Moral Choices in Occupied Europe

Abstract

Throughout Hitler’s Europe people were forced to choose, and to find answers to tragically difficult and unprecedented questions. Jews were often faced with a stark choice between bodily death or spiritual annihilation. The Christian resister confronted the necessity to lie, to deceive, to murder. Officials were faced with the need to violate all professional standards. The occupation years raised profound ethical problems concerning individual responsibility, professional ethics and conflicting duties. Life and death questions. Questions of adherence to pacifist religious principles or saving lives. Questions of patriotism, honour and treason. Questions of political obligation and disobedience: obeying the law or following the dictates of one’s conscience. Questions of utilitarian ethics: choices between a greater or lesser evil. Questions central to the just war tradition which has shaped western attitudes towards violence: when, and under what conditions were killing and violence justified? Questions for every resister to ponder: even if one had a just cause, did one have a right to use any method to defeat Nazism, or were there limits to what was permissible? Disturbing questions concerning the human cost of resistance actions, which jeopardized the lives of one’s fellow countrymen, and whether the price in human suffering was disproportionate to the ends being pursued.

It was one of those rare times when everyone was faced with a moral choice, even though the choice most people made was ‘life as usual’.¹

Ted Morgan

The Occupation, by putting people against a wall and forcing them to make the kind of choices that people should perhaps never be asked to make, pushed them into ambiguities … This was a time of heightened sensitivities … Situations that had never seemed in need of questioning now began to be questioned, and new situations arose for which no response had been formulated.²

Frederick Harris