Identifying with the Victim in Nazi Dominated Europe

The meaning of the word “empathy” intrigued me as soon as I encountered it as a graduate student at New York University. With time, the German word Einfühlungsvermögen, the capacity to feel oneself into the situation of the other, allowed me to separate empathy from altruism, compassion, sympathy, caring, and love. While these feelings can overlap with each other in that they may enhance one’s capacity to feel empathy toward fellow human beings, empathy can be present even in the absence of the others.

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But how does one gain the capacity to place oneself in the situation of another? It is clear that it is easier to do so in times of peace than of war and upheaval. Thus, it is relatively uncomplicated to advise under ordinary circumstances that one should show empathy toward a child who is being bullied and even urge a child to stand up to the bully. But how is one able to act empathetically during extraordinary circumstances? What should one say or do when the threats to life are real, such as during a dictatorship or in the context of a war?

I wanted to discover why some men and women show empathy when everything seemed to indicate that they ought not; that is, when the act required unusual courage and integrity, to the point of risking prison, torture, and death. One possibility is that a person can develop a superego that is so strong that she or he can overcome the desire to survive. Here I will concentrate on three situations that take us into National Socialist-dominated Europe in the early 1940s.

The first case pertains to the policeman and mayor of a small town in Germany, who in 1944 were unwilling to turn over a Jewish woman and her two children to the Gestapo, despite the pressure of an SS officer in their midst. The second case pertains to a young woman in 1943-44 WWII Poland who realized that the Jews with whom she was working would be transported to a camp and killed if she did not act on their behalf. The third instance is of a German diplomat in Bulgaria who realized in early 1944 that he would have to place a number of Jews into the hands of other German authorities who would send them to their deaths unless he could outwit them. The first case is known primarily in Germany, the second is well known in the United States, and the last is an unpublished account shared only with the diplomat’s family.

Sibylle Krause-Burger explained the first case beautifully in her Mr. Wolle Greets You One Last Time: The History of My German-Jewish Family (2009). When the troubles became intolerable as bombs rained down on Berlin in 1943, her Catholic father Walter Burger and her Jewish mother Edith Wolle decided to send their daughter Sibylle to Nussdorf, his ancestral home on the Enz River in Württemberg. When Sibylle’s family joined her in 1944, Burger’s brother-in-law, a lieutenant in the SS, began to agitate against

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them. He first protested to the constable, then to the mayor, and finally to Sibylle’s grandfather. The constable’s response to this threat remains a classic: “First you win the war, Mr. H., then we will see what we can do.” Sibylle’s grandfather, when confronted by his son-in-law in his favorite restaurant with the observation that Hitler disapproved of Jews living in a German household, said to the amusement of other farmers sitting around: “I swore my oath to the king (of Württemberg).”

Although at first sight this looks like the typical power struggle in a small town, it was carried out in the national context that supported the SS officer. Empathy can take many forms: here are some ideas about this one. While the town’s citizens did not particularly love or care for Sibylle and her family, they had reason to assist. After all, Berger grew up in the town and, even though he had moved to Berlin and married a Jew, he had not forgotten it or its complicated dialect. Also, upon their arrival, both Sibylle and her mother fit in immediately. By contrast, the SS officer was an outsider, refused to speak the dialect, and behaved like his wife, an arrogant local with an excessive loyalty of the NS cause. Additionally, the town’s inhabitants were Catholics and may have believed in the humanistic teachings of that faith. In other words, traditional values and attitudes made official and unofficial town leaders consider the situation and show empathy for the German-Jewish family at considerable risk to themselves.

The second case is well known from Irene Gut Opdyke’s In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer (2001). Not even 20 years old, Gut confronted the stark reality that the 12 Jews with whom she worked as a waitress in a German officers’ club in Poland would be eliminated if she did not act. While doing nothing would have been acceptable according to the new norms, she decided, instead, to act differently. After several failed attempts, she was able to find a space in the cellar of the local commander’s house in which to hide them. Perhaps she acted out of youthful idealism, or deep religiosity, but given her traditional values, she had no choice; but without a doubt, she risked her own life to save the lives of a dozen strangers.

The final example of Roland Gottlieb is instructive because he saved Jews as a German diplomat. In an unpublished account,

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and used here with permission, of his diplomatic service first for Austria and then Germany, he tells of his work in Sweden, Berlin, and Sofia. In Sofia, his superiors ordered him to have all German Jews in the area appear in his office so that they could be handed over and returned to the Reich. Each of the individuals and families coming before Gottlieb told a unique story, convincing him that there were no good reasons to return any of them to Germany. He further determined that since strictly speaking, they were not even German, they faced a certain and undesirable fate on German soil.

The individuals involved did not speak of empathy as such—maybe the word was not part of their vocabulary—but each was in a situation in which he or she felt called upon to act empathetically. In the case of Sibylla Krause-Bauer and her mother, empathy came with the approval of leaders and family members in town, but at risk from the wider German society. In Gut and Gottlieb’s cases, too, empathy stemmed from the recognition that they were all part of the same humanity, even if they only knew each other in this specific context. Gut may have been too young to articulate her actions. But Gottlieb put it rather bluntly: “One does not do such things…to anyone.”

In the safety of a reasonably civil society, feeling oneself into the situation of others can be an intellectual exercise or a temporary engagement as part of an office routine. But being empathetic in a crisis period requires different attitudes and behaviors. Principally it asks for the ability to feel for the plight of the other. In each of the examples, rebelliousness was involved as well; each one acted based on values and behaviors that preceded those of the Nazis and that they had attained at some other point in their lives. When these men and the woman decided to save the lives of others at the risk of losing their own, they demonstrated the courage and integrity of empathy.

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