The bookshelves and film racks are filled with accounts of the Holocaust that
focus on three representative figures: the victim, the perpetrator, and the selfless
savior. The victims are the most numerous. Those who were killed, enslaved, and
tortured totaled into the millions with Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, political and
religious activists, and the mentally and physically disabled marked as prime
targets. In pursuit was the Nazi killing machine, Germans and their collaborators,
which methodically organized men and women to annihilate whole communities.
Comparatively, a handful of people later anointed as the “righteous among the
nations,” risked their lives to protect those in danger.1
Missing from these accounts is by far the largest number of people, the
bystanders, who witnessed the Holocaust ravage Europe. They raised no objection
to the horrors that befell their neighbors. They swore their denial of events. Others
would claim that the risk of resistance was too high. What could one man or
woman do under the circumstances? Later some would seek absolution by insisting
that they were merely following orders. They had become bystanders, without will,
to morality. Acquiescing to power and circumstance, disengaged, all of these men
and women, wrote philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, were “silenced by [h]istory.”2
Their silence offers proof of John Stuart Mill’s observation about the bystander:
“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should
look on and do nothing.”3 Decisions about goodness, however, should be withheld.
This essay will consider three aspects in the matter of the bystander during the
Holocaust. First, this essay will consider the intellectual and historical
complexities of defining bystanders and assessing their role. How does the
historian investigate those who remained in the background, blurred faces as
events passed by? Second, this essay will assess the importance of context. How
do specific historical, national, and local circumstances affect bystander behavior?
These factors also open to view the actions of those who collaborated and those.
