By doing nothing, one could also indicate tacit approval of the persecution and killing of certain groups, or at least the belief that the victims’ lives were not worth risking one’s own life or livelihood to stand up for. Many others participated willingly they were true believers in Nazi ideology and did not need to be persuaded. The Nazis persuaded or coerced thousands to participate. concealed and sustained them.” In the end, the Nazis succeeded in murdering 6 million of the estimated 9 million Jews who lived in Europe in 1939.īecause of the magnitude of the tragedy of the Holocaust, it is necessary to confront the reasons why so many participated as perpetrators or looked the other way as bystanders. Hayes adds that “at most, 5 to 10% of the Jews who survived the Holocaust in Europe did so because a non-Jew or non-Jewish organization. Rescue was always the choice of the relatively few. Cosmopolitan residents of Warsaw may have been more inclined to aid Jews than Poles in the countryside, but not dependably so. Minority group members expressed solidarity with Jews more frequently than the surrounding population, but not reliably or uniformly. More clergy accepted the challenge, but a majority did not. Historian Peter Hayes writes:Ī few diplomats rose to the occasion, but most did not. The efforts of rescuers and resisters, therefore, were the exception rather than the rule, and the Nazis largely succeeded in their plan to annihilate European Jews.
Indeed, thousands participated actively in the Nazi plan of annihilation, while many more knew what was happening and did nothing. However, opportunities to resist or rescue were not available to everyone, and among those who had such opportunities, many did not seize them. While the Nazis carried out their plans to murder millions of Jews and other supposedly inferior groups, individuals, groups, towns, and even entire nations risked their own safety to protect, hide, or evacuate those in danger. The history of the Holocaust reveals a range of behavior of which people are capable when confronted with extreme brutality toward their fellow human beings. Students will grapple with questions about how circumstances of time and place played a role in the choices available to people, and they will reflect on why some people decided to help-in both dramatic and subtle ways-while others stood by or even participated in the atrocities that occurred. Students will read firsthand accounts in which perpetrators, bystanders, upstanders, and rescuers describe their choices during this period of time and reflect on both the reasons behind their actions and the consequences. In this lesson, students will continue this unit’s historical case study by deepening their examination of human behavior during the Holocaust and considering the range of choices available to individuals, communities, and nations in the midst of war and genocide.
In the last lesson, students learned about the atrocities the Nazis committed during the Holocaust, the experiences of many who were targeted for murder, and some of the ways those imprisoned in the ghettos and camps resisted.
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