The 1985 IPA meeting was held in Hamburg marking the first return of that organization to Germany since World War II. A prominent theme of that conference was the role of the non-Jewish psychoanalyst in Nazi Germany. In a continuation of that significant theme we are pleased to include in this issue of the Newsletter devoted to the International reflections on the relationship between morality and political systems written by Holocaust survivor and fellow analyst Anna Ornstein.
Since coming to this country in 1952, I have been asked to speak to various groups about my personal experiences during the Second World War. I have spoken to educators and to school children, to Jews and to Gentiles, to small groups and to large ones. There is something very powerful about hearing the personal story; it brings historical events close to home. Nothing could prove this better than the way in which Anne Frank was heard, while the documentaries of the millions killed could not be fully comprehended.
Because the personal stories are so powerful, the teaching of the Holocuast has been done, to a large extent, by describing the inhuman conditions under which the victims had to live and had to die, and by recounting the historical, economic, and political circumstances that made it possible for a whole nation to accept Hitler's assertion that the solution to their economic and political problem was the extermination of European Jewry.
However, I have slowly begun to realize that while these personal accounts had powerfully brought to the attention of my audiences the extent of the Nazi atrocities, it also permitted them—and me!—to keep the moral implications of these events at a distance from ourselves. It was easy to say that it was the Germans, or more strictly thinking, the Nazis, who had to examine their consciences. It is difficult for us, living in this free and democratic society, to consider what our own behavior would have been like under similar circumstances. In order to bring the moral implications of these events closer to home, I began to include into my presentations stories of Gentiles whose behavior during those trying years separated them from the behavior of the masses, people who put their physical existence on the line in order to preserve their humanness.
Why, I ask myself, do we consider the behavior of these people “heroic”? What does it say about human nature that there were so few of them? And, most importantly, where would we place ourselves in the spectrum of possible human behaviors?
It is easy to hold lofty ideals when they don't commit us to action. In extreme conditions—war, famine, natural disasters—every act has a moral implication. Existentialism was a popular form of philosophy during World War II: action was considered to be the only honest expression of one's moral and ethical conviction. For instance, the Dutch, the Danes, some Norwegians, some French, some Germans, and some Polish Gentiles, as well as other nationals, distinguished themselves with the extraordinary courage with which they responded to the plight of their Jewish neighbors. It is the behavior of such as these which forces us to ask some difficult questions about ourselves.
I shall briefly sketch the psychological profiles of some of the people whom I had the good fortune to know personally at that time.
One of them was a simple peasant woman who lived all her life in a Hungarian village where I grew up. She tended a small piece of land, raising a daughter while receiving a modest check from her husband who worked the coal mines in Canada. She became attached to my father's family when, as a young girl, she worked in my grandmother's home.
I don't remember life without her. She was present at my birth, as she was present at the birth of all my cousins. Her small, wiry figure, always dressed in the traditional style of the Hungarian countryside, is associated with the most pleasant of my childhood associations. My memories go back to times when our parents were already preoccupied with the events of the war and with the severe anti-semitism that had become the official attitude of the Hungarian government, when our mothers' faces were darkened by their concerns for their sons and husbands going off into forced labor camps or disappearing into underground movements.
Under these circumstances, where children's lives were deprived of the ordinary joys of everday life and filled with the oppressive mood of anticipated tragedies, our Mari Neni—Aunt Mary—was there to bring joy and laughter into our lives.
But this would not be a good enough reason to call her a “righteous Christian”. The test of her nobility and courage came later when the clouds grew darker, when the small Jewish population of the agricultural village was loaded onto trucks and taken to the railroad station to an unknown destiny.
Gentiles were strictly forbidden to come to the station or in any way come near the train. But I remember hearing her voice, calling to my father. She had managed to get around the police cordon and approached the train through the fields; she was noticed and I witnessed her being subdued by two men as she had raised her hand to her lips in a vain effort to throw us a kiss goodbye.
I hope you can appreciate the meaning of this gesture. When the Jews in towns like this were surrounded by only hostility, when the people who knew them well looked on silently as they were driven out of their homes, this woman gave a rebellious expression of her feelings, an open declaration of her conviction. This action makes her as much of a hero in my mind as any that would have involved the use of arms.
