Nazis didn’t murder six million Jews — the Germans did

WEIMAR, GERMANY — There are few places on earth where the promise of human culture and the catastrophe of human evil stand in such obscene proximity as Weimar.

This small German city is synonymous with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, the towering figures of Weimar classicism. Goethe made Weimar his home for most of his adult life. Schiller joined him here. Together, they helped transform this provincial city into one of the great capitals of European thought.

Walk through Weimar today, and their presence is everywhere. Their famous monument stands before the German National Theatre, Goethe and Schiller side by side, cast in bronze, seemingly presiding over the civilization they helped create. You can visit Goethe’s home. You can visit Schiller’s. You can walk the streets where they debated poetry, philosophy, freedom, beauty, human dignity and the meaning of life.

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And then you can get into a car. Fifteen minutes later, you are at Buchenwald.

That short drive may be one of the most disturbing journeys in Europe. Fifteen minutes separate the city of Goethe and Schiller from Buchenwald. That distance should haunt Western civilization forever.

Buchenwald was established by the Nazis in 1937 on the Ettersberg, the wooded hill overlooking Weimar. By the time American forces commanded by General George Patton reached the camp on April 11, 1945, hundreds of thousands of prisoners had passed through the Buchenwald system and tens of thousands had died through murder, starvation, disease, forced labor, and systematic brutality.

Standing there, I found myself struggling with a question larger than Buchenwald itself. What happened to German culture?

How could a nation that revered Goethe produce the SS? How could a society that celebrated Schiller’s soaring vision of human freedom construct concentration camps? How could people who listened to Bach and Beethoven, read poetry and philosophy, attended universities, and considered themselves heirs to one of Europe’s greatest intellectual traditions become participants in — or spectators to — industrialized barbarism?

We often assume that education makes people good. It does not. We assume that art humanizes. Not necessarily. We assume that sophistication is a defense against savagery. Buchenwald proves otherwise. Education without divine and godly values, like the Ten Commandments and “thou shalt not murder” at their center, results in unspeakable barbarism.

This is not an argument against culture. It is an argument against worshipping culture rather than God as morality. A person can read the greatest books ever penned and remain cruel. A society can produce magnificent music while dehumanizing its neighbors. A university can teach philosophy while its professors accommodate tyranny. Intelligence can sharpen conscience, but it can also sharpen rationalization.

The Nazis were not simply primitive thugs emerging from a cultural wasteland. Nazism arose in one of the most educated and culturally accomplished societies on earth. That is precisely what makes the story so frightening. Education can teach us how to think. It cannot, by itself, teach us whom we must never stop seeing as human.

Goethe died in 1832. Schiller died in 1805. Neither, obviously, bears responsibility for crimes committed generations later. Nor should German culture be reduced to Nazism. The point is almost the opposite. Their Weimar represented an extraordinary aspiration: that human beings could be elevated through beauty, reason, literature, and self-cultivation. Then came a regime that demonstrated the limits of that aspiration when culture is severed from moral obligation.

There is an additional obscenity to Buchenwald’s location.

The prisoners could see the cultural world of Weimar nearby. The SS personnel who administered the camp were not living on some distant planet. They had families. They went into town. They existed alongside ordinary civilian life. The concentration camp and the cultural capital were neighbors. That fact destroys one of our favorite defenses against evil: distance.

We like to imagine that monstrous things happen somewhere else, committed by people fundamentally unlike us. Buchenwald says otherwise. Civilization and barbarism can occupy the same postal code. The terrifying lesson of Weimar is that civilization and barbarism are not opposites separated by centuries. Sometimes they are separated by a 15-minute drive.

Judaism has never believed that knowledge alone makes us righteous. The Torah does not merely command us to study. It commands us to act: feed the hungry, protect the stranger, pursue justice, honor the image of God in every human being. Knowledge that does not lead to moral action can become sterile — or worse.

Perhaps that is why the Hebrew prophets remain so uncomfortable. Isaiah and Amos were not impressed by ceremony divorced from justice. Religious grandeur meant nothing when widows and orphans were abandoned.

The same standard must apply to secular civilization.

Do not tell me how many symphonies your society performs. Tell me how it treats the powerless. Do not tell me how many philosophers it produces. Tell me whether its citizens speak when their neighbors are demonized. Do not tell me how sophisticated its universities are. Tell me whether professors have the courage to resist fashionable hatred.

And do not tell me that antisemitism cannot become dangerous because we live in enlightened societies. The Jews have heard that before.

This is why Buchenwald is not simply a historical site. It is a warning. We are again living through an age in which Jews are being caricatured, demonized, and increasingly treated as uniquely undeserving of sympathy. Antisemitism can flourish among the uneducated, but history demonstrates that it can flourish just as easily among intellectuals, artists, and elites who discover sophisticated language with which to disguise ancient hatred. Hatred does not become morally respectable merely because it acquires a university vocabulary.

The Holocaust did not occur because Germany lacked culture. It occurred because culture proved powerless when conscience collapsed.

After visiting Buchenwald, I returned to Weimar. Goethe and Schiller were still standing there in bronze. I looked at them differently.

Their achievement remains immense. Humanity needs poetry. We need music, philosophy, literature, and beauty. A world without them would be spiritually impoverished. But they cannot save us. Only moral courage can do that.

