What would you have done?

They thought they were free
Milton Mayer
Chapter 4, What would you have done?, pp. 71-83

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None of my ten friends ever encountered anybody
connected with the operation of the deportation system or
the concentration camps. None of them ever knew, on a
personal basis, anybody connected with the Gestapo, the
Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service), or the Einsatzgruppen
(the Occupation Detachments, which followed the German
armies eastward to conduct the mass killing of Jews). None
of them ever knew anybody who knew anybody connected
with these agencies of atrocity. Even Policeman Hotmeister,
who had to arrest Jews for protective custody or
resettlement and who saw nothing wrong in giving the
Jews land, where they could learn to work with their hands
instead of with money, never knew anyone whose shame
or shamelessness might have reproached him had they
stood face to face. The fact that the Police Chief of
Kronenberg made him sign the orders to arrest Jews told
him only that the Chief himself was afraid of getting into
trouble higher up.
Sixty days before the end of the war, Teacher Hildebrandt,
as a first lieutenant in command of a disintegrating Army
subpost, was informed by the post doctor that an SS man
attached to the post was going crazy because of his
memories of shooting down Jews "in the East"; this was the
closest any of my friends came to knowing of the
systematic butchery of National Socialism.
I say none of these ten men knew; and, if none of them,
very few of the seventy million Germans. The proportion,
which was none out of ten in Kronenberg, would, certainly,
have been higher among more intelligent, or among more
sensitive or sophisticated people in, say, Kronenberg
University or in the big cities where people circulate more

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widely and hear more. But I must say what I mean by
"know."
By know I mean knowledge, binding knowledge. Men who
are going to protest or take even stronger forms of action, in
a dictatorship more so than in a democracy, want to be sure.
When they are sure, they still may not take any form of
action (in my ten friends' cases, they would not have, I
think); but that is another point. What you hear of
individual instances, second- or thirdhand, what you guess
as to general conditions, having put half-a-dozen instances
together, what someone tells you he believes is the case --
these may, all together, be convincing. You may be
"morally certain," satisfied in your own mind. But moral
certainty and mental satisfaction are less than binding
knowledge. What you and your neighbours don't expect you
to know, your neighbours do not expect you to act on, in
matters of this sort, and neither do you.
Men who participated in the operation of the atrocity
system -- would they or wouldn't they tell their wives? The
odds are even in Germany, where husbands don't bother to
tell their wives as much as we tell ours. But their wives
would not tell other people, and neither would they; their
jobs were, to put it mildly, of a confidential character. In
such work, men, if they talk, lose their jobs. Under Nazism,
they lost more than their jobs. I am not saying that the men
in question, the men who had first-hand knowledge,
opposed the system in any degree or even resented having
to play a role in it; I am saying, in the words of Cabinet-
maker Klingelhofer, that that is the way men are; and the
more reprehensible the work in which they are voluntarily
or involuntarily engaged, the more that way they are.

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I pushed this point with Tailor Marowitz in Kronenberg,
the one Jew still there who had come back from
Buchenwald. On his release, in 1939, he was forbidden to
talk of his experience, and, in case he might become
thoughtless, he was compelled to report (simply report) to
the police every day. Whom did he tell of his Buchenwald
experience? His wife and "a couple of my very closest
friends -- Jews, of course."
"How widely was the whole thing known in Kronenberg
by the end of the war?"
"You mean the rumors?"
"No -- how widely was the whole thing, or anything,
known?"
"Oh. Widely, very widely."
"How?"
"Oh, things seeped through somehow, always quietly,
always indirectly. So people heard rumors, and the rest they
could guess. Of course, most people did not believe the
stories of Jews or other opponents of the regime. It was
naturally thought that such persons would all exaggerate."
Rumors, guesses enough to make a man know if he
wanted badly to know, or at least to believe, and always
involving persons who would be suspected, "naturally", of
exaggerating. Goebbels' immediate subordinate in charge of
radio in the Propaganda Ministry testified at Nuremberg
that he had heard of the gassing of Jews, and went to
Goebbels with the report. Goebbels said it was false,
"enemy propaganda," and that was the end of it. The
Nuremberg tribunal accepted this man's testimony on this
point and acquitted him. None of my ten friends in
Kronenberg -- nor anyone else in Kronenberg -- was the

