal, perhaps enjoying a nice wine or at least a good beer and a cigar with it, is much, much more like the evil of the suburban abortionist than we want to imagine.

“That’s clumsy thinking, to put it mildly. Here is another syllogism that follows your logic.”
Sorry, I was not making any such syllogism, nor trying to draw exact analogies.
I guess my point, which has been made by a few others here is this: in considering the question of what would I have been a nazi guard, we too often pose the question from a false vantage point. From our perspective, the virulent antisemitism that was so common then is itself a moral abomination, and so the question comes down to would I have the moral courage to risk my life and my family to save what we all agree has value? But isn’t the real question what is am willing to do to protect those that society as a whole tell me are without value? It is one thing to risk your life to save a “one of us” but will you lay done your life to save to a criminal? a meth addict living on the street? a child pornographer? Christ did, apparently.

Grendel,
For you to compare African slaves, or Jews, or for that matter homosexuals, to child pornographers is outrageous.
Christ might have died for the child pornographers, but I’d strongly suspect most child pornographers are going to end up in h*ll anyway. Anyway, I’m not Christ, and while we are told to love our enemies, I have no desire to pat the child pornographer on the back and tell him he’s OK just the way he is. It’s the place of Christ to forgive, and it’s the place of the law to punish.

“killing a few hundred unborn children a week, using the cash payments to add a pool to his back yard–that’s what we can’t see, and why we fall for evil again and again in our fallen human state.”
And so we’re a step away from the blood libel in a thread about the Holocaust. Maybe this is not such a useful exercise?

Um, Dan – could you direct me to the point where Erin mentions the blood libel? Maybe it’s just my weird habit of reading what someone writes rather than projecting some kind of bizarre straw man onto it in order to change the subject, but I couldn’t see it.
It is undoubtedly true that many OB-GYNs make not inconsiderable amounts of money from performing abortions. It may be uncomfortable for pro-choicers, or irrelevant to the debate over the morality of abortion, but it is not an untruth, or anything even close to the anti-Semitic blood libel.

I wondered how long until someone jumped the abortion shark and thankfully Erin fulfilled her role. Should that be a new Manning Corollary — Any conversation will turn into a conversation about abortion given enough time?

“Um, Dan – could you direct me to the point where Erin mentions the blood libel? Maybe it’s just my weird habit of reading what someone writes rather than projecting some kind of bizarre straw man onto it in order to change the subject, but I couldn’t see it.”
I find people who insist on making abortion analogies to the Holocaust tiresome. The comparisons are as malformed and dull as they are dangerous. It’s like, “Hmmm.. What else really evil thing can I think of to compare X to… Okay, I know! People will react to that!” They are the work of people whose intentions are to provoke. (Like the sarcasm was not a dead giveaway). It’s a silly to object to a rhetorical scrum when it’s asked-for.
It’s not lost on me, or any other person of Jewish heritage, that many anti-abortion activists latch on to the view that it is Jewish doctors drive abortion, and that they do it for the money. Call it the Father Marx special, okay? But it’s in the ether, it’s been here for a long time, and it’s a variety of blood libel.
There’s history here. What was written was, as I said, a step away.

Re: It may be uncomfortable for pro-choicers,
It’s also uncomfortable for pro-choicers like Mr. Dan O. to admit the obvious truth that the life of any diploid organism- including, yes, human beings- begins at conception. Which is why they try to change the terms of the debate by babbling about autonomy, or feminism, or anti-semitism, or any number of other red herrings and irrelevancies. Probably because at bottom they realise they’re defending the indefensible.

There is an interesting first hand survivor account written by Max Liebster entitled “Crucible of Terror” that deals with his time in Auschwitz.
In gives some insight into the thinking of the SS guards when Max’s accent is recognized by one of the guards as being from his home area of Mannheim. The guard pushed by his inner tumoil bridged the gap between Ubermenschen (super human) and Untermenschen (subhuman as Jews were viewed). In one conversation he lamented to Max:
“I feel as if I were on a runaway train hurtling downhill …It will crash without fail. But if I try and jump off, I’ll be shot. You Max have a greater chance of survival then I do.”
Max although he was a devout Jew was inspired by a group of Christians he encountered in the camps. Despite torture and imprisonment they refused to give up their faith. All they had to do was sign a document renouncing their faith and they could leave the camp, by far the majority refused.
You can read more about Max and the foundation he and his wife established at http://www.alst.org/pages-us/index-us.html

“It’s all but impossible, really, to know what any of us would have done had we had the misfortune to be born in a place and time where whole classes of human beings were dehumanized, called less than human, considered disposable, and ruthlessly exterminated.”
So then Ms. Manning, we know exactly how you would act when confronted with a genocide, you would do nothing. I mean other than complain and if that was costing you anything you likely wouldn’t even do that.

