The Holocaust usually refers to Nazi Germany’s systematic genocide of various peoples during the Second World War, the main target of this designed massacre being the Jews. Approximately 6 million Jews became the victims of this fanatical racism, slaughter, and cruelty. However, in all this madness, there were still a few people with sound conscience and courage to act against these atrocities. The most famous of these heroes would be , the once opportunistic businessman who, later, spent every last of his pennies to save his 1200 ‘Schindler Jews.’ People often deliberate on why Oskar Schindler did what he did. However, the issue of interest should not be focused on why Oskar Schindler did what he did but rather, on why no one else did what he did. The exact reason that makes Schindler a hero is that he did what everyone else did not dare to do.
The initial depiction made of Schindler is not exactly one of high morals and a good conscience. Although Schindler was born in a deeply religious Catholic family, his early years of life were colored with materialism and debauchery. He was notorious for being a greedy exploiter of slave workers, a black-marketer, a gambler, a member of the Nazi party, and an alcoholic playboy. However, this most hated and degraded of man became the most revered saviors of modern times. Oskar Schindler succeeded in accomplishing something everyone else deemed impossible.
The saving of the first Schindler Jews began in 1939, when he opened up a small enamel shop right outside of Krakow near the Jewish ghetto. Here, he employed mostly Jewish workers, thus, saving them from being deported to labor camps. Then in 1942, when Schindler found out that the local Krakow Jews were being sent to the brutal Plazow labor camp, he convinced the S. S.
and the Armaments Administration to set up a sub-camp in his factory. They agreed, and Schindler took even those who were unfit and unqualified for work. In turn, he spared 900 Jewish lives from this one action. In October of 1944, after negotiating with S.
S. officials, he was allowed to take with him some Jewish workers to his armament production company in Bruunlitz. Schindler then succeeded in transferring over 700 Jews from the Gross rosen camp, and another 300 women form Auschwitz. After this successful operation in Brunnlitz, Schindler rescued a train of evacuated Jews from the Golezow camp when they were stranded in the nearby city of Svitavy. In order to keep his Jews out of the death camps, Schindler spent a sum of 4 million German marks which was an enormous sum of money for those times. People ask why.
They ask why such a greedy opportunistic person changed his way of living and spent the whole of his life and his money to save the Jews. When asked this question in person, Schindler replied as follows.’ I hated the brutality, the sadism, and the insanity of Nazism. I just couldn’t stand by and see people destroyed. I did what I could, what I had to do, what my conscience told me I must do. That’s all there is to it. Really, nothing more.’ Like he said, that was all there was to the reason for Schindler’s actions.
Schindler believed that the Germans were doing wrong when they started killing innocent people, and, therefore, did what was right, which was trying to save as many victims as possible. Any person with a sound mind and a sound conscience would have realized what Schindler had realized. However, during this period of intense cruelty, the vast majority of German citizens stood by and watched as their Jewish neighbors were dragged from their homes, stripped of their belongings, and killed. Two famous psychological experiments illustrate why no one else did what Oskar Schindler did. Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted a study focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. The experiment began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question ‘Could it be that Eichmann, and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?’ In this psychological experiment, two people were placed in a small container divided by a curtain. On one side of the curtain, a person was seated on an electric shock chair, and on the other side, another person was given the switch to the electric shock chair. Surprisingly, when ordered, the person with the switch pressed the switch that gave the person on the other side of the curtain a mild electric shock. Although only a mild electric shock, after a few shocks, the person seated on the chair began to express pain. The person with the switch was right on the other side of the curtain and could hear the other person’s expressions of pain.
However, when told by an official that the person seated on the chair was going to be fine and when ordered to press the button again, the person with the switch pressed the button with ease. An amazing 65 percent of experimental participants administered the experiment’s final 450-volt shock, though many were quite uncomfortable in doing so. No participant stopped before the 300-volt level. Milgram summed up in the article ‘The Perils of Obedience’, writing:’ The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations.
I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.’ This experiment shows well that people have a tendency to lose their sound judgment and uncritically submit to authority. In the experiment, although it is obvious that he is inflicting harm upon another human being, the person with the switch is easily convinced that he is not inflicting any harm. People are easily misled and so lose the ability to judge their actions from a sound, objective point of view. This was the case for the majority of the people during the Holocaust.
The average people were misleadingly convinced by propaganda that the Holocaust was justifiable. A psychological experiment carried out by Philip Zimbardo provides another explanation to why the majority of the people did not do what Schindler had done. In 1971, Stanford psychologist, Zimbardo created a fake prison on campus and randomly assigned student volunteers to be prisoners and guards. What was originally a two-week experiment had to be called off after only six days because the guards began to abuse the prisoners for their amusement. They made the prisoners simulate sodomy, stripped them naked for various offenses, and locked them up in solitaries for long periods of time. The behavior of the prison guards in this experiment is similar to the behavior of guards in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
The shocking photographs taken in the Abu Ghraib prison showed U. S. prison guards abusing the prisoners of war, taking pictures of their nude bodies, etc. When human beings have complete control over other human beings and are not under the control of anyone or any clear rule, like the case in the experiment, they easily lapse into sadistic behavior. Sadism can be traced to group dynamics and circumstances rather than to individual personalities.
Even a person who thinks of himself as very moral, if everyone else is doing it, considers something wrong to be acceptable. The majority of people during Nazi Germany had these basic human tendencies. They could justify their cruelty, whether through sadistic behavior or through neglect, because everyone else was acting the same way. They could lapse into such cruelty because they were in total control of the Jews. Oskar Schindler became a historical figure because he did what others did not, and did not do what human beings usually fall for. He did not fall for the Nazi’s propaganda, which justified their cruelty, like any other individual had, but sustained sound judgment and conscience.
Also, he did not lapse into cruelty like the average German had, but realized the monstrosity of the actions of the Nazis. Moreover, based on his untarnished judgment, Schindler stepped forward and took action against evil doing. Bibliography Keneally, Thomas. Schindler’s List. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. Milgram, Stanley.
Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New Work: Harper/Collings, 1974. Milgram, Stanley. ‘The Perils of Obedience.’ Harper’s Magazine. 1974. Paldiel, Mordecai.
‘Schindler, Oskar.’ Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. New York: Macmillan, 1990. Zimbardo, P. G. , and Lippe, M… The Psychology of Attitude Change and Social Influence.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991.