Bystander Indifference during the Holocaust and the Erasure of the Victims' Identities and Lived Experiences

This piece is the fourth installment of essays based on Carolyn A. Dean’s The Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust, published in 2004. The other essays inspired by her book can be read here, here, and here.

Photo by Liang Skhikey on Unsplash

In Carolyn J. Dean’s “Indifference and the Language of Victimization,” from her book The Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust, the intellectual historian takes on a complicated, yet necessary exploration of the phenomena and their consequences, of how the “we” become “them” when addressing the purported bystander indifference during the Holocaust as captured in its historiography.

That is to say, how those producing the historiography of the Holocaust push for an identification with the “human suffering from the bystanders’ perspective,” which, in turn, “blur[s] victims’ identities in its effort to underscore their anguish, and may be an unwitting defensive strategy against numbness.”¹

First, as Dean points out, it’s important to situate the rise of “bystanders” as a category. This “self-conscious discourse about collective social responsibility [developed] in the 1960s.”² The now and oft-repeated lines from the famous Pastor Martin Niemöller poem about turning a blind eye to the victims of the Holaust (“First they came for the Communists/And I did not speak out/Because I was not a Communist/Then they came for the Socialists/And I did not speak out/Because I was not a Socialist,” and so forth), first written in 1946, gained popularity in the 1960s in the U.S. with the flurry of widespread protests against the Vietnam war. Here is when the emergence of concepts around what “we” would have done or will do in the face of such large-scale horror(s) became more dominant.

Yet, the notion that, to paraphrase Dean, we ignore suffering at the expense of our own peril, and even worse, “humanity,” is a reminder of the “we,” which comes at the cost of the original and actual victims.

Dean is certainly not suggesting that the rise of this rhetoric and its proponents in the 1960s was done in “bad faith.” However, the concern, again, is that the victims’ experiences and identities in the past are covered over by this insistence on emphasizing the “we” and what the future may hold if we don’t remain aware with our eyes wide open to what we fear in that future to (perhaps) come. This rhetoric also informed historiography, of course. Thus, for example, the historiography on bystanders “mostly defers redemption to a future when lessons will have been learned.”³ Dean concludes, “this historiography generally replaces the real failure of human solidarity and its consequences with ‘our’ human frailty and, however unwittingly, blots out victims’ experiences (whatever those might be) in its every effort to move us to tears.”⁴

This bystanders’ historiography on the Holocaust, beginning in the 1970s through the 1980s, concluded that, when it came to the annihilation of the Jewish population, Nazi terror, and the “Jewish Question,” the majority of the German population was “indifferent” to the Jews’ fate. This indifference implies that perhaps Germans did not know the full extent of the horrors unfolding around them, as only minorities (Jews, Roma and Sinta—“gypsies”—communists, homosexuals, criminals), whom they rarely acknowledged in everyday life, were the only ones affected. However, the assumption that Germans were so indifferent that they did not know what was happening, as initially conveyed by historians, no longer stands in the current historiography. Instead, Dean writes, the Germans “tacitly consented” and “were never merely indifferent but often ambivalent, sometimes complicit, occasionally heroic and mostly not.”⁵

There is also another thread of thought in the historiography in which scholars assert that Germans went into a form of “retreat” in order to protect themselves against the rising Nazi terror surrounding them, which while not being a form of “indifference,” also allows for bystanders during the period of time off the hook in their involvement with the rise of Nazi Germany and its devastating and annihilating effects on the Jewish people.

Furthermore, the concepts of “retreat” and “indifference” find themselves contradicted when one learns that Mathausen, a brutal concentration camp in annexed Austria, was a mere three miles away from the center of town, and “residents often witnessed beatings and shootings.” These facts, of which there are countless examples, collapse one historian’s assertion that the fate of the Jews was “a little noticed matter,” which, Dean concludes, “inadvertently or defensively diminishes the impact of bystander anti-Semitism on the Jewish minority.”⁶

Historian Saul Friedländer believes it’s a waste of time to delve into questions about whether or not the Germans knew or did not know. Instead, he argues, “they knew, and they didn’t care enough to do much about it, whether they were themselves preoccupied or they weren’t.”⁷ In this way, there can be no defense or apology for the German population during the Nazi Regime. Friedländer keeps it simple: there were hierarchical structures in society that excluded the minorities from the majorities. (Friedländer also provides copious evidence of how Germans “knew” to such a degree that he stresses their “active complicity and anti-Semitism.”)

Friedländer also focuses on the fraught relationships and interactions between Jews and gentiles, going into great detail to describe the humiliation of everyday life as traumatic as a result of these actions being normalized. In so doing, Dean writes, “Friedländer begins to challenge both the expansive ‘we’ that naturalizes indifference and the minority ‘us’ for whom indifference is explained by reference to the long history of Jewish difference.”⁸

This dehumanization and exclusion of a minority group becomes “banal and eventually so normal that murder is not entirely out of the question.”⁹ Dean adds:

The desire that Jews disappear is neither unconscious nor the first thing on every non-Jew’s mind. Friedländer thus captures how the semiconscious erasure of Jews becomes so deeply embedded in social reality—becomes structural—that no one but the Jews notices it, not just because anti-Semitic legislation doesn’t affect gentiles or they somehow get ‘used’ to it, but because it comes to make sense, to be a part of the way things should be be. This argument already begins to define indifference by reference to a series of dynamic, pyschic operations that current consructions of indifference, from whatever perspective they are asserted, fail to capture.¹⁰

With this analysis in mind, and Friedländer’s concept that “redemptive anti-Semitism defines a sacralized but secular struggle against Jews that must be fought at all costs to salvage the national body,” it serves to reveal how anti-Semitic prejudice shifted to a collective idea and acceptance that all Jews needed to be annihilated.

In the last section of Dean’s essay, she homes in on what anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes calls “small wars and invisible genocides” when analyzing several memoirs and journals. Dean defines the phrase as:

the institutionalized forms of everyday violence that normalize the dehumanization of specific groups of people in ways mostly invisible to others: these ‘small wars’ then define targets of mass atrocity and genocide when and if they occur and bridge a gap between peacetime discrimination and mass murder.¹¹

Dean draws on a conceptual framework of “invisible genocides” to analyze how “persecution, discrimination, and finally murder become invisible to those who are not targets, even when they take place right in front of them.”¹² The invisibility of mass murder becomes easier for a group of people aware, but unwilling to admit, of genocide surrounding them. One should also take into account this new normal as “lives literally subjected to other people’s repressed or newly liberated desires.”¹³

Victor Klemperer’s diaries are one of the primary documents she analyzes to discuss invisible genocide. Klemperer, whom I’ve written about extensively on this Substack, was a Jewish-German philologist who managed to survive the war as a result of being married to a non-Jew and having “luck” when Dresden was firebombed in 1945 by the Allies (the day the city began to be bombed, Klemperer was slated to be seized and taken to a concentration camp). Again, he kept detailed diaries of what it was like to live under the Nazi Regime.

What Dean finds most striking in Klemperer’s diary is the “quiet cruelty manifest in what were (or once appeared to be) ‘normal’ relations with non-Jews, as well as the annihilation of German-Jewish selfhood.”¹⁴ Dean cites an example from Klemperer’s diaries when he receives a bar of soap as a token of kindness from his non-Jewish friend, Richter. After their exchange, in which both parties acknowledge Klemperer may be sent to death, the diarist says, “he bade me farewell with a kind of emotional solemnity as if I were departing for the Russian front.” Dean states that the interaction is “recorded as a ‘normal’ encounter,” and yet they are talking about him going to his death.

Far from being bystander indifference or retreat, Klemperer’s friend is aware of the fate he may face: death. Dean adds, “indifference represents active complicity with the murderers, for Richter normalizes Klemperer’s impending death and thus erases him as a human being and a German citizen.”¹⁵ Klemperer’s diaries are littered with these sorts of anecdotes, indicating absolute complicity in what was happening and the knowledge therein of those horrific acts of inhumanity.

It is in these moments, Dean notes, of “uncanny banality with which extraordinary cruelty is manifested.”

She also examines Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s memoirs, in which there are countless examples of brazen, inhuman treatment. But then there is the banal, cruel indifference. In 1938, Reich-Ranicki met his wife, Tosia, and they survived the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland. However, most of his family were murdered by the Nazis.

Reich-Ranicki eventually returns to Germany and becomes one of the most influential literary critics of his time. He finds himself at one point at his high school reunion in 1963 (for the class of 1938), when Dean notes the cruelty of an exchange he captures in his memoir. Some of his fellow students ask him how he survived, not so much out of genuine interest in hearing what he has to say, but rather out of politeness. Reich-Ranicki finally gains the gumption to ask them why they weren’t more anti-Semitic at school, given the period of time and hatred directed at Jews. His former schoolmates proceed to explain that there were examples of “smart” and “athletic” Jews, high-achieving Jews. Reich-Ranicki realizes that since they saw some Jews in this way—smart and capable—they didn’t find a reason to be so outspoken against them. In this case, Dean asserts, they are treating Reich-Ranicki like “himself,” instead of as a German-Jew, thus erasing his identity. He also finds himself somewhat embarrassed by raising the question, so he quiets down.

Even worse, the publisher Wolf Jost Siedler invites Reich-Ranicki to a party for the author Joachim Fest’s new biography on Hitler. When Reich-Ranicki and his wife arrive, they notice that everyone has surrounded a particular man in his late sixties to talk to him. It turns out the man is none other than Albert Speer.

Speer was a German architect who served as Minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany during most of World War II. A close friend and ally of Adolf Hitler, he was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and served 20 years in prison. Albert Speer was a German architect. He also served as Minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany during most of World War II. He was also a very close friend and staunch supporter of Adolf Hitler. At the Nuremberg trials, he was convicted and spent 20 years in prison.

Speer is affable towards Reich-Ranicki. However, as Dean notes, Reich-Ranicki notes:

that he kept nodding his head in agreement, ‘as if to say: the Jewish fellow citizen is right, the Jewish fellow citizen is welcome.’ But then Speer, gesturing to Fest’s book on whose cover the title Hitler was emblazoned in a monumental Gothic script says: ‘He would have been content with this, he would have liked it. Reich-Ranicki is, naturally, horrified.¹⁶

Again, in this moment, being invited to a party where a former Nazi war criminal was present, erases Reich-Ranicki’s Jewish-German identity. Even worse, as Dean notes, the erasure “take[s] place in a world in which Reich-Ranicki is a famous and touted German Jew.” The invitation and Speer’s attitude show how cruelty emerges in banal forms, as Reich-Ranicki lost family in “‘his’ ovens,” and now he finds himself at a party with someone who was closely linked to those mass murderers.

Dean argues that these cases show indifference “far more effectively than numbness, human nature, or an unconscious refusal to think, and the cruelty manifest not only in the best intentions but also in the most banal ones.”¹⁷

Through understanding indifference in this way, agency is restored to bystanders. They may not be perpetrators, Dean notes, but it:

warns us against the retrospective identification of ourselves with bystanders who could not do otherwise, and thus warns agains the reconstruction of history writing of a fantasmic ‘we’ who might have done something differently if not constrained by human inclinations that we recognize as regrettable and condemn. This retrospective identification with those who were not Nazis, opportunists, and thus but ‘normal’ people who watched indifferently or helplessly and therefore numbly or guilitly, is apologetic even though it is accompanied by sincere hand-wringing, and unwittingly repeats the self-protective numbness into which some have argued onlookers must have retreated. But most important, this identification with bystanders once again ‘forgets’ the victims except as those ‘we’ could not help or against whose pain we would naturally protect ourselves. In so doing, it unwittingly performs a similar symbolic erasure of the victim—albeit with far less dire consquences—whose own experience of bystanders’ grace or cruelty is hardly discussed at all.¹⁸

Ultimately, it’s critical to understand the issue of indifference through the lens of the victims, instead of making, as Dean concludes, “arrogant assumptions about how bystanders should have acted, but to be conscious of our own fears and longings onto the past.” In placing the “we” in this paradigm, one can not only bury the victims, but also “erase the very historical memory we wish to safeguard.”¹⁹ In short, Dean wonders if the focus on bystander indifference is more about our own fears of what “we” would have done in the past and still might do in the future. And perhaps at this juncture in which we currently find ourselves, with fascism spreading across the globe and at home, we should stop concerning ourselves about what “we” would have been doing in, say, 1933, during the Jim Crow era, and so forth, and instead be focused on the current victims now and actively using our agency to put a stop to crimes against humanity in the moment.

1. Carolyn J. Dean, “Indifference and the Language of Victimization” in The Fragility of Empathy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 79.

2. Ibid., 77.

3. Ibid., 80.

4. Ibid., 80.

5. Ibid., 81 - 82.

6. Ibid., 89.

7. Ibid., 92.

8. Ibid., 94.

9. Ibid., 94.

10. Ibid., 94.

11. Ibid., 95.

12. Ibid., 95.

13. Ibid., 96.

14. Ibid., 97.

15. Ibid., 99.

16. Ibid., 103

17. Ibid., 103 - 104.

18. Ibid., 104.

19. Ibid., 105.