I think that when we get to the point that a group which demonizes and scapegoats another group gets into power and now has the full power of the state to enforce its views it is too late to protest with any hope of effectiveness. The fear that such awesome power generates in a person effectively stifles dissent (with some exceptions). So if we want to avoid any repeats of the holocaust we have to be alert to the things that happen long before we pack people into railroad cars. It requires less courage to resist groups which have not yet acquired the powers of the state. After all – the Nazi’s were ELECTED and we should not be so naive or presumptuous as to think we won’t elect people and give them this power too. No society wakes up one day and decides to kill millions of their fellow citizens – there is a long process which segregates a group and makes them “less human” and hence susceptible to being killed. So if we would resist – it is during those early steps that one would be more likely to resist.
My Mom went to nursing school in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor and her room-mate was a German Jewish woman who – along with her husband – had been smuggled from Germany until they ended up in this Fransiscan hospital in Hoboken NJ. Until they learned English and could work etc they were being given a place to live but because the nuns had no coed facilities they originally were separated – the wife living in the nurses dorm and the husband living in the residents dorm. Hence my Mom’s friendship with this family which caused her to have a very great sense of revulsion re: the Nazi’s and the holocaust which was expressed to her kids often. As children we often had discussions – especially about the people who sheltered Anne Frank. I have no doubt my mother would have resisted the Nazi’s and would assuredly have sheltered Jews and other people who were being hunted down by the Nazi’s. But I doubt very much that I would have the courage to shelter people if the penalty of discovery was that I and my family would end up in a concentration camp too. But I would have the courage to resist those “early” steps. So to my mind it is more important to identify what starts a people in this horrifying and revolting direction than to contemplate what one would do once you get to the point of people being rounded up. We know from our history as humans that most of us would sit back – perhaps with great discomfort – but sit back never the less and watch others get carted off.
This is why I think we should pay attention to the ways in which we use language, the way in which we react to what others say. There are lots of things going on in our society today which look like “early steps” to me – the anti intellectualism, the tendency to demonize the other side, the unwillingness to demonstrate respect for people who have dissenting POV to our own and of course garden variety ignorance. Granted these kinds of “early steps” have been around forever and they don’t lead always to genocide. But in circumstances of stress every society will try to find its scapegoats so it makes sense to me to avoid making the scapegoats.
I agree with Simon in that we should face this honestly – few would have the courage to risk their lives to protect others. If we face that – it can provide us with the motivation to then resist that which we do have the courage to resist – those early steps which create social environments that lead to brutality against others.
captcha: mistreat The

