What Would I Have Done?

A leading expert on Hitler and the Third Reich asks himself this question — and contemplates the costs of passivity.


Whether, as Dr. Johnson claimed, courage is the greatest virtue — greater, that is, than justice or love — is contestable. But is any virtue more difficult to uphold when put to an extreme test? It seems hard to imagine a greater test than standing up for principles, at the risk of life and liberty (also potentially involving friends and family), in the conditions of the unconstrained brutality of a police state. The Nazi regime provides as severe a moral test as can be imagined.

I think I would have failed the test — along with millions of others. When, in 1983, I published one of my first books on the Nazi era, on political dissent in the Third Reich, I remarked: “I should like to think that had I been around at the time I would have been a convinced anti-Nazi engaged in the underground resistance fight. However, I know really that I would have been as confused and felt as helpless as most of the people I am writing about.”

My book was about everyday forms of dissent, not fundamental opposition to Nazism. But even very minor forms of political nonconformity invited recrimination. Telling a political joke, tuning in to foreign radio broadcasts, or even listening to jazz — actions that would not even be noticed in a democracy — were among the manifestations of political nonconformity that could result in imprisonment. In a society that opened the door to denunciation, no form of behavior that the regime saw as a challenge to its authority was free from risk. One needed courage to act in ways that could result in severe reprisals.

Tens of thousands of Germans engaged in activities that went much further than everyday dissent. Their courage derived from principles that would brook no compromise with Nazi ideas and methods. It gained strength from group identity in subcultures that the Nazis could not destroy. Even though their illegal resistance groups were repeatedly infiltrated by Gestapo informers, making membership extremely perilous, Communists kept rebuilding their underground organizations. That took courage. Around 150,000 Communists and Socialists paid for their courage by exposure to grievous maltreatment in concentration camps between 1933 and 1939. Second only, among the German population, to the Communists in the proportion of members persecuted by the Nazis were Jehovah’s Witnesses. Here, too, the courage to defy the demand to comply with Nazi ideals — such as refusal to bear arms or undertake war-related work — persisted despite draconian persecution. Collective fellowship and the faith of devotees replenished the remarkable courage. Even in concentration camps, the Nazi tormentors could not break them down.

In Hitler’s Germany, the merest friendly or compassionate act toward those condemned as “enemies of the people” — first and foremost, the supreme “racial enemy,” the Jews — required enormous courage. So did a readiness to speak out against Nazi persecution. When the Nazi regime destroyed the synagogues in the so-called “Crystal Night” pogroms of November 1938, the major Christian Churches — Catholic and Protestant — remained silent. But some highly courageous priests and pastors from both denominations did condemn what had taken place, and in the knowledge that they would gain no public support. In one such case, after a Protestant pastor had denounced the pogroms from his pulpit, a large gang of Nazi thugs fell upon him like wild animals a few days later, beating him almost unconscious, denouncing him as a slave of Judaism, and dragging him off to prison. Such fearsome retribution attests to the courage it took for him to speak out.

Courage could be close to foolhardiness. When a group of Munich students calling themselves the “White Rose” movement distributed anti-regime leaflets in their university in early 1943, their breathtaking courage was as good as suicidal. Turned in by a university janitor, they were arrested, swiftly tried in a farcical trial, condemned, and immediately guillotined.

Moral courage meant not just personal danger, but social isolation, especially marked for those who decided to risk all in order to try to kill Hitler and bring to an end the death and destruction his regime had inflicted on Europe. In a terrorist police state that would stop at nothing in the destruction of its perceived enemies, the profound courage required to engage in acts of such immense personal danger is deeply moving. It is hard to conceive of the courage of Georg Elser, a joiner from southwest Germany, in the attempt he made, operating completely alone, to assassinate Hitler with a homemade bomb in November 1939. The attempt that came closest to toppling Hitler, that of Claus von Stauffenberg in July 1944, was the culmination of a conspiracy of extraordinarily courageous men from both military and civilian life.

The courage is all the more striking given the awareness of the conspirators that they did not have the support of the German people. Stauffenberg commented that “the man who has the courage to do something must do it in the knowledge that he will go down in German history as a traitor. If he does not do it, however, he will be a traitor to his own conscience.”

Acknowledging the level of courage needed to challenge the Nazi regime even in minor ways, let alone through the actions of the “White Rose,” an Elser, or a Stauffenberg, requires some humility by those of us who, mercifully, have never had to contend with such political ruthlessness. When trying to reach moral judgments on the behavior of Germans under Hitler, we must ask ourselves how we would have behaved. If we think we would have lacked the courage to oppose such a brutal regime, then we have to recognize that we would have been prepared to make compromises and concessions, to reach an accommodation of some sort. And this was the slippery slope, descending steeply into gross inhumanity, as the passivity of the many allowed the radical hatred of a minority — if a fairly large and powerful minority — swiftly to gain ground and to engender the most devastating breach of civilization the world has yet encountered. ;

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Sir Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography of Hitler has had a profound impact on the way the world looks at the Nazi dictator and his times. His most recent book is Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940–1941. He was knighted in 2002 for his services in the field of history.