The moment that defined my feelings about Germany came very early, before the mass killings had begun. At college I was being instructed in physics by a Nobel Prize winner, James Franck, who came to Johns Hopkins because as a Jew he had been fired from his professorship in Germany. The next year, Jan Masaryk appeared on campus as a guest professor. The Germans had taken over Czechoslovakia, and he had no choice but to take flight. He had been foreign minister of the government which the Germans swept away, and, more damaging still, he was the son of Thomas Masaryk, the legendary first elected president of Czechoslovakia. In class with James Franck and Jan Masaryk, I started to wonder how large an immigration they represented. It was clear that Jewish intellectuals had no choice but to leave, but how many of their Gentile colleagues joined them in the spirit of resistance? How many chose to stay as "internal emigres," having as little as possible to do with the Nazi regime? How many accepted the new Fascist order, some even with enthusiasm?
To be sure, some prominent figures did leave rather than live among the Nazis. They included the famous writer Thomas Mann, who left for Switzerland; the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who took asylum in the United States; and a young Willi Brandt, who fled to Sweden.
I had grown up believing that Germany was a towering beacon of advanced culture. I wanted to trust that in 1933 the intellectual elite would spring to the defense of their Jewish compatriots or join them in exile. They were the Jews' best hope. But my trust proved to be ill-placed. The overwhelmingly majority of the German intelligentsia remained silent or collaborated. The world-famous philosopher Martin Heidegger became an avowed, passionate Nazi, unhesitatingly taking over the rector's chair at the University of Freiburg a day or so after Hitler threw out the liberal scientist who then graced that office. But most of the professors and scholars not only chose to remain on German soil, as Max Weinreich's seminal book, Hitler's Professors (1946) proved, most of the luminaries of German academic life, in the humanities and in the sciences, chose to serve the regime. The rapidly advancing technology of the Nazi war machine required very high theoretical and technical skills. Men and women who were at the advancing edge of science, many of whom had been avowed liberals before 1933, helped the evil regime invent technologies of mass destruction, including the gas chambers and crematoria.
I looked at the churches in Germany, hoping that there I might find more compassion, kindness, and courage. There was some resistance to the Nazis' treatment of Jews, but it was not very substantial. The Lutheran Church actively collaborated, and some of its leaders wore Nazi crosses on their clerical gowns. The Roman Catholic bishops did not confront the regime, even after they knew about the death camps. They did not excommunicate the Nazis. Edith Stein, the nun of Jewish extraction who is now being canonized by the Pope, was essentially abandoned by her order. They would not take the risk of hiding her from the Nazis, and so she died in Auschwitz, not as a Catholic martyr but for the sin of her Jewish birth. Yes, there were individuals who acted with towering heroism to defend Jews, some of whom were caught, tortured, and murdered. But these were few.
The only other institution in Germany that was capable of offering some resistance to Hitler was the army. Its generals came from an old aristocracy, the Junkers, who supposedly were men of honor. With few exceptions, there was not enough honor to resist Hitler's campaign to exterminate the Jews. As the news began to leak out about the mass murders, it was often accompanied by the comment that the actual atrocities were being committed by the SS officers and troops, the parallel army of convinced Nazis, and not by the regular army. This became less and less believable as we learned that the earliest atrocities were carried out by special units of the army and not by the SS. In the half century since the end of the war, enough information has accumulated for it to be clear, beyond any doubt, that the German army of those days was guilty beyond forgiveness of willing and even eager complicity in the Holocaust. The Austrian Kurt Waldheim served in Salonika, while its entire Jewish community was sent to its death, not in the uniform of the SS but of the German army.
Because I know all this, I have never been able to set foot in Germany. I might have, perhaps, if I could have convinced myself that my grandfather and all of my mother's siblings and their families were murdered by a brutish element in Germany while the decent majority resisted. On the contrary, it was ordinary Germans, as Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen have documented, who collaborated in bringing this catastrophe upon the world.
Sometimes, I think I must finally make an end of my quarrel with the Germans, that I must go and see what they have done to build a new democracy. I know that the Germans have gone farther than any other European nation in facing their past, but I still cannot bring myself to get on the airplane bound for Frankfurt, Berlin, or Munich. I cannot face Germans of my own generation--that is, those who lived through the Nazi era as adults--without remembering that more of them are guilty than innocent--at the very least of the sin of silence. At the airport I would brush past men and women in their seventies and ask myself, person by person: is that the one who gassed my family?
Normally in our interactions with strangers, we presume they are decent unless proven otherwise. I confess that my feelings about my own German contemporaries (and for that matter about that generation in most of Europe) is in reverse. I cannot help but start with the presumption that they are guilty until I hear something that convinces me otherwise.
Nevertheless, it would represent an ironic triumph of racism if I were to impute the sin of Nazism to their children and grandchildren. For many years I have gone out of my way to make friends with two generations of German students whom I have met in the United States and Israel. Obviously, those who have wanted to speak or study with me are a self-selecting group who are wrestling with the German past and the German future.
Will I ever go to Germany? I do not know. But I do recognize the ultimate restraint on me. As a Jew who lost most of his family during the Holocaust, to go to Germany is an act of forgiveness. Those Germans who were not yet alive, or who were children during the Holocaust, do not need forgiveness. Those who are old enough to need it, neither I nor anyone else can forgive.
Back to Winter 1997
Copyright © 1997, Union of American Hebrew Congregations
Back to UAHC home page