Interesting question, Rod. You’re going out on the old blog on a good note, Rod.
This is one of those questions that is particularly difficult for Americans to work through. We mostly have not been a subjugated people in modern times, although we had slavery at one time. And some of our immigrants came and still come from nations where citizens were suppressed. It’s not just working at a camp such as you describe that defines life under totalitarian rule. At its core, there would be less evil actions. Dehumanizing conditions such as not being able to speak your mind, not having mutiple political parties to choose among, and not being able to debate issues are foreign to us. As some posters noted on the thread about Poland after World War II, we haven’t lived through any of that. Much of Eastern Europe lived through Nazi and Soviet oppression. (I especially liked a cable tv movie from about 5 years ago about Karol Wojtyla. It captured the oppressiveness of living under Nazi and Soviet regimes. I don’t remember the title, something about the man who became Pope. A Polish production, it covered Wojtyla’s life from the 930s to when he became Pope.
As a history buff, I’ve read a fair bit about World War II and also about the period between the two world wars. Hitler did not come to power through heading a majority party. He came in 2nd in the 1932 presidential election with a little over a third of the vote. Rather, he came to power by consolidating power after being named chancellor in 1933. He was able to ram through a law which made his party the only legal one in Germany. Given that, I wouldn’t argue that there was unanimity among Germans as to his goals and objectives. That’s not to say that a lot of people didn’t go along to get along. Or just kept their heads down. But the resistance—groups such as The White Rose or Stauffenberg’s military group—was not large in number and certainly not high profile. For any of us to say, “I’d join the resistnce” posits something more similar to what was possible in Vichy France (a nation overrun by another nation) than in Germany itself.
It’s hard for us to place ourselves mentally in the position of people who lived under Hitler and under Stalin in situations dominated by fear. Where what you have in your own heart is deemed meaningless and even dangerous. Here’s how it would be in U.S. terms. Someone seizes power and outlaws all parties but his. We lose our right to debate his actions publicly. Not only that, we have to be careful not to be viewed as enemies of the state. Maybe we would feel pressure on the job to go out and rally, shouting slogans in support of someone we actually oppose. (It would be like Gore supporters being required by their bosses to go out and rally for Bush. Or McCain supporters being required to go out and rally for Obama.
Erin, let’s say the chief of state in this country who has imposed one party control supports some actions that you oppose. You would have no right to write protests in Internet comments. Not only that, he would control your external life to a large extent, although you still would control your internal life (as the Wojtyla movie captured so well). You might even be asked to send your children to Party Youth camps so they could be indoctrinated ideologically. If you were lucky, you could get away with working a low profile little job somewhere, as a baker or seamstress, without being forced to hand out leaflets supporting actions (such as abortion, since you brought it up) you actually oppose. But even then, as you listened to the party faithful praise the dictator as they visited your shop, you would have to wear an expression of neutrality, at best, never betraying even with a frown, that you hated him. That’s not our experience in the U.S. We have been lucky. The people of Europe? Not so much.

In her essay “The Concentration Camp SS as a functional elite,” Professor Karin Orth shows that SS guards and officers were not coerced to carry out extermination policies. They were recruited from middle class families, they were high school drop-outs, and they were often unemployed in the depression of the 1930s. They were politicized in their youth and belonged to Nazi youth groups even before Hitler came to power. The SS was a career short-cut to positions of leadership. Orth discovered that they often initiated techniques of mass murder; she shows that they specifically picked out Jewish prisoners for acts of violence, and the insecticide Zyklon B was first used at Auschwitz for mass murder at the “initiative” of the SS.
There was no moral dilemma for SS guards.

Yes, you have to differentiate between the regular German army (Wehrmacht), whose ranks were filled with conscripts as well as volunteers, and the SS, which grew out of the Sturmabteilung and started out as a paramility arm of the Nazi party. An elite group, its members were considered personally loyal to Hitler as an individual and leader. Within the SS, you had the Waffen-SS, which was the fighting force, and the regular SS (security forces).

Sorry, that should be paramilitary, obviously.

For those unfamilliar with The White Rose student anti-Nazi resistance in Germany, check out the Wikipedia article which summarizes it activities quite well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose
Sobering but provides a glimpse of man’s (and woman’s) courage.

Aaron is right. The guards actually lived a pretty good life aside from their work. They had tons of positive social reinforcement and viewed their victims as vermin. They had no moral dilemma to deal with.
The folks who had the real dilemma were the Wehrmacht officers who occasionally had to deal with the SS and they were the ones who conspired to kill Hitler. Unfortunately, being good Europeans, they decided to use a bomb instead of a man on a rooftop with a rifle. (One could hardly say that they had a shortage of men with rifles!)

God, Erin’s critics are failing to engage with her substantive points and changing the subject by throwing juvenile insults more than usual. And that’s quite the challenge!

Cultural conservative, the comment to which you reacted @6:47 has been deleted. But since you mentioned engagement, I would say this. I mentioned Erin, did not criticize her here, but chose not to engage with her points. Why did I not engage her? I happen to believe that the approach she takes in arguing her issue does more harm than good. If I were a young woman, which I’m not, I probably would read her arguments here and turn around and write a check contributing to Planned Parenthood, just because I could (was free to do so). And I happen to largely oppose abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or danger to health.
This thread is about totalitarian states. The issue she raised is not one that is viewed with unanimity here in the United States. Current polling show public opinion evenly split on the issue of abortion. I believe the pro-life numbers have gone up largely because the issue has not been shoved down voters’ throats and bundled with other social issues the way it had been during the 1980s and 1990s. That it has faded to the back burner and been de-linked from other sociaol issues has left a lot of younger people with the room to formulate their own opinions, often through chatting quietly amongst themselves, without feeling as if they are being forced to do what “daddy” and “mommy” order them to do. If you want more pro-life thinking among younger voters, that’s a good thing. Overly strident, authoritarian voices could tip the balance the other way among some of them, as it did during the 1990s.
Speaking of being ordered to do things, I would see the question fitting under this thread if we were debating what it would be like to live in a totalitarian society where women would be forced to undergo abortions or forced to carry all pregnancies to term. Otherwise, you’re just introducing a topic on which people in a democratic society have diverse views into a thread dealing people who have few freedoms, no ability to express diverse views, and who are ruled through fear and worries about self preservation. That’s not our world here in the U.S. The Supreme Court has left the matter to the states, where it is handled according to the views of the majorities in the states. That’s nothing like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