The other person I want to tell you about had a very different background and lifestyle. Kreisdekan Hermann Maas was a Dean in the Protestant church in the district of Baden in Germany. Pfarrer Maas—as we called him—belonged to an elite group of clergy who had early, during Hitler's rise to power, formed an underground organization to smuggle Jewish children into Palestine. He was the last survivor of this underground group, their members having been hung or otherwise executed during the course of the war. He himself survived the last
year of the war in a concentration camp in France.
We met Dean Maas in Heidelberg where we studied medicine after the war. We did a great deal for each other: for us, he gave the first glimpse into the character of people who made an attempt to resist Nazism and to actively help the Jews in Germany. And for him, we represented Jewish survival; he believed that Christianity would lose its very foundation without the renewal of Jewish life. Pfarrer Maas' name, along with other righteous Christians, is enshrined in “Yad Vashem” in Jerusalem, and today there is a village named after him in Israel.
But without contrasting these two people with others, I could not make my point about the moral dilemmas that existed for the average person under those extreme conditions. I shall therefore tell you about still another man we met in Heidelberg after the war.
Herr Pabst was a pharmacist. My husband and I lived in the Pabst home for two years. This was the typically clean, well kept home of a German “Burger”. We were always cordially invited to use the kitchen and to share the table with the family for our meals. While we did not accept the invitation to share meals, I spent time there preparing our own, and also afterwards while Herr Pabst drank his nightly mug of beer.
Herr Pabst had asked me many questions about my experiences in the various concentration camps. He listened to my stories, and I, in turn, listened to his. During the Hitler years, Herr Pabst had a membership card in the National Socialist Party, a card that he considered essential to his life under the circumstances. He never questioned his membership in the Party; for him it was the obvious and pragmatic thing to do: not having a membership card could have meant the loss of his license to operate his pharmacy.
There were five teenaged children in the Pabst family, all of whom belonged to the Hitler Youth Movement, where all the action was. The adolescent who did not belong to the Youth Movement, for whatever reason, had a great deal to lose in terms of status, recognition, and opportunity to participate in sports, maybe to travel, to feel part of the pulse of German life. Could I understand, he asked me, his reasons for belonging to the National Socialist Party? Herr Pabst recognized that the problem was that people had promoted the Party to begin with, but he still wondered if I could understand his position; how a man who worries first and foremost about the welfare of his family may swim with the tide, not ask any questions, and believe that the leaders of his country would know what was best for him. I did not know, then whether I could understand Herr Pabst's position at all, but I did know that one of these days I would have to try.
And, indeed, I learned an important lesson from my conversations with this man: I learned that issues related to morality are not simple. He had five children. Raising them “properly”, providing them with what he considered to be essential to good life, had priority in his life. And who among us could not appreciate such an attitude? Not that Herr Pabst had subjected himself to the agony of a moral dilemma. He followed the road prepared for him in a manner that probably most people would follow. But even if he had raised questions in his mind, I suspect that he would have easily rationalized his behavior on the basis of his commitment to his children and wife. He could not, at that time, see the larger picture that eventually crashed down on him and his family, as it did on the millions of Germans whose attitudes and behavior were identical to his. Herr Pabst was far removed from the site of the crimes; he did not have to know what was going on in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Berger-Belsen, or Sobibor. He was not an active perpetrator of the crimes, and he never asked himself or others what had happened to his Jewish neighbors. For example, why hadn't he been sent prescriptions by Jewish doctors for many years? His passive participation lending support to these horrors had never become fully conscious to him.
I shall now move to the other end of the spectrum of possible human behaviors,
from the exceptions like Aunt Mary and Dean Maas, through passive and non-thinking followers like Herr Pabst, to the people who planned, performed, and/or witnessed the atrocities.
Simple sadism, I believe, does not explain the behavior of these people. The examples of simple beastiality were Kristallnacht and the Russian pogroms, but pogroms would not have been effective methods for the “Final Solution”. This required bureaucracy and obedience to authority which, however, did not exclude sadism by the individual members of the SS.
Listen to this diary entry of SS Professor D. Hans Hermann Kremer: “Date: September 6, 1942. Today, Sunday, excellent lunch, tomato soup, half a hen with potatoes and red cabbage (20g. fat) sweets and marvelous vanilla ice … in the evening at 800 hours outside for Sonderaktionen.” (The most spectacular of the mass atrocities were called Sonderaktionen [special actions]. One of these, which was practiced particulary in Auschwitz, was the burning of live prisoners, especially children, in pits measuring 20×40 to 50 meters, on piles of gasoline-soaked wood). I believe the question of moral responsibility here loses all its meaning.
