Paradoxically, the Nazi period was pivotal in turning public opinion against bystanders. Victims were making themselves heard. In 1935, Joachim Prinz, a leader of the German Jewish community, wrote an early and classic statement of bystander incrimination when racism was again on the rise after a two-year lull in state-inspired antisemitism. The notorious Nuremberg Laws, which emerged later that year, would codify national apartheid. Jews, wrote Prinz, were dangerously vulnerable, but just as ominous, he asserted, was the silence of his compatriots: ‘The Jews of small towns, who live at the market square without neighbours, whose children go to school without neighbouring children, feel the isolation …’ It ‘might be the hardest lot anyone can befall’ – as hard as persecution itself.
Jews, whose demise accelerated during the Second World War, remonstrated as strongly against the indifference of onlookers as they did against their assailants. Writing in 1944 from his hiding place in Warsaw, Tadeusz Obręski reviled the Polish government-in-exile:
Why … didn’t it order the Poles, back in 1939, to help Jews hide from the German murderers? Why did they keep silent? Why did they let, and why are they still letting, us be destroyed, here on the Aryan side? … The Polish people betrayed three and a half million Jews. This is a fact which will be discussed in [future] history.
Obręski made sure that, in losing hope for survival, he would save his final, bitter words for feckless officials and ordinary citizens alike.
It’s unlikely that the turn from bystander innocence to bystander incrimination started during the Nazi period. We need more research on the history of bystander construction to clarify its emergence as consensus opinion. Did Black people in the United States, for example, implore white neighbours for protection against the systems of slavery and Jim Crow? We find little evidence for this until the mobilisation of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s, and Black people did so then in good part because the Holocaust and its legacy exposed bystanders’ complicity. Writing in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr commented that, though it was ‘“illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany … had I lived in Germany at the time I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers.’ At the time, the Black militant magazine The Liberator frequently referred to the consequences of passivity during the Holocaust era, as it saw it, to inspire action as well, turning its attention to Black people themselves.