Chapter 8 The Imperative to Act: Jews, Neighbors, and the Dynamics of Persecution in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945

The rupture of relationships: Holocaust survivors on complicit bystanders

“…Two years after the Nazis came to power, Joachim Prinz, a popular and outspoken rabbi in Berlin, sounded the despair of German Jews: “It is the fate of the Jew to be without neighbor,” he observed, noting, astutely, the reason for the depth of their pain: “We wouldn’t feel all this with so much pain if it weren’t for the feeling that we once had neighbors.” Even more astonishing was his awareness that abandonment cut more deeply than persecution: Jews, especially in small towns, “feel the isolation […] and in the cohabitation of humans it might be the hardest lot anyone can befall” (Morina, 2019: 148–149).…”

“…Christoph Kreutzmüller characterized survivor Arthur Flehiger’s claim, in a report Flehiger filed in 1955, that “decent citizens refrained” from complicity as “wishful thinking” Kreutztmüller (2020:140). Christina Morina offered a credible explanation for survivors’ reluctance to condemn their neighbors’ inaction as late into the war as 1944: They sought “to stay connected as long as ever possible.” She argued, moreover, that Jews were disinclined to acknowledge hostile bystander behavior because doing so would replace hope with depression Morina (2019: 162, 159).…”