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immediate subordinate of a cabinet minister. Anti-Nazis no
less than Nazis let the rumors pass -- if not rejecting them,
certainly not accepting them; either they were enemy
propaganda or they sounded like enemy propaganda, and,
with one's country fighting for its life and one's sons and
brothers dying in war, who wants to hear, still less repeat,
even what sounds like enemy propaganda?
Who wants to investigate the reports? Who is "looking for
trouble"? Who will be the first to undertake (and how
undertake it?) to track down the suspicion of governmental
wrongdoing under a governmental dictatorship, to occupy
himself, in times of turmoil and in wartime with evils, real
or rumored, that are wholly outside his own life, outside his
own circle, and, above all, outside his own power? After all,
what if one found out?
Suppose that you have heard, second-hand, or even first-
hand, of an instance in which a man was abused or tortured
by the police in a hypothetical American community. You
tell a friend whom you have trying to persuade that the
police are rotten. He doesn't believe you. He wants first-
hand, or, if you got it second-hand, at least second-hand
testimony. You go to your original source, who has told you
the story only because of his absolute trust in you. You want
him now to tell a man he doesn't trust, a friend of the police.
He refuses. And he warns you that if you use his name as
authority for the story, he will deny it. Then you will be
suspect, suspected of spreading false rumors against the
police. And as it happens, the police in this hypothetical
American community, are rotten, and they'll "get" you
somehow.
So, after all, what if one found out in Nazi Germany

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(which was no hypothetical American community)? What if
one came to know? What then?
There was nichts dagegen zu machen, "nothing to do about
it." Again and again my discussions with each of my friends
reached this point, one way or another, and this very
expression; again and again this question, put to me with
the wide-eyed innocence that always characterizes the
guilty when they ask it of the inexperienced: "What would
you have done?"
What is the proportion of revolutionary heroes, of saints
and martyrs, or, if you will, troublemakers, in Stockholm,
Ankara, El Paso? We in America have not had the German
experience, where even private protest was dangerous,
where even secret knowledge might be extorted; but what
we did we expect the good citizen of Minneapolis or
Charlotte to do when, in the midst of war, he was told,
openly and officially, that 112,000 of his fellow-Americans,
those of Japanese ancestry on the American West Coast,
had been seized without warrant and sent without due
process of law to relocation centers? There was nichts
dagegen zu machen -- not even by the United States
Supreme Court, which found that the action was within the
Army's power -- and, anyway, the good citizen of
Minneapolis or Charlotte had his own troubles.
It was this, I think, -- they had their own troubles -- that in
the end explained my friends' failure to "do something" or
even to know something. A man can carry only so much
responsibility. If he tries to carry more, he collapses; so, to
save himself from collapse, he rejects the responsibility that
exceeds his capacity. There are responsibilities he must
carry, in any case, and these, heavy enough under normal

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conditions, are intensified, even multiplied, in times of
great change, be they bad times or good. My friends carried
their normal responsibilities well enough; every one of
them was a good householder and, with the possible
exception of Tailor Schwenke, a good jobholder. But they
were unaccustomed to assume public responsibility.
The public responsibilities which Nazism forced upon
them -- they didn't choose to assume them when they chose
to be Nazis -- exceeded their capacities. They didn't know,
or think, at the beginning, that they were going to have to
carry a guilty knowledge or a guilty conscience. Anti-
Nazism of any sort, in thought or in feeling (not to say
action), would have required them, as isolated individuals,
already more heavily burdened than they were accustomed
to being, to choose to burden themselves beyond their limit.
And this, I think, is always the case with public
responsibilities of a volunteer nature -- in Germany,
America, anywhere -- which promise, at best, a deferred
reward and, at worst, an imminent penalty.
The American is much better accustomed than the German
to responsibilities of a volunteer character, but the principle
of rejection is operative here in the United States, too,
although the load limit is greater. The greater the combined
load of my private and required public responsibility, the
weaker my impulse to take volunteer public responsibility;
if I'm building a new house and I have to enrol in Civilian
Defense, my work with the Boys' Club will suffer. And
anti-Nazism in a Nazi dictatorship was no Boys' Club.
Responsible men never shirk responsibility, and so, when
they must reject it, they deny it. They draw the curtain.
They detach themselves altogether from the consideration