Although the perhaps most common excuse used after the war was that ‘if I did not do x I would also have been shot’ there are multiple well attested cases of SS personnel refusing to serve in concentration camps and being transferred elsewhere.
One well known example is SS-Mann Richard Bock who was posted to Auschwitz, witnessed one gassing and immediately demanded a transfer and got it – and many years later was memorably interviewed on the TV series World at War.
As transfer was generally to a combat unit of the Waffen-SS (who themselves committed countless atrocities in the field) this was not a risk-free option – however virtually any physically able German male was likely to end up in a trench under fire at some point and in fact the Waffen-SS frequently sent its new recruits to spend some time as camp guards as this was regarded as an ideal way of rapidly brutalising them.
The second option which was taken by a surprising number of SS officers was to have a real or feigned mental or physical breakdown.
The third option was to remain at your post and attempt some kind of resistance – this was supposedly the course chosen by the SS chemist Kurt Gerstein (fictionalised in the film Amen) who claimed he used his position to try and inform the Vatican of the holocaust (they were profoundly uninterested) and tried to sabotage and delay delivery of the gas he was charged with supplying to the camps.
Two more senior examples were Artur Nebe and Count Helldorf who had both served as Higher SS and Police Leaders in the occupied east and were responsible for many thousands of deaths – but who nevertheless both participated in the plot to kill Hitler and died for their part in it.
For these three the monstrous reality was that only by doing their part in the mass murder machine could they acquire the potential power to stop it. And as they all failed in their resistance activities – which in any case had very little chance of success – I doubt this would satisfy any infernal tribunal.
The fourth option – for which there are attested examples – was suicide.
One of Christopher Browning’s (whose Ordinary Men is fundamental reading)b books has a very significant little example of the round up of the small Jewish community in a single Russian village.
This was carried out not by the SS but by a scratch team made up of every German policeman and civilian in the area.
As by this point no German or Jew in this place could be unaware that transportation meant death this presented every one of these men – policemen, clerks, agronomists, foresters with a profound existential choice.
One un-named German (who if he could be identified must surely count as a righteous gentile) chose to kill himself the night before the operation rather than participate.
Two others who were foresters made a point of instead turning up without weapons, argued vociferously against their orders and delayed the operation for vital hours, filed a formal complaint through the proper channels and told to hold the village perimeter deliberately let those who tried to flee through their part of the cordon escape.
(Ironically the most active of the two foresters was to be killed not by the Nazis for his insubordination but by a Jewish partisan unit’s bomb that destroyed the train he was returning to Germany on).
But as Browning, Hilberg and so many other writers tell us the easy option for those who were repelled by their task (and even Himmler and Eichmann were reputed to have been physically sickened by executions they themselves witnessed) was to try and minimise their part – volunteering to guard the motor pool or perimeter etc rather than take part directly in the Aktions – and again there is ample evidence that officers and NCOs allowed this most passive and futile form of ‘resistance’ as there were generally no shortage of volunteers for the killing squads.
I like to imagine that I’d be in class 1 above but very much doubt that I’d have the moral courage.