In relation to Herr Pabst, we could consider that in an authoritative, totalitarian political system, the individual did not feel responsible for his actions—or non-actions. For him, morality was suspended, passed on to higher authorities, an explanation used by many of the perpetrators at the Nurnberg trials. Herr Pabst had thus found a different solution related to morality than did the planners of the Final Solution. Herr Pabst had systematically reduced his sense of moral responsibility; it was his non-action that supported the atrocities. But those who planned, and many among those who had executed the exterminations, did so with eagerness and enthusiasm.
In his book The Nazi Doctors, Robert Lifton says that the physicians were the first to embrace the Nazi ideology; a profession with the Hippocratic Oath was the one that became most enthusiastic about the idea of genocide under the guise of eugenics.
Webster defines moral conduct as that which is associated with “goodness and uprightness of behavior”. The term is not applicable to the planners and perpetrators of these crimes. We need a concept that helps explain the eagerness and enthusiasm with which members of the SS, many of them physicians, embraced the idea of genocide. I found the psychoanalytic concept of “ideals” useful here. These are ideas that become idealized and thereby attain a specially powerful position in the mind; they are experienced as absolutes and imperatives. Ideals may or may not include moral principles. When ideas are not idealized, when they do not attain absolute power within the psyche, they are more readily compromised; they are not internally binding absolutes.
Nazism embodied such ideals. Thus, when the physicians in Germany embraced the Nazi ideology, they were living up to their own ideals by removing the cancer (Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals) from the body of the German nation. They followed the imperatives of the Hippocratic Oath. This was no less a heroic and noble act in their minds—maybe more so—than removing cancer from the body of an individual.
We are now left with the most difficult question of them all: what is the fate of ideals, especially as far as their moral content is concerned, in a democratic society such as ours?
Just how difficult is it to face ourselves in this respect became clear to me when a few years ago I began to read Walter Laquer's book, The Terrible Secret. I never finished the book. I did not want to know that as early as 1941, and certainly by 1942, the free world knew what fate had befallen the Jews of Europe, and that when there were still options available for their rescue, deliberate efforts were made by the governments of England and the U.S. to thwart them.
The first meeting that signaled to Hitler that he was free to deal with European Jewry as he pleased came from Evian in France. This was an international conference that took place in 1938. Reading the report of the conference sends chills down one's back as delegate after delegate “explained” the reasons why his country was unable to accept refugees. What should we think, for example, of the explanation given by the delegate from Australia, one of the most underpopulated continents in the world, when he said: “It will no doubt be appreciated that as we have no racial problems, we are not desirous of importing one?” Four South American countries had adopted laws at Evian severely restricting the number of Jews who could enter; in the case of Mexico, the quota was 100 per year.
Reducing quotas occurred in the United States as well: only ten percent of the number who could have been legally admitted had entered the U.S. during the three and a half years that the nation was at war with Germany.
By 1984, when David Wyman's book, The Abandonment of the Jews, was published, I felt that I had to learn the truth. This is a well documented book; as a historian, Wyman worked with recently declassified archives.
These are some of the findings that Wyman regarded as most significant:
“The American State Department and the British Foreign Office had no intention of rescuing large numbers of the European Jews. On the contrary, they continually feared that Germany or other Axis nations might release tens of thousands of Jews into Allied hands. Any such exodus would have placed intense pressure on Britain to open the gates of Palestine and on the United States to take in more Jewish refugees, a situation the two great powers did not want to face. Consequently, their policies aimed at obstructing rescue possibilities and dampening public pressures for government action.”
The best example of this was the Bermuda Conference that convened only to appease the more vocal English clergy, but was never intended to accomplish anything. The conference convened on April 19, 1943, the day the Warsaw ghetto uprising had erupted. Two days later a secret Polish transmitter flashed news of the ghetto battle, but it was cut off after four sentences, ending with the words, “save us”. The appeal was radioed around the world. It reached London and Washington, but was barely noticed. It was certainly not heard in Bermuda. Bermuda, said The New York Times later, was “a cruel mockery”.
