…Resist the beginnings

Another colleague of mine brought me even closer to the heart of the
matter—and closer 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 twenty-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 to whom 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 it was I who lost it”
“Do I understand,” I said, “that you think that 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
the helping of 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 that 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,” said he, “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 be 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.”
“You don’t mean to tell me that your refusal would have overthrown the
regime in 1935?”
“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 one of these hundreds of thousands was, like me, a man of great
influence or of great potential influence. Thus the world was lost.”
“You are serious?” I said.
“Completely,” he said. “These hundred lives I saved—or a thousand or ten
as you will—what do they represent? A little something out of the whole
terrible evil, when, if my faith had been strong enough in 1935, I could have
prevented the whole evil.”
“Your faith?”
“My faith. I did not believe that I could ‘remove mountains.’ The day I

said ‘No,’ I had faith. In the process of ‘thinking it over,’ in the next twenty-
four hours, my faith failed me. So, in the next ten years, I was able to remove

only anthills, not mountains.”
“How might your faith of that first day have been sustained?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said. “Do you?”
“I am an American,” I said.
My friend smiled. “Therefore you believe in education.”
“Yes,” I said.
“My education did not help me,” he said, “and I had a broader and better
education than most men have had or ever will have. All it did, in the end,
was to enable me to rationalize my failure of faith more easily than I might
have done if I had been ignorant. And so it was, I think, among educated men
generally, in that time in Germany. Their resistance was no greater than other
men’s.”