Another
colleague of mine brought me even close to the heart of the matter – and closer
to home. A chemical engineer by profession, he was a man of whom, before I knew
him, I had been told, “He is one of those rare birds among Germans—a European.” One day, when we had become very friendly, I
said to him, “Tell me now—how was the world lost”
“That,” he
said, “is easy to tell, much easier than you may suppose. The world was lost
one day in 1935, here in Germany. It was I who lost it, and I will tell you
how.
“I was
employed in a defense plant (a war plant, of course, but they were always
called defense plants). That was the year of the National Defense Law, the law
of ‘total conscription.’ Under the law I
was required to take the oath of fidelity.
I said I would not; I opposed it in conscience. I was given twenty-four
hours to ‘think it over.’ In those
twnty-four hours I lost the world.”
“Yes?” I said.
“You see,
refusal would have meant the loss of my job, of course, not prison or anything
like that. (Later on, the penalty was worse, but this was only 1935.) But
losing my job would have meant that I could not get another. Wherever I went I should be asked why I left
the job I had, and, when I said why, I should certainly have been refused
employment. Nobody would hire a ‘Bolshevik.’
Of course I was not a Bolshevik, but you understand what I mean.”
Yes,” I
said.
“I tried not to think of myself or my family.
We might have got out of the country, in any case, and I could have got a job
in industry or education somewhere else.
“What I
tried to think of was the people I might be of some help later on, if things
got worse (as I believed they would). I
had a wide friendship in scientific and academic circles, including many Jews
and ‘Aryans,’ too, who might be in trouble.
If I took the oath and held my job, I might be of help, somehow, as
things went on. If I refused to take the oath, I would certainly be useless to
my friends, even if I remained in the country. I myself would be in their
situation.
The next
day, after ‘thinking it over,’ I said I would take the oath with the mental
reservation that, by the words with which the oath began, ‘Ich schwöre bei
Gott, I swear by God,’ I understood that no human being and no government had
the right to override my conscience. My
mental reservations did not interest the official who administered the
oath. He said, ‘Do you take the oath?’
and I took it. That day the world was lost, and I was the one who lost it.
“Do I
understand,” I said, “that you think you should not have taken the oath?”
“Yes.”
“But,”
I said, “you did save many lives later on.
You were of greater use to your friends than you ever dreamed you might
be.” (My friend’s apartment was, until his arrest and imprisonment in 1943, a
hideout for fugitives.)
“For the
sake of the argument,” he said, “I will agree that I saved many lives later on.
Yes.”
“Which
you could not have done if you had refused to take the oath in 1935.”
“Yes.”
“And you
still think that you should not have taken the oath.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t
understand,” I said.
“Perhaps
not,” he said, “but you must not forget that you are an American. I mean that,
really. Americans have never known anything
like this experience – in its entirety, all the way to the end. That is the point.”
“You must
explain, “I said.
“Of
course I must explain. First of all, there is the problem of the lesser evil. Taking
the oath was not so evil as being unable to help my friends later on would have
been. But the evil of the oath was certain and immediate, and in helping my
friends was in the future, and therefore uncertain. I had to commit a positive
evil, there and then, in the hope of a possible good later on. The good outweighed
the evil; but the good was only a hope, the evil a fact.”
“But,” I
said, “the hope was realized. You were able to help your friends.”
“Yes,” he
said, “but you must concede that the hope might not have been realized – either for reasons beyond my control or
because I became afraid later on or even because I was afraid all the time and
was simply fooling myself when I took the oath in the first place.
“But that is not the important point. The problem of
the lesser evil we all know about; in Germany we took Hindenburg as less evil
than Hitler, and in the end we got them both. But that is not why I say Americans
cannot understand. No, the important
point is – how many innocent people were killed by the Nazis, would you say?”
“Six
million Jews alone, we are told.”
“Well,that
may be an exaggeration. And it does not include non-Jews, of whom there must
have been many hundreds of thousands, or even millions. Shall we say, just to be safe, that three
million innocent people were killed all together?’
I nodded.
“And how
many innocent lives would you like to say I saved?’
“You
would know better than I,” I said.
“Well,”
he said, “perhaps five or ten, one doesn’t know. But shall we say a hundred, or a thousand,
just to be safe?”
I nodded.
“And it
would have been better to have saved all three million, instead of only a
hundred, or a thousand?”
“Of course.
“There,
then, is my point. If I had refused to take the oath of fidelity, I would have
saved all three million.”
“You are joking,” I said.
“No.”
“Or that
others would have followed your example?”
“No.”
“I don’t
understand.”
“You are
an American,” he said again, smiling. “I will explain. There I was, in 1935, a
perfect example of the kind of person who, with all his advantages in birth, in
education, and in position, rules (or might easily rule) in any country. If I
had refused to take the oath in 1935, it would have meant that thousands and
thousands like me, all over Germany, were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have heartened millions.
Thus the regime would have been overthrown, or, indeed, would never have come
to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist in 1935,
meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, like me in Germany were
also unprepared, and each of these hundreds of thousands was, like me, a man of
great influence or of potential influence. Thus the world was lost.”
“You are
serious?” I said.
“Completely.”
