How the social structures of Nazi Germany created a bystander society

In the initial post-war judicial proceedings to establish what had happened under Nazism, and to punish the perpetrators of crimes, victims' accounts were often discredited. Only in 1961, with the high-profile trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, did the focus shift.

For many survivors, the concept of "Holocaust testimony"—accounts of what they had lived through—took on almost sacred dimensions. In 1989, author and Auschwitz-survivor Elie Wiesel argued that it was unethical for anyone besides surviving victims of the Holocaust to try to represent or explain it.

In some ways, Wiesel's insistence that only surviving victims could really "know" the Holocaust has contributed to the mystification of this historical period. Holocaust deniers have misappropriated this very process to their own ends.

Examining contemporary non-victims' perspectives can help us to understand the violence perpetrated as, in part, the result of social systems. My research explores how accounts by anti-Nazi refugees were received (in translation) by British readers at the time.

Such memoirs can illustrate the process by which Nazism transformed the German population into what historian Mary Fulbrook calls a "bystander society"—even before the conditions of wartime normalized acts of excessive violence.

Living in Nazi Germany

In 1939, Sebastian Haffner, whose real name was Raimund Pretzel, wrote a memoir titled "Geschichte eines Deutschen. Die Erinnerungen 1914–1933" (Stories of a German. Recollections 1914–1933).

It was published after the author's death in 2000, using the pen name under which he had become famous as a journalist in post-war West Germany. An English translation followed in 2003, titled "Defying Hitler." Historian Dan Stone has described it as "among the more remarkable contemporary analyses of Nazism and the Third Reich."

Haffner was a law trainee when Hitler took power. As the Nazi regime destroyed the democratic legal system he had studied, he took up journalism instead. His partner, Erika Schmidt-Landry, had been designated "Jewish" according to the Nuremberg race laws. When she became pregnant with Haffner's child, the couple left Germany for England.

In the UK, Haffner started writing a memoir of his life so far, including his view of the rise of Nazism. In one telling scene, he describes how he felt when the Jewish colleagues in his law firm were forced out by Nazi storm troopers (AKA brown shirts) on April 1, 1933, the day of the Jewish boycott. Some colleagues paced about nervously. Others sniggered. One Jewish colleague simply packed his bags and left.

Haffner writes:

"My own heart beat heavily. What should I do? How keep my poise? Just ignore them, do not let them disturb me. I put my head down over my work. […] Meanwhile a brown shirt approached me and took up position in front of my work table. "Are you Aryan?" Before I had a chance to think, I had said, "Yes." […] The blood shot to my face. A moment too late I felt the shame, the defeat. […] I had failed my first test. I could have slapped myself."

On another occasion, at a compulsory indoctrination camp for law students, Haffner is forced to perform the Hitler salute and sing pro-Nazi songs. He writes: "For the first time I had the feeling, so strong it left a taste in my mouth: "This doesn't count. This isn't me. It doesn't count." And with this feeling I too raised my arm and held it stretched out ahead of me for about three minutes."

Haffner's account illustrates the self-deception and denial by which many people who did not actively support the Nazi regime survived within it. In an interview given in 1989, Haffner said it wasn't that all Germans were Nazis but nor did Nazism hardly affect everyday life: "It was possible to live in a way alongside it."