Dear America :
You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches.
— Werner Herzog
Although I think he makes a great mysteriously pragmatic villain in The Mandalorian, I had no idea whom Herzog is, and although I differentiate the German culture (protestant and nihilistic) from the Austrian (Catholic and regally monarchistic) and the Swiss (Methodist, communitarian, and humanely traditionalist ), I always bristle a little when Hollywood portrays the Germanic Man as if they are all the blackest of evil and all vestigial Nazis, even though I think it's very important to remember how such a great nation became bedazzled by such a monstrous ideology.
Among my greatest heroes is the Austrian economist from Germany who was exiled to Switzerland, Wilhelm Röpke, who was Hitler's greatest economic enemy, who was the architect of the 1948 "German Economic Miricale," and who wrote in his 1945 book 'The Solution of the German Problem' reflectively foreboding words which Herzog echoes in this statement:
As a first approximation we should have to distinguish between three main groups of Germans:
- the minority of the chiefly responsible persons, whether they were party members or not;
- the minority of the proved anti-Nazis, whether they were in concentration camps or not;
- the overwhelming majority of the more or less meek, the more or less ignorant, more or less docile, more or less > stupid, in other words, the great mass of the human average who are neither scoundrels nor saints nor even remotely > heroes. . .
I think Röpke's got it right: there are the evil people who pushed it, there are heroic and innocent people who pushed against it, and then there are people who permitted it who are neither "mostly guilty innocent" or "mostly innocent guilty," but who are wholly guilty because they should have known better, but are simply, tragically human.
I am not going to confer more or less innocence on them because they were ignorant or apathetic or swept up by stupid contagion. Instead I am going to confer their tragic human status upon them, point out that they were citizens of one of the most advance countries in history, and say that although they were personally no great evil, they abetted great evil, and so they are accomplices. They are not innocent because they were unwitting.
And in this age decades removed from it, I think that is precisely the lesson we must take from it. Far from demurring the pressing of a ridicule, we must wholeheartedly assert this lesson with stingy confidence and thoughtful, forceful argument or else we shall have it again. It is precisely the tragically stupid, apathetic, and ignorant people today who are being duped by and abetting this monstrous evil which threatens always to raise its head and flex its muscles among people who cannot recognise it.
The sins which strengthen that evil are no mystery; envy, jealousy, covetousness, resentment, and sloth put the wind in the sails of a movement of pride and wrath. It should not be that difficult, all these years later, to call a spade a spade, even though lots of hearts got trumped by their love for diamonds and their willingness to let others club over the heads those who could be targeted as scapegoats.