New Archive:

March 2000 Issue, Volume 1

Good Germans?

By Leonard Fein

Good Germans? Until recently, the overwhelming sentiment of most American Jews was that the phrase is an oxymoron. But note: I use the word "sentiment" to distinguish between gut feeling and intellectual conviction. We've known all along, of course, that it's wrong, both morally and factually, to brand an entire people as evil. We've known that here and there, some Germans resisted the Nazis, and some risked their lives to save Jews. But we've been quite comfortable to set the things we know aside and to give priority to our feelings. Surely, in light of what happened, we're entitled in this instance to indulge ourselves, to respond to everything German with distaste.

My sense of the matter, unbuttressed by survey data, is that our negative attitude may have softened somewhat in recent years, as we observed the German effort to confront the past and contrasted that effort with the behavior of other nations: France, Switzerland, Austria, and, holding the record for evasion, Japan. Still, notwithstanding our growing sense that Germany now is not Germany then, our overall stance has remained at best skeptical, more often downright dismissive.

Two stories that surfaced in The New York Times of Sunday, February 13, deserve our attention and suggest that the time for a serious reassessment has arrived.

First: Maria Paasche died. I cannot here reproduce all the details included in her obituary, which are only some of the details of her remarkable life. Here's a brief summary: She was the daughter of General Kurt von Hammerstein, commander in chief of the German Army from 1930 to 1934. In 1939, he plotted unsuccessfully to assassinate Hitler. So did two of Ms. Paasche's brothers five years later. In the 1930s, as Hitler's policies towards the Jews became increasingly explicit, Ms. Paasche would ride her motorcycle to Prague, transporting Jews, intellectuals, and materials for the anti-Nazi community. Based on information she received from her father, she would warn Jews of the imminent danger.

As a young woman, Ms. Paasche left the convent where she was studying to enroll in a public school and study agriculture, so that she could usefully join her Jewish friends who had emigrated to Palestine. She and he husband did move to Palestine, but a typhoid epidemic forced them to return to Germany, from which they then emigrated to Japan to evade an increasingly suspicious Gestapo. In 1948, they came to San Francisco, where, at the age of 90 and a resident of the Jewish Home for the Aged, she died on January 21.

Interesting, even gripping - but so what? We've known all along that there were exceptions, dozens, maybe even hundreds, of exceptions. Big deal.

Now comes Peter Schneider, a German novelist, who writes the cover story in the Times magazine section. "For every Jews who was saved," Schneider writes, "dozens of Germans performed everyday acts of heroism" that made the saving possible. In all, he proposes, there may have been 20,000 or even 30,000 Berliners who helped save Jews, an estimate far higher than anything that has until now been contemplated. And Schneider provides examples, stories of people who had 20 or more hiding places during the war.

Assume the Schneider is right. Once again, so what? Of Berlin's 180,000 Jews, 170,000 were driven out, most of them murdered. And most non-Jewish Berliners looked the other way. Isn't Schneider trumped by Daniel Goldhagen, who argues in his Hitler's Willing Executioners that hundreds of thousands of Germans joined in the genocide?

Here's the interesting novelty of Schneider's argument: He doesn't contend that the thousands of rescuers exonerate the German people. On the contrary, he proposes that the fact of 20-30,000 rescuers establishes that resistance was possible, that to resist did not mean to be found out and killed. To imagine only hundreds of resisters is to imply that these hundreds were endowed with superhuman courage, blessed with a decency beyond comprehension. But to imagine tens of thousands of resisters is to suggest that resistance was available to real people, to ordinary people. In so doing, Schneider harshens the indictment against those who were complicit in the killing and, at the same time, offers us hope. The true lesson, he suggests, is a mixed lesson.

As most of life's lessons are. In 1961, I sat in the Jerusalem courtroom where Adolph Eichman was being tried. Not long into the terrible testimonies, it dawned on me that "it" could happen anywhere, that there was no way to judge human behavior in a society where evil is rewarded. That is, of course, a miserable moral, a moral I heard repeated just last week at a symposium in Boca Raton: "The Holocaust," a learned scholar stated, "teaches us to discard our naÑve belief in the inherent goodness of man." Both versions in effect exonerate the Germans: They (at least they, perhaps everyone) lack goodness, or their society induces evil.

Now comes Peter Schneider, not to restore the belief in goodness but to teach that its dismissal is refuted by the evidence. We don't know nearly as much as we should about what it was that distinguished the resisters from the accomplices, but now we know enough to say that goodness is not the result of a rare mutant gene. And now we know enough to enable us to do what I once thought we could not do, to judge human behavior even in the worst of times. Good Germans? Absolutely, even if far, far from enough.

Leonard Fein is a writer and teacher, having published two books, Where Are We? The Inner Life of America's Jews and Israel: Politics and People, and more than 700 articles and essays which have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Commentary, Commonweal, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. He writes a syndicated OpEd column for the Forward.