Hitler's Professors: The Part of Scholarship in German's Crimes Against Jewish People

Plot

Interestingly enough, I came across this book just after finishing Victor Klemperer's wonderful two-volume work on life in Nazi Germany as a forcibly retired German Jewish professor. All I read here made more convinced of the wisdom in Klemperer's lasting bitterness over the co-option and collaboration by many non-Jewish academics by the national Socialists. In fact, he says at one point that he can forgive almost everyone but the academic fellow-travelers of the Third Reich, who in Klemperer's mind had succumbed too easily to their cowardice, their fears, and their ambitions rather than listen to their hearts, their morals, and their intellects, for they knew better and should have acted better.
This is an interesting if somewhat limited book, one that gives example after example of individuals so frightened by the "thumbscrews in the basement" of the Nazi headquarters that they jumped voluntarily into compliance with a whole range of horrific and hideous affronts on knowledge, truth, and acceptable behavior to either save their own skin, or even worst, to advance in the coming Nazi thousand-year Reich. Yet, as despicable as such instances are (and there were a lot of them), one must also remind oneself of the terrible existential crisis such circumstances force on frail, limited, and ordinary human beings, many of whom had the same kinds of vulnerabilities and human weaknesses as the rest of us. It is easy to condemn them, but much harder to look away.

However, none of this is meant to suggest that any of these cretins should be forgiven or that anything they did was less than immoral and inhumane; instead it is to suggest that the real crime lay in allowing these horrific circumstances to arise in the first place. When citizens let apathy and inconvenience get in the way of taking the trouble of safeguarding their society's rules of law, liberties, and acceptable ways of behaving, this is what inevitably occurs, whether in Nazi Germany, Bosnia, or Kosovo. This book's true message is a timeless one; each of us must act as responsible citizens to safeguard the rights, freedoms and privileges of all. For whenever anyone, even the least of us, is allowed to suffer outside the law, we all, regardless of our position, our influence, or our wealth, are in danger.