Customer Reviews

Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust

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In recent years, a number of books have probed the question, "How could the Holocaust happen in a highly-civilized country of 'ordinary,' law-abiding people?" Victoria Barnett's penetrating and provocative book goes a long way in answering the question. Barnett is a first-rate scholar and a skillful writer. She has studied in Germany and is an expert on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Although she relies on a vast amount of research, the material is presented simply and directly. Rather than trying to inflame or lay blame on one person or institution or people, Barnett examines the historical and psychological elements of both individual and institutional behaviors and attitudes in Germany and Europe. Her approach is detailed, fair, and reasoned. In an honest and rational manner she presents all the factors that converged in Germany, beginning in the years immediately after World War I, to create Nazism and ultimately the "final solution." This is a disturbing book. Almost from the first page you will find yourself looking into a mirror asking: "Would I have been a bystander?" "Am I a bystander?" Barnett's writing style is simple, direct, clear, and engrossing. However, don't be surprised if you fing it difficult to read more than a few pages at a time. Bystanders should be required reading in every Holocaust-studies, ethics, history and psychology class in every country in the world. If we can answer the questions "how" and "why" perhaps we save the world from another Hitler or another Holocaust. This book changed my life.

The author of this book is focused particularly on the phenomenon of the "bystander", not the perpetrators or the victims of the Holocaust. As such, it is an excellent study of the subject. I am reading it a second time, and this time around I am more aware that one area is dark: the complicity of corporations in the Holocaust. She does, however, discuss the failure of churches and NGOs to aid the Jews in their time of need, which amounts to a gross complicity. Corporations in the US and elsewhere were making Holorinth machine cards,selling the Germans autos, trucks, etc. But given the area of focus the author sets out in the beginning, it is an excellent study of its kind.