In regards to the Holocaust, what is Bystander?

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.

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