BYSTANDER PSYCHOLOGY

Studying the Pivotal Role of Bystanders

by Ervin Staub

 "Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception."

Stopping Police Brutality

    "You should need to shift the mind set, so officers realize that if they remain passive as bystanders they are responsible for what their fellow officers do," said Dr. Staub.
     "You have to do it in a way that does not undermine their loyalty to each other, but changes what loyalty means - stopping excess violence rather than hiding it behind a code of silence."
     The program aims to make the police better able to readily recognize when a fellow officer is about to run the risk of using too much force, and encourage officers to step in to avert it by, for example, quickly explaining to the person being subdued what he needs to do to avoid being the target of even greater violence, or taking command of the situation from the other officer.
     "Given the nature of police culture, this kind of intervention is easier before there is actual violence than once violence has started," said Dr. Staub.
    Beyond that, the training seeks to help officers understand the forces that make police brutality more likely, such as seeing certain ethnic or racial groups in terms of negative stereotypes. Those attitudes make it easier for the police to justify to the use of excessive force with members of those groups, Dr. Staub said.
     In recent years, Dr. Staub's research has shifted from the experimental laboratory to case studies of events like the Holocaust, the genocidal reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the wholesale slaughter of enemies of right-wing military governments in Argentina.
     "I wanted to understand in totality the dynamics of genocide and other group violence," said Dr. Staub. "I'm no longer interested in the kind of piecemeal principles that lab science studies yield."
     His analysis of how such atrocities come about, and what might be done to prevent them, is summed up in his 1989 book, "The Roots of Evil," published by Cambridge University Press.

The Path to Atrocity

    The path to grave horror begins with minor transgressions. "The Holocaust began with much milder persecutions, like the laws forbidding Jews to hold positions in commerce or government," said Dr. Staub.
     These steps are crucial junctures. "If bystanders,  people who are neither perpetrators nor victims, object firmly at this point, it can slow or even stop the whole process," said Dr. Staub. "But if no one objects, it emboldens the transgressors." For example, he says, in the early days of Serbian aggression against Bosnia, "if a U.N. fleet had appeared offshore and said 'Stop or we'll bomb your artillery' it would have sent a clear signal the world disapproved."
     But just as perpetrators become more violent unless stopped, those who help them, even in small ways, are often drawn to greater acts of altruism, Dr. Staub finds. He cites the case of Oscar Schindler, a German bon vivant who was given control of a Jewish-owned factory after the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. Starting with small acts of kindness to protect the welfare of his Jewish workers, Mr. Schindler eventually took greater and greater risks to protect them, finally surreptitiously setting up another factory outside Poland, taking along his entire contingent of "skilled workers" and saving the lives of more than 1,300 Jews.
     Standing by passively while witnessing an evil act has a subtle effect on bystanders themselves. "If you empathize with the victim, but do nothing, you feel guilty," said Dr. Staub. "So there is a tendency to diminish the seriousness in your own mind, or to distance yourself from the victim. One way this happens is through the assumption that people who are suffering must somehow deserve it. Without quite realizing it, you can join the perpetrator in devaluing the victim."
     By the same token, the passivity of bystanders has a demoralizing effect on victims. "When the rest of the world did nothing to help the Jews in Germany, Jews felt abandoned," said Dr. Staub. "When you feel helpless and alone, you are less likely to resist. But in Belgium, where the population resisted Germany in its persecution of the Jews, Jews themselves did much more on their own behalf."
     In short, "actions by bystander - even simply protesting what's being done - empower the victims, while passivity adds to their suffering," said Dr. Staub.
     While that may seem self-evident, Dr. Staub finds that all too often people whose voices could have helped protect victims remain passive. "People don't realize the power they have as bystanders to make a difference," he said.
 
 

"To kill the Jews, the Nazis were willing to weaken their capacity to fight the war. The U.S. and its allies, however, were willing to attempt almost nothing to save them."
 

THE DEPRESSION

ROOSEVELT AND THE JEWS

    Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated president in 1933. The presence of several high ranking Jews in FDR's administration was seized upon by his enemies who popularized the notion that the president's "New Deal" was in fact a "Jew Deal." From the beginning of his presidency, Roosevelt had to contend with the view that he was pro-Jewish. His support among American Jewry was solid, and he did not have to worry about losing it. Paradoxically, the devotion of Jews to FDR was their political undoing. The president became much more interested in winning the support of his enemies, often conservative congressmen who were not in the least bit interested in offering shelter to refugees (i.e. Jews) or any foreigners.