@Charles Cosimano, I think the use of a bomb in the July 20 plot of the Stauffenberg group derived from an expectation that it would be effective in killing the dictator in a small enclosed conference room and that the perpetrators would have a chance to flee. Keep in mind, Stauffeberg left the room in which he and others were conferring with Hitler on a pretext (pre-planned phone call). That someone moved the briefcase in which the primed bomb was planted saved Hitler from serious injury or death. Just shooting him, as Ghandi was assassinated, would have resulted in the immediate arrest and killing of the assailant. The July 20 plot was linked to a planned coup d’etat, which I believe also affected the means used to try to kill Hitler. Several thousand people were arrested after July 20, effectively breaking up the militry resistance.
To get a sense of what it was like for the military to deal with a man such as Hitler in the final days of the war, I recommend the film Untergang (2004). The title means downfall. The film vividly captures the last 10 days of Hitler’s life in 1945.

“This thread is about totalitarian states”.
I’m not sure it is. it’s about the extent to which ordinary people, who don’t think of themselves as wicked, can persuade themselves to commit grievously wrong acts, or be complicit therein. And Erin’s comment engaged with that issue. It was perhaps unwise, as it raised the culture war temperature on an otherwise not very culture war-y thread, but it was perfectly within the bounds of rational, relevant debate.

@Cultural Conservative, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. OK by me (yay democracy).

@Cultural Conservative, your answer deserves more than just my flippant “yah democracy.” So here it is. As I pointed out, opinion is split on Erin’s issue. No one side has prevailed in the last 30 years and in a nation such as ours, is unlikely to do so, certainly not by fiat. Since I’m Protestant, not Catholic, I can and do argue for use of artificial contraceptives. Others can’t because they oppose them. That creates an irreconcilable divide from the get go, right there, on issues relating to conception.
On this and any other issue, I do remain firm in my view that finger wagging isn’t always effective. That just reflects my personality. I’m not submissive, not naturally drawn to authoritarian, hierarchical environments, and very much a “don’t fence me in” person. There’s a classic type who when a wife says, “you better take out the trash” thinks and sometimes says out loud, “when I’m good and ready, I sure as heck won’t hop to it right now, this very minute, cuz you say so.” That’s me on a lot of issues. I have to be persuaded.
Except in situations involving an employer, I’m not likely to be commanded in situations or persudaded by dramaz where there is free will and room for disagreement and debate. If it were my job to run a program encouraging young women to have their babies, despite her obvious earnestness and good intentions, I wouldn’t hire Erin to help me. I’d hire someone else who can reach more people.

“God, Erin’s critics are failing to engage with her substantive points and changing the subject by throwing juvenile insults more than usual. And that’s quite the challenge!”
Actually, I’m pretty ambivalent about choice. I feel differently by the day. Generally, they’re discussions I prefer to stay out of. I’m not, however, ambivalent about holocaust comparisons, and I’m very consistent about that. I’m pretty well bound to insult people who make them. On a recent thread I went off on a person who compared intermarriage to the holocaust. If there were a future thread where someone compares environmental degradation to the holocaust, I’ll insult them too.
Indy expresses my view about Erin’s rhetoric with the tranquility I lack. However, I will add that there has never been a widespread propaganda campaign to depict fetuses or unborn children as evils to society to be exterminated, nor do echoes of such campaigns routinely appear in contemporary political discourse. I realize in saying this, that people will likely persist with their dimly constructed metaphor. They should recognize, as Indy does, that doing so makes them so rhetorically weak that they can’t punch their way out of paper bags.
But to turn the discussion back to the original topic… The point, I assume, was an uncomfortable kind of self-reflection. I could not reflect uncomfortably without imagining myself not of Jewish birth. I ask myself, how would I react to hell on earth despite being part of it, and wanting to be part of it (whether as a means to an end or an end in itself – that doesn’t matter). How would the reality of it meet with my expectations? Would it be like the fight I scheduled in high school, where the idea of punishing a person in rage turned out to be far more satisfying than the reality (I only hit him once; we became buds. It’s a story as common as rain.)? Would I have deceived myself to accept the “glory” of punishment instead of easing into mercy? Would I have let others deceive me? It would have been easy – there were lots of them. Would mercy in that circumstance actually be less comfortable than hate? Who could I have turned to? It’s a bit funny to someone who is as secular as I am, but it sounds to me like an invitation for prayer.
Then again, I still doubt the usefulness of the exercise. It depends on regarding the memory of the Holocaust as sacred, which is not universally shared here. I had the privilege of visiting the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, which expresses that sacredness. I found it extremely touching that the Germans would do this, and in a way that respectfully avoided iconography in concert with Jewish wishes for rememberance. It is remarkable, and also expresses how Germans are as human now as they were then, just as we are, only better for the memory.