Abstract
This chapter examines the role of bystanders in genocide. To achieve their objectives perpetrators had to rely on bystanders to be neutral or supportive. Bystanders are not victims or perpetrators, but they can easily be swept into supporting one or the other sides in a genocidal conflict. Borrowing from Gregory Mellema’s discussion on complicity the author considers nine ways that bystanders could have become complicitous. Their omissions, endorsements, and cooperation could count as complicitous behaviors. Four case studies are considered to demonstrate how actors became complicitous in the Holocaust: the case of Pastor Martin Niemöller, the case of A. J. Topf & Sons, the case of the German church, and the case of neighboring nations. In order these cases represent a loyal citizen who endorsed the politics of the Nazis, a corporation making goods to be used for mass murder, a social collective supportive of the genocide, and a sovereign nation that refused to intervene in the initial stages of mass murder. Attention is given to the failure of churches to speak out against the killing of Jews. In genocide perpetrators can anticipate and take advantage of the complicity of bystanders.
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Notes
- 1.
Anthony Apia, “Racism and Moral Pollution,” The Philosophical Forum 18 (2–3, 1986): 187.
- 2.
Gregory Mellema, Complicity and Moral Accountability (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), 3.
- 3.
Mellema, Complicity and Moral Accountability, 4.
- 4.
Mellema, Complicity and Moral Accountability, 10.
- 5.
Matthew D. Hockenos, Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor Who Defied the Nazis. First edition (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 135.
- 6.
Hockenos, Then They Came for Me, 148.
- 7.
Hockenos, Then They Came for Me, 110.
- 8.
See “A Perfectly Normal Company”. https://www.topfundsoehne.de/ts/en/exhibitions/permanent_exhibitions/the_engineers/128598.html.
- 9.
Karen Bartlett, Architects of Death: The Family Who Engineered the Death Camps (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 159.
- 10.
Bartlett, Architects of Death, 159.
- 11.
Kyle Jantzen, Faith and the Fatherland: Parish Politics in Hitler’s Germany (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 2008), 5.
- 12.
Bernard J. Bergen, The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt and “the Final Solution” (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 163. The role of Pope Pius XII is not discussed at length in this volume. His complicity is discussed in Killian McDonnell, “Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust: Fear of Reprisals and Generic Diplomacy.” Gregorianum 83 (2, 2002): 313–34. For an in-depth analysis of his complicity see David I. Kertzer, The pope at war: the secret history of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler (New York: Random House, 2022).
- 13.
Bergan, The Banality of Evil, 164.
- 14.
Jantzen, Faith and the Fatherland: Parish Politics in Hitler’s Germany, 108.
- 15.
Jantzen, Faith and the Fatherland: Parish Politics in Hitler’s Germany, p. 109.
- 16.
Edward Shapiro, “America and the Bombing of Auschwitz: The Importance of Asking the Right Questions,” Society, 56 (6, 2019): 625–33.
- 17.
Shapiro, “America and the Bombing of Auschwitz,” 626.
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Wilson, P.E. (2023). Bystanders to Genocide. In: The Degradation of Ethics Through the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30919-9_11
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