Twenty years after I decided to pursue a career in history, I first came across a picture of the woman who enabled me. Wanda J radiates self-possession in the little picture my doctoral supervisor showed me in his Warsaw apartment; this is a trait she possessed rather well during the Nazi occupation.
Protecting her two sons from the German mass murder campaign that claimed almost all of her fellow Warsaw Jews, she was a Jewish mother. She resisted going when her family was called to the ghetto. She moved her kids around, depending on friends, neighbors, and total strangers. She thought, first the ghetto and then the rest of Warsaw was burned to the ground, what counted was the "faultless moral instinct" of the people who decided to aid Jews.
Most of us would want to believe we have a "moral instinct". Maybe we see ourselves saving others in some sort of future disaster. Few of us would behave well, though, if states were destroyed, local institutions were corrupted, and economic incentives aimed at murder were directed against us.
There is little justification for believing that we are ethically better than the 1930s and 1940s Europeans or for that matter less susceptible to the kind of ideas Hitler so effectively spread and realized. A historian owes Wanda J thanks for her bravery and for the trace of herself she left behind. But a historian also has to take into account why rescuers were so few. It is all too easy to dream that we would have helped Wanda J. Separated from National Socialism by time and chance, we can reject Nazi ideas without thinking through their implications. It is our very forgetfulness of the events of the Holocaust that convinces us that we are unique from Nazis and hides the ways in which we are alike. We share Hitler's planet and some of his obsessions; we have maybe changed less than we would like to admit.
The concept that no human instinct was moral set the stage for the Holocaust According to Hitler, people belong to races destined for constant and bloody struggle among themselves for limited resources. Hitler denied that any concept—religious, philosophical, political, or otherwise—justified seeing the other—or loving the other—as oneself. Conventional forms of ethics, he said, were Jewish creations, and conventional governments would fall apart during the racial struggle. Hitler especially, and quite mistakenly, denied that agricultural technology could change the relationship between people and food.
Lebensraum, German for "habitat," or "ecological niche," was Hitler's substitute for science and politics. Races needed ever more Lebensraum, "room to live," to feed themselves and spread their kind. Nature insisted that the higher races subjugate and starve the lower. Every race's natural goal was to procreate and conquer, thus the battle was endless. Simultaneously, Lebensraum also meant "living room," with ideas of comfort and plenty in family life. Thought Hitler, the yearning for security and pleasure could never be satiated since Germans "take the circumstances of the American life as the benchmark". Standards of living were always relative and subjective, thus the demand for pleasure was unbounded. Lebensraum thus brought together two assertions: that jealous tribes always wanted more and that human beings were mindless animals always in need. It created survivalist emotions in the name of personal comfort, so confusing lifestyle with life itself.