    In the summer of 1937, the rug was pulled from beneath the modest economic recovery the Roosevelt administration had engineered. Recession set in, and unemployment soared anew. Eight to ten million Americans were out of work (or fifteen percent of the work force). American confidence was shattered. The issue of jobs was paramount: you were unemployed, you knew someone who was unemployed, or both. Few American families were untouched by the catastrophe. It was precisely during this time of economic hardship in the United States that the Jews of Europe sought an avenue of escape from the Nazis. The visa (an official authorization appended to a passport, permitting entry into and travel within a particular country) became, quite literally, a ticket to survival. Dorothy Thompson, an American journalist who championed the cause of refugees, addressed the issue in terms that were stark and foreboding:
 

"It is a fantastic commentary on the inhumanity of our times that for thousands and thousands of people a piece of paper with a stamp on it is the difference between life and death."

    The U. S. quota for Germany and Austria was 27,370. Between 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany, and 1938, when the Nazis seized neighboring (and fellow German speaking) Austria, a mere 10% of the U. S. quota was filled, despite the obvious danger to German and Austrian Jews. Until 1938, the debate in the U.S. was not about enlarging the quota. Far from it. The few proponents of the refugees realized this would jeopardize the existing quota. Instead, the debate was about whether the existing quota would be filled, or if it would be stretched beyond the existing 10%. In 1938, following Anschluss (the Nazi seizure of Austria) the friends of refugees won a victory. It was agreed that the U. S. quota would be filled. As it turned out, the quota was filled for only two years. The outbreak of war between the U. S. and Germany in 1941 effectively closed the doors to U. S. immigration entirely. U. S. officials argued that the threat of spies smuggling themselves into the country under the immigration process was too great.

ANSCHLUSS

    When German troops entered Austria on March 12, 1938, they were met not by armed resistance but by flowers thrown at their feet by adoring Austrians who lined the streets of the villages and towns along the road to Vienna, the Austrian capital. The Austrian border guards were instructed not to resist the Germans. "Let us not spill our brothers' blood," said the Austrian Chancellor, Kurt Schussnigg, in a radio broadcast that was particularly ominous for the Austrian Jews. Immediately following Anschluss, or "union" between Germany and Austria, anti-Semitism was unleashed with a special fury, most notably in Vienna. SA men (Nazi storm troopers known as brown shirts who, long before the SS, were the foot soldiers of the Nazi movement) seized Jews randomly and forced them to scrub the streets free of anti-Nazi slogans. Crowds of Viennese gathered and watched the humiliation of the Jews, delighting in the spectacle. The American journalist William Shirer described the mistreatment of Jews as "an orgy of sadism."

    The Austrian Jews desperately sought to emigrate. It was obvious that there was no place for a Jew in the new Austria. Long lines appeared outside of foreign consulates in Vienna. Following Anschluss, 170 Jews committed suicide each day in Vienna alone. The Nazis cynically labeled these deaths as "traffic accidents."

    The events in Austria and the subsequent pressures for immigration led the Roosevelt administration to call for an international conference to deal with the refugee situation. The American invitation to the foreign governments was cautiously worded. "No country," the invitation read, "would be expected or asked to receive a greater number of immigrants than is permitted by its existing legislation." Thirty-two nations agreed to meet at the French resort town of Evian to discuss the plight of the Jews. Poland and Rumania, interested principally in the prospect of getting rid of their Jews, sent observers to Evian.

THE EVIAN CONFERENCE

    The U. S. refused to send a high ranking delegation to Evian. Its representative was the president's friend Myron C. Taylor. At the opening of the conference, Taylor said, "The time had come when governments...must act and act promptly." At the end of the conference, reporting on its results, a reporter for Newsweek answered Taylor's call with bitter sarcasm: "Most of the governments represented acted promptly by slamming their doors against Jewish refugees."

    The conference was held in July 1938. Its ostensible purpose was to facilitate the flow of Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Austria, and to put pressure on the German government to permit the Jews to take with them a reasonable amount of property and wealth. No foreign country was interested in taking on impoverished Jews. However, the U. S. government called the Evian Conference with a different purpose in mind. A 1938 memorandum from the State Department referred to the increasing pressure on the U. S. government to assume the leadership of world efforts to deal with the refugee question. The pressure, the memorandum stated, emanