German Bystanders: A Very Brief Summary

Levi takes a more direct approach at communicating the responsibility of a bystander than Conrad, explicitly blaming German bystanders for contributing to the success of the Holocaust. Levi writes, “Whatever the case, since one cannot suppose that the majority of Germans lightheartedly accepted the slaughter, it is certain that the failure to divulge the truth about the Lagers represents one of the major collective crimes of the German people” (15). Imbedded in this statement is the acknowledgment of the moral obligation humans have to protect their fellow kind from oppression, especially as extreme as that of the Holocaust. Levi assumes the German people who had knowledge of the Nazi atrocities had the moral sense to reject the decimation

Levi contends that the “collective crime” of the German people as bystanders was “the most obvious demonstration of the cowardice to which Hitlerian terror had reduced them: a cowardice which became an integral part of mores and so profound as to prevent husbands from telling their wives, parents their children” (15). Self-preservation is a natural instinct, so when an individual faces a threat as pervasive as that of the Nazis during the early 1940s, it can’t be fair to assign responsibility of the perpetrators’ success to an individual who succumbed to this fear. This is why Levi is careful to discuss the choice to be a bystander as a collective crime as opposed to an individualized one. Of course, the population of German bystanders as an entity is still comprised of individuals who would each needed to have resisted fear and spoken out to have prevented the collective crime. Although Levi certainly provides a convincing argument for the assignment of some responsibility for the success of the Holocaust to bystanders, the situation is not without