How did ordinary Germans come to terms with living within the Nazi dictatorship? How much did they know about the atrocities that were taking place? And under what circumstances did they help or hinder the Nazi regime? Here, Professor Mary Fulbrook – author of a new book about bystanding – examines the slippery slope from conformity to complicity in the Third Reich – and discusses the emergence of the ‘innocent bystander’ myth in German society…
Mary Fulbrook is professor of German history at University College London, and the author of Bystander Society, Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2023). Professor Fulbrook was talking to Rebecca Franks on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full episode here
Why did you want to write a book about bystanding in Nazi Germany?
I’ve often wondered how millions of people living through the Nazi regime came to terms with it. How did they understand the period they were living through?
Some historians have considered Nazi Germany very much as a ‘perpetrator society’. Some contemporaries – post-war particularly – have considered Germans in Nazi Germany to be ‘bad Germans’. Other historians have talked about it as a consensus dictatorship, pointing to the high numbers of enthusiastic Nazis and the people who saw Hitler as a great saviour.
I believe that it was a lot more complex. I strongly disagree with the idea that Germans operated as a homogenous mass; they navigated their way through an extremely complex and demanding period of history.
How would you define a bystander?
I don’t look at bystanders as individuals, and then argue about personality characteristics or what features of their own psychology might cause them to act one way or another. What I try and understand is the way in which a society can foster a widespread tendency to remain passive in the face of violence.
Bystanders are defined in relational terms. A bystander is somebody who happens to be a witness to, or near to, an incident of violence. They are neither the direct perpetrator, nor the direct victim of violence. They do tend to lean one way or another; they’re either showing a tendency towards complicity with the perpetrator side, or sympathy towards the victim. This works in democratic societies, where you can report violent incidents, ring the police, call for medical help.
But you can only momentarily be neutral, or an ‘innocent bystander’. An innocent bystander is how most people like to portray themselves – the idea being that they are not involved, not the perpetrators. But the reality is that the longer you are present at a conflict between perpetrators and victims – and the longer you remain passive – the more you are condoning the violence.
What does this mean for the notion of bystanding in a dictatorship like the Third Reich?
What I find interesting about Nazi Germany – and it’s the case in many other authoritarian and autocratic regimes too – is that the state itself is instigating and condoning the violence. There is no external authority to whom bystanders could report offences.
The question I’m particularly interested in is what lead Germans to be more likely to continually remain passive? Over the period as a whole, there are three factors which explain German passivity overall: indifference, ignorance and impotence.
Indifference can be rooted in deep anti-Semitism, but it can also be rooted in just not caring about people that you don’t see very often. An individual may start to disassociate from former Jewish friends for a whole variety of reasons; perhaps it’s not good for their career to be seen consorting with Jews, for example. In 1933–34, having even one Jewish grandparent was sufficient to lose you a job in the civil service.
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From 1935 onwards, there was compliance with the Nuremberg Laws [a series of laws which stripped rights from Jewish people who lived in Germany] and many people began to feel that there was no point protesting. In April 1933, some non-Jewish Germans did protest the boycott of Jewish shops – but by 1935 there was more of a general feeling that they couldn’t change anything.
This is impotence. Coupled with the awareness of the severe penalties that came from refusing to go along with the regime – knowledge of people being brutally beaten up when they were arrested, and taken to concentration camps – many people felt that the risks were too great and the likelihood of changing anything was too small.
There are awful incidents recorded in the archival materials. For example, a man tried to stop a crowd from looting the goods from a Jewish department store. The crowd responded by killing him with a blow to the head. For the Nazis, this would not have been a criminal offence.
I think we can see why people increasingly no longer wanted to know about it. This is why indifference and ignorance come in alongside impotence, because people increasingly found it easier to turn away.
You argue that there was a slippery slope from conformity to complicity in the Nazi regime. What was a key tipping point?
There are some obvious public tipping points. First there is the Anschluss with Austria in the spring of 1938. Then there is Kristallnacht, which saw the burning of synagogues and the smashing up of Jewish businesses and homes in November 1938. A lot of German Jews realised at this stage that they would have to try and emigrate, so this was a tipping point for the Jewish community. But I think it was also a tipping point for non-Jewish Germans who – for the first time – could not claim ignorance about what was happening. Mass violence against Jews was visible everywhere across the Third Reich.
Many Germans even took the opportunity to assist in looting, and benefitted from the smashing up of properties and department stores. They became more complicit.
Some people did say that they were ashamed to be German, but they would never be too critical of the regime. They had to phrase their sense of shock and horror in ways that the regime itself would find acceptable, so comments like: “What a waste of windows this is! In a time of economic difficulty, we shouldn’t be smashing up property like this.”
Kristallnacht was a very ambivalent moment for many Germans. They were constrained to go along with their own national community while still feeling a sense of both shame and sympathy for the victim.
I think for the Nazis, it showed that they can engage in outright, brute violence, force, arson and murder without anyone standing up in public to protest. Nobody was willing to risk a public protest. They might give assistance in private, but they would not come out and protest in public.
Some Germans were more likely to take the personal risk of helping victims. But under what conditions did this happen?
During the peacetime years, a lot of Germans managed to live quite a double life. There are examples of Germans who would do the ‘correct’ Nazi things in public, but invited Jewish people into their homes for private social events. Often these were affluent individuals with large homes and gardens. I think if you were in more constrained circumstances – for example, if you were an ordinary working-class mother – you were more likely to conform. It depended on your social situation.
Things shifted during wartime, when most Germans were in a very different situation. Every German family knew someone who had been called up. Of those fighting at the front, certainly hundreds of thousands were involved in the persecution and mass murder of Jews on the eastern front. We don’t have exact figures – historians debate this – but many Germans either facilitated or participated in mass murder – and certainly witnessed it, knew about it, and wrote about it.
What can you tell us about the emergence of the idea of the ‘innocent bystander’ in German society?
There is evidence of this myth as early as April 1945.
When the Allies interrogated Germans in late 1944, they found that Germans were perfectly willing to talk about everything they knew concerning the atrocities on the eastern front – and “everybody knew about it”. This is evidenced in diaries and letters, too.
By April 1945, when Germans were forced to confront what Germany had been engaged in – they walk around the concentration camp Buchenwald, for example, and see the piles of corpses – they started saying “we never knew anything about it”. “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst” is the refrain.
With this myth of ignorance, people could claim they were an innocent bystander. If they didn’t know what was happening, then they couldn’t have done anything about it. But it’s totally self-contradictory when you look at people’s own accounts of their own lives in denazification reports. For example, they often say “I never knew anything about it”, while also saying “I tried to help a Jewish person”. It’s a complex and often inconsistent set of claims.
One of the real shifts came with the trials of key Nazis and the major concentration camps through the 1960s and ’70s, where the notion of ‘who was a perpetrator?’ is narrowed until the definition is either a frontline killer or somebody at the top who gave direct orders.
This is the myth of having to obey, and it implies that everyone else must have been merely an innocent bystander.
This whole shift in cultural perceptions of how the Nazi regime developed is born, which effectively excludes most of the population from having been complicit or, in some way, more actively involved in perpetration.