The Right Question

While we were in Europe, my family traveled north from Italy to Munich, Germany. Near to Munich, is Dachau Concentration Camp. I think that it was only fitting that we were there in November, when the trees were bare and the air was chill. It made the grounds harsh and uninviting. That’s the only way that place should feel.

Nazi Germany is an enigma to most modern people. It’s something were still grappling with as a society. That’s why books and movies about the Second World War are so popular. We still have questions that haven’t been answered. The main question is how could it have happened? How could they have done such horrible things?

Maybe they all suffered from mass hysteria. But that answer is really a non-answer. It doesn’t help us understand what happened. Reason and motive does not enter the brain of the hysterical. We have nothing to learn from them.

Maybe the Germans are a hateful people. But that just gives us an excuse to dismiss them. Hateful people are wrong, therefore I don’t need to understand them. We aren’t going to get any answers that way. And can we really believe that they are or were more hateful than any other people?

Maybe they were easily manipulated by their leaders. The Germans? They are one of the best educated nations on the planet. The notion that all of them were just used for the personal vendetta of their leaders is silly. Also, that argument just delays the question. Eventually we are going to want to know why their leaders would want to kill millions of people.

I think that these answers are hard to come by because we aren’t asking the right questions. Instead of asking, “How could they have done that?” we should ask, “What would I have done in their place?” That changes the way we think about the problem and gives us a better chance of solving it.

Between the world wars, Germany suffered one of the worst financial collapses ever experienced. To pay for its debt from the first war, the government just printed money until the German Mark was worth next to nothing. People would burn heaps of them for warmth. Milton Bradley collected them to put in the Monopoly game because that cost less than printing his own fake money. When the currency was hyperinflated, people’s savings became worthless. Businesses went under and unemployment was rampant.

Enter the young, charismatic leader of a new political party. The leader: Adolf Hitler. The party: the National Socialists. Hitler promised to put the country back on track. He promised to solve these economic problems. He promised to give people jobs again.

And in his first months in office, Hitler was true to his word. He solved the unemployment problem. He did so by going into so much debt that they had to invade and plunder their neighboring countries and seize the property of minorities to pay for this, but the average German didn’t know that. All he knew was that before he had no job, now he had one. All she knew was that before she had no bread, now she had that and more.

Now they hear rumors that people are being gassed in what are supposed to be worker retraining camps. Who are they going to believe? The people who gave them their life back, or unsubstantiated rumors? But what about the soldiers? Are they going to disobey orders and defy the people who made their country great again? When anyone else would flip the switch in his place?

If he was moral he would, we say. I think that is the answer. A moral person would do what is right. He would not be an executioner of innocent people even if it meant that he would have to lose his own life. Moral strength was lacking in Nazi Germany, which is why such atrocities were allowed to happen.

But I don’t think that Nazi Germany was especially lacking in moral strength. I think that most people, most nations are lacking in moral strength. An American teacher reproduced the Third Reich in his classroom, and his students started behaving like Nazis without even realizing it. We do what everyone around us does. We go with the flow. We look out for number one.

It takes great moral strength not to.

It takes great moral strength to stand up for what it right, even when everyone around you says that it is wrong. It takes great moral strength to defy your leaders, especially when they have complete power over you. It takes great moral strength to see the truth, even when it means that what you have been given is ill gotten.

When we stop asking, “How could they?” and start asking, “Would I?” maybe we’ll develop the moral strength necessary to prevent what happened in Nazi Germany from happening again.