The 15 minutes between Goethe’s Weimar and Buchenwald should therefore become a permanent measurement of human vulnerability. Fifteen minutes from poetry to persecution. Fifteen minutes from civilization to savagery. Fifteen minutes separating some of humanity’s highest aspirations from one of its darkest abysses.

We should visit both. And we should never again make the mistake of believing that the existence of the first makes the second impossible.

Which leads us to the following inescapable conclusion: The Nazis didn’t murder six million Jews. The Germans did.

There is a phrase I encountered again and again while traveling through Germany, visiting the places where the Holocaust was conceived, administered, and remembered. “The Nazis murdered six million Jews.”

It is true. But it is also dangerously incomplete. The Nazis did not descend upon Germany from another planet. They were not an alien occupying army that conquered an innocent German population and forced it, at gunpoint, to participate in crimes it abhorred.

They were Germans.

The government was German. The army was German. The bureaucracy was German. The railways transporting Jews to their deaths were German. The police battalions shooting Jewish mothers and children into pits were German. The industrial companies supplying and profiting from the machinery of conquest were German. And the country in whose name all of this was done was Germany. The Nazis did not descend upon Germany from another planet. They arose from German society and ruled through German institutions.

This does not mean that every German was a murderer. It does not erase the courage of German opponents of Hitler: Sophie and Hans Scholl and the White Rose; Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Georg Elser, who nearly assassinated Hitler in 1939; Claus von Stauffenberg and the conspirators of July 20, 1944; and others who resisted and, in some cases, paid with their lives. Their courage deserves remembrance precisely because resistance was possible — and because it was exceptional.

Nor should history be falsified in the opposite direction. Hitler was not “democratically elected” chancellor. The truth is more complicated and more damning. In July 1932, the Nazi Party won 37.3 percent of the vote, becoming Germany’s largest political party. Its vote declined to roughly 33 percent that November. President Paul von Hindenburg then appointed Hitler chancellor on January 30, 1933, after conservative German elites convinced themselves that they could harness Hitler’s enormous popular movement and control him.  They miscalculated catastrophically.

Even after Hitler began dismantling democracy and terrorizing opponents, the Nazis received 43.9 percent in the March 1933 election. Hitler then destroyed constitutional government through repression, intimidation and the Enabling Act.

So, no, every German did not choose Hitler. But neither did Hitler simply choose Germany.

Millions embraced his movement. German institutions accommodated him. German elites empowered him. German judges served his state. German soldiers conquered Europe for his Reich. And the German military continued fighting after Hitler killed himself on April 30, 1945, until Germany’s final surrender in May. The Holocaust Museum notes that despite the participation of a small number of officers in the July 20 plot, most of the German officer corps continued fighting until Germany surrendered. 

The Holocaust was not simply a Nazi crime committed somewhere inside Germany. It was a crime of Nazi Germany, implemented through German state power and German institutions.

That distinction matters. Words distribute responsibility. If we continually say “the Nazis murdered the Jews,” we risk turning “Nazi” into an almost mythical category — a mysterious tribe of monsters who temporarily seized Germany and disappeared in 1945.

But Auschwitz was not built by extraterrestrials. The deportation orders did not arrive from Planet Nazi. The Holocaust required ministries, policemen, soldiers, engineers, railway schedules, accountants, civil servants, diplomats, industrialists, and administrators. It required a modern state capable of identifying human beings, stripping them of citizenship and property, concentrating them, transporting them, and murdering them across a continent.

That state was Nazi Germany.

And yes, Germany had collaborators throughout occupied and allied Europe. The Holocaust could not have assumed its enormous continental dimensions without assistance from governments, organizations, and individuals outside Germany. Historical accuracy demands acknowledging them as well.

But collaboration elsewhere does not erase the central authorship of Nazi Germany. This is why Germany’s memorial culture, admirable as it often is, should be extremely careful with language.

Germany has done more than perhaps any other country to confront the crimes of its past. Berlin is filled with monuments, museums, and plaques acknowledging German crimes. Modern democratic Germany is not the Third Reich, and today’s Germans do not inherit personal guilt for crimes committed before many of them were born.

But they do inherit history. And history must be named accurately.

There is no inherited personal guilt. There is, however, an inherited national history — and Germany must never sanitize that history through euphemism.

The lesson of the Holocaust cannot simply be: Beware of Nazis. That is too easy. The deeper lesson is: Beware of what an educated, technologically advanced, and culturally sophisticated society can become when hatred is normalized, institutions surrender their independence, citizens surrender their consciences, and the state transforms prejudice into law and murder into policy.

Germany gave the world Goethe and Beethoven, Kant and Bach. And Germany also produced the Third Reich.

Those truths must stand beside one another because that terrifying contradiction is precisely what makes the Holocaust’s warning universal. Six million Jews were not murdered by some mysterious people called “Nazis” who happened to occupy Germany.

They were murdered principally by Nazi Germany, with the assistance of collaborators across Europe. Germany need not accept eternal guilt. But it must accept eternal truth.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach of Englewood is the author of 30 books, including “Holocaust Holiday: One Family’s Descent into Genocide Memory Hell.” Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @RabbiShmuley.