Being Evil and Doing Evil: Are They Always The Same?

Why and how do good people let evil happen? Are people who do evil things inherently evil? Its a question my life experience has often driven me to explore. Not only because the ugliness Ive witnessed, and experienced firsthand. But also for another reason...Im one quarter German. From the time I was little, I grew up with the knowledge that a great many of the things that made me and my family special were a result of my German heritage. My mothers tendency to use German exclamations for emphasis. The unique holiday traditions that were the legacy of my mothers long-lapsed Lutheran upbringing. The duck-like feet that seemed built for Birkenstocks. By the time I was school age, awareness of my German identity was well ingrained, the benefit of which I never questioned. But then, in school, we learned about World War II. About the Holocaust. Now my German identity didnt seem quite so special. And I wondered, what did it mean? Was there some part of this horrible ugliness that resided somewhere inside of me? In a childs world, good and evil are polarized, very clear cut, and often represented as intrinsic. Villains in childrens books and programs are evil through and through; their minions never waver. Evil is evil. Good is good, and never the twain shall meet. If the Germans were evil, and I was German, what did that make me? It troubled me greatly. It took me a long time to fully reconcile myself to the idea that the Germany that perpetrated the Holocaust was also the Germany of my ancestors. Although I comforted myself with the thought that they had left long before these horrible atrocities happened, that never fully satisfied. Was evil intrinsic, or wasnt it? Was there something in the basic building blocks of the makeup of the German people of that time that could also have been present in those who left earlier? I began to play a little game with myself. What would my family have been like had they NOT left Germany? Would they have, like so many, been deceived by Hitlers Nazi regime? Or would they have been the courageous lone dissenters in a crowd? I hoped so. Soon, I began to imagine myself in such a situation. What would I have done? How much of the environment of hate and fear would have influenced me, a child in a world of adults? This question haunted me for much of my life, but was never fully resolved. A few weeks ago, browsing in a bookstore, I came across a book that brought this old speculation roaring back to life. The book, On Hitlers Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood, by Irmgard A. Hunt, was the story of a little girl who grew up in the shadow of the Third Reich. She was the girl I always feared I might have been, who grew up the daughter of an average, law abiding, middle-class German who helped sweep Hitler to power and then supported him to the end. I knew I had to read it.

The personal impact of the story hit me quickly, as the author described an early experience: Three of the four Dehmel girls were always part of the group of neighborhood children that played together in the park. The fourth girl had an illness of some kind and never came outside to playWhite-blond Hildegard, the youngest of the three sisters who played with us, was a somewhat peculiar-looking, slow child with very small eyes and seemingly little response to the world around her. Her two older sisters, Else and Gisela, were incredibly patient with Hildegard and carefully helped her get through a fence or sat her down on a lump of grass or moss so that she could see us while she gently rocked her body back and forth. One afternoonTante Susi and my mother talked quietly with serious, worried faces. I loved to listen to grown-up gossip and moved closer to hear what the women were saying. One of the Dehmel children, the mongoloid one whos never outside, was picked up by the Health Service a few weeks ago, and now theyve said shes dead from a cold, said my mother. Tante Susi with her pretty bobbed haircut shook her head. That child was retarded worse than Hildegard, she mused, adding after a moment, Well, thats probably true, her dying from a cold, I mean. The reality, of course, was much more disturbing. Hitlers program for euthanizing the disabled was now in full swing. The Dehmels, the author explained, never questioned the death of their child, although they must have suspected. With deep silence, cunning, and determination she wrote, they succeeded in hiding Hildegard. They did not send her to school, use public health services, or do anything else that might bring her to the authorities attention. The fear of having their child killed by the Nazis for her defect far outweighed the risk they took by not having her inoculated or ever visit a doctor. All these years, Id worried I could have been someone like Irmgard; but now two more sinister possibilities emerge. I could have been Hildegard. Or her sister. Its a reality thats danced around the edges of my consciousness, unacknowledged, since learning about my place on the spectrum and this makes it all too clear. But why would the adults dismiss the implications of this news of a killer cold so easily? How could they stand by and do nothing as children were murdered? Irmgards mother, she speculated, did not want to believe or face the reality of what was happening, and would have convinced herself that Hitler himself would not condone such murder. None of the adults, she wrote, the girls parents included, had the moral courage to voice their suspicions openly, attributing this to fear of Nazi retribution, and the wish to be left alone. Its a situation we see all too often in daily life the desire to avoid trouble. When does this all too common desire shade into complicity? What should they have known? When should they have acted? Strangely enough, this makes me think about my father, my experiences with bullying, and what he taught me about human nature as a result of it. My father had a unique perspective on bullying. While he too had been bullied in the same way, in the same community, he also had memories of being a bully. So, when I asked the question that the parent of every bullied child dreads, Why? He was uniquely positioned to answer. He answered with a story.