Bystanders - Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust

The Holocaust did not introduce the phenomenon of the bystander, but it did illustrate the terrible consequences of indifference and passivity towards the persecution of others. Although the term was initially applied only to the good Germans-the apathetic citizens who made genocide possible through unquestioning obedience to evil leaders-recent Holocaust scholarship has shown that it applies to most of the world, including parts of the population in Nazi-occupied countries, some sectors within the international Christian and Jewish communities, and the Allied governments themselves. This work analyzes why this happened, drawing on the insights of historians, Holocaust survivors, and Christian and Jewish ethicists. The author argues that bystander behavior cannot be attributed to a single cause, such as anti-Semitism, but can only be understood within a complex framework of factors that shape human behavior individually, socially, and politically.

List of contents

Introduction
Who Is a Bystander?
Individual Behavior
Collective Behavior
Interpreting the Holocaust
The role of Totalitarianism
Attitudes Toward "The Other"
Prejudice and Indifference
The Dynamics of Indifference
A Broken World
Religious Interpretations of the Holocaust
Acts of Disruptive Empathy
One Village
The Individual as Ethical Being
Bibliography
Index

About the author

VICTORIA J. BARNETT is a consultant for the Department of Church Relations, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She has written numerous scholarly articles on religious topics. An authority on the history of the churches during the Holocaust, she is the author of For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (1992).

Product details

• Authors: Victoria J. Barnett, Barnett Victoria
• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Languages: English
• Age Recommendation: ages 7 to 17
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.07.2000
• EAN: 9780275970451
• ISBN: 978-0-275-97045-1
• No. of pages: 208
• Weight: 312 g
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > 20th century (up to 1945); Religion, Europe, European History, HISTORY / Military / General, PSYCHOLOGY / Social Psychology, HISTORY / Europe / General, HISTORY / World, General & world history, Second World War, The Holocaust, Social, group or collective psychology, c 1938 to c 1946 (World War Two period), General and world history, Modern warfare, c 1940 to c 1949, HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century / Holocaust, History / Wars & Conflicts / World War II / European Theater