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of they evil they ought to, but cannot, contend with. Their
denial compels their detachment. A good man -- even a
good American -- running to catch a train on an important
assignment has to pass by the beating of a dog on the street
and concentrate on catching the train; and, once on the
train, he has to consider the assignment about which he
must do something, rather than the dog-beating about which
he can do nothing. If he is running fast enough and his
assignment is mortally important, he will not even notice
the dog-beating when he passes it by.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, with its fantastically
rapid development of a central record of an ever increasing
number of Americans, law-abiding and lawless, is
something new in America. But it is very old in Germany,
and it had nothing to do with National Socialism except to
make it easier for the Nazi government to locate and trace
the whole life-history of any and every German. The
Germany system -- it has its counterpart in other European
countries, including France -- was, being German,
extraordinarily efficient. American tourists are familiar with
the police identity cards they fill out pro forma at
Continental hotel desks. Resident nationals don't fill out a
card when they come to live in a German town or leave it;
they fill out a life-history for the police.
Policeman Hofmeister explained to me, with enthusiasm,
how thoroughly the identity system meshed in Germany,
before Nazism, during Nazism, and since Nazism. Every
town has a criminal registry which contains, always up to
date, the record of every person born in the town (no matter
where he now lives) who has ever been in "trouble"; in
addition, the registry contains the whole record of any

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person who has ever committed a crime (or been arrested)
in the town, no matter where he was born. "Consider," said
Policeman Hofmeister, an unenthusiastic Nazi, "how nearly
impossible it is, and always has been, in Germany for
anyone to escape or 'lose' himself. In such a country, my
friend, law and order rule always."
How nearly impossible it is to escape, once a man has
come into conflict with the police. Better, far, if you have
ever before come into conflict with them (or if you suspect
that you have ever come under their suspicion), to come
into contact with them on their side; best of all, never come
into contact with them at all. Don't see the dog-beating on
the street or the wife-beating or the Jew-beating or
anything. You have your own troubles.
Everyone everywhere has his own troubles. Two hundred
miles from Kronenberg was the great chemicals plant of
Tesch & Stabinow. In 1942, the manager -- he is not a "little
man," like my friends, but a manager -- gets his first
government order for Cyclon-B gas, which could be used as
an insecticide but wouldn't be likely to be (especially since
the order is "classified," secret). Now Tesch & Stabinow
has been producing poison gases for the Army's chemical
warfare service, which has a colonel of engineers attached
to the plant for consultation. But this order is not for the
Army, and there has been no consultation. The manager
may have heard, or guessed, that the famous "final solution
of the Jewish problem" was to be mass death by gas;
Cyclon-B would be the most suitable preparation for this
limited purpose. We learned at Nuremberg that the entire
extermination program was directed without written orders,
a remarkable fact in itself; still, a big man whose business is

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poison gas for the government may have heard, or guessed.
Perhaps the manager shows the order to the colonel, who is
not a "little" man, either.
What did these two big men -- not little men, like the
Nazis I knew -- do then, at that moment, with the
government order on the desk between them?
What they did say?
What didn't they say?
That is what we did not find out at Nuremberg. That is
what we never find out at Nuremberg. That is what we have
to imagine. And how are we to imagine it? -- We are not
colonels or plant managers or Nazis, big or little, with a
government order on the desk between us, are we?
Everyone has his own troubles.
None of my ten Nazi friends ever knew -- I say knew -- of
these great governmental systems of crime against
humanity. None of them except possibly (quite probably, I
believe) Tailor Schwenke, the SA Sturmfuhrer, ever did
anything that we should call wrong by the measure we
apply to ourselves. These men were, after all, respectable
men, like us. The former bank clerk, Kessler, told his
Jewish friend, former Bank Director Rosenthal, the day
before the synagogue arson in 1938, that "with men like me
in the Party," men of moral and religious feeling, "things
will be better, you'll see." And Hildebrandt, the teacher,
thought that it had to be expected, under the conditions that
obtained in Germany just before Nazism, that the
movement would be proletarian and radical, with fools and
villains in positions of leadership, "but as more and more
decent citizens joined it, it would certainly change for the
better and become a burgerlich, bourgeois development.

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