Authenticated information that the Nazis were systematically exterminating European Jewry was made public in the United States in November 1942. President Roosevelt did nothing about the mass murder for 14 months, then moved only because he was confronted with political pressures he could not avoid and because his administration stood on the brink of a nasty scandal over its rescue policies.
“The War Refugee Board, which the President then established, received little power, almost no cooperation from Roosevelt's administration, and grossly inadequate government funding. Contributions from Jewish organizations, which were necessarily limited, covered 90 percent of the WRB's costs. Through dedicated work by a relatively small number of people, the WRB managed to help save approximately 200,000 Jews and at least 20,000 non-Jews.
“Several factors hampered the growth of public pressure. Among them were: anti-Semitism and anti-immigration attitudes, both wide-spread in American
society in that era and both entrenched in Congress; the mass media's failure to publicize Holocaust news, even though the wire services and other news sources made most of the information available to them; the near silence of the Christian churches and almost all of their leadership; the indifference of most of the nation's political and intellectual leaders; and the President's failure to speak out on the issue.
“The effectiveness of the American Jewish leaders was importantly diminished by their inability to mount a sustained or unified drive for government action, by diversion of energies into fighting among the several organizations, and by failure to assign top priority to the rescue issue.
“In 1944, the United States War Department rejected several appeals to bomb the Auschwitz gas chambers and the railroads leading to Auschwitz, claiming that such actions would divert essential airpower from decisive operations elsewhere. Yet, in the very months that it was turning down pleas, numerous massive American bombing raids were taking place within 50 miles of Auschwitz. Twice during that time, large fleets of American heavy bombers struck industrial targets in the Auschwitz complex itself, not five miles from the gas chambers.”
Reminding you of these by now well-known facts may sound like an indictment of the free world, the American government, and the American people. My intention is not to indict, however but to understand and to learn from the past.
There is a world of difference between the way in which individual morality can be exercised in a democratic society and the restrictions that exist in this regard in a totalitarian regime. In a totalitarian political system, the individual may become systematically stripped of his ethical and moral responsibilities. I think the story of Mr. Pabst makes that point. Aunt Mary and Dean Maas, on the other hand, exemplify people whose ideals for the dignity of their fellow human beings could transcend the pressures of the political system in which they lived.
In a democracy, especially in the American version of it, where the right to pursue individual happiness is written into the Constitution, the individual's conscience—theoretically at least—becomes the very foundation of the political system and the functioning of the society. In a democracy, individual responsibility and individual action determine whether the system will work or fail.
For us, in this free society, the problem emerges when we forego the privilege—and the responsibility—to exercise our own choices according to our own conscience; when we fail to maintain a well-functioning democracy simply by assuming our elected officials act within the limits of a shared morality. This was, to a large extent, the case in relation to Roosevelt: since he felt his election assured, in none of his four Presidential campaigns did he have to concern himself with the “Jewish vote”.
Should we fail to exercise our own moral convictions, we could then gradually and imperceptively behave exactly the way Herr Pabst did.
The danger for us is not that we have Eichmanns among us, or that we would elect a Hitler to high office; government sponsored, systematic extermination of a whole people is inconceivable in a multi-ethnic, democratic society. The danger for us is that, based on average expectable human psychology, we would behave exactly as Herr Pabst did. Not unlike him, we would close our eyes, not ask any questions, and thereby avoid facing difficult moral dilemmas. We would certainly avoid doing anything that would even potentially threaten the safety or the welfare of our families or place us personally in jeopardy.
We all wish we could think of ourselves behaving as did Aunt Mary and Dean Mass. A friend of mine, a Gentile, put this poignantly. After reading a book providing examples of the behavior of Gentile rescuers of the Jews, entitled The Courage to Care, he wrote to me: “I wonder whether I would have had the courage to act as these people did. I want to think that so very much. The slightest doubt about this is too horrifying to contemplate.…”
What I am asking of you, and of myself, is that on a day like today, filled with the memory of our awesome losses, we should summon the courage to contemplate just that.…
This address was delivered by her on the occasion of Yom Ha' Shoah, the Day of Remembrance for the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.
Errata
The waiver for CORST applicant Barbara Jones was granted to the Baltimore-Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis, not the Washington Institute as printed in the Summer 1987 issue.
In the announcement of new training and supervising appointments Eugene H. Kaplan, M.D.'s name was printed with an incorrect middle initial.