Blog
Ordinary People
Friday 27 January is Holocaust Memorial Day.
As students in Year 9 and above will know, the Holocaust was the organised murder of Jewish men, women and children by the Nazis and their collaborators that took place during the Second World War. Many other groups were persecuted and murdered under this regime; however, we use the word ‘Holocaust’ to refer to the experience of the Jewish people, as the Nazis under the leadership of Adolf Hitler aimed to kill every Jewish person under their power as their invasion of Europe spread further.
The reasons for this – the answer to ‘why the Jews?’ – can be found in paranoia and scapegoating of a religious minority group. The best answer to this question I have found, along with an explanation of why the Nazis - and those historically involved in anti-semitic persecution - were wrong in their hateful beliefs about the Jewish people, is in this video from the Imperial War Museum:
Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. It is important for us to remember that the Holocaust did not begin on this day. Instead, the first steps towards genocide came through the passing of laws to victimise and isolate the Jewish people of Germany – who amounted to only 0.76% of the German population.
The intention of this was to encourage German Jews to leave the country, but in reality this proved difficult (and expensive) for many ordinary people to do. It was not until June 1941, during the German invasion of the Soviet Union, that Nazi policy became that of mass murder.
The theme of Holocaust Memorial Day this year is ‘ordinary people’. Historian Christopher Browning’s best-known book Ordinary Men investigates the activities of Police Battalion 101 during the Second World War. The members of this police battalion were not devoted Nazis, but instead were ordinary middle-aged, working-class men. Police Battalion 101 committed acts of mass murder in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942.
What this shows us is that genocide is carried out by ordinary people, and what poses us a difficult moral question is why these ‘ordinary men’ carried out acts of horror. Students often suggest that perpetrators did this out of fear of the consequences, but in fact the commander of Police Battalion 101 once gave his men the option of being reassigned elsewhere if they did not want to commit mass murder. However, fewer than 12 men (out of a battalion of 500) did so.
Those Psychology students who are familiar with the Milgram experiment may have some ideas of how the impact of peer pressure and the influence of authority figures can contribute to ordinary people choosing to carry out actions that are clearly wrong.
It is also ordinary people who turn a blind eye to genocide, allowing it to happen. Ordinary people have choices. Sometimes, ordinary people choose to rescue those in need, to hide them or to stand against the hatred they can see or hear.
One of the people I find most memorable is Leopold Socha. He was a sewer worker in Poland, who by his mid-twenties had served three prison sentences for theft. In 1943, he met a group of Jewish people who were hiding in the sewers from the Nazis. Rather than turn them in, Socha used his own money to buy supplies for these people, even bringing them candles every Friday so that they could keep up their religious traditions. In doing so, this ‘ordinary man’ made a choice that saved ten lives.
However, sometimes ordinary people choose to be bystanders, to ignore what they see around them. This allows acts of horror to be carried out. To these people, Pastor Martin Niemoller – who suffered at the hands of the Nazis – famously wrote this poem:
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
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
We should take this opportunity to reflect on how we, as ‘ordinary people’, engage with the injustices we see in our lives – and whether we dismiss these as ‘not our problem’ and choose to be bystanders, or whether we speak out when we see abuse, discrimination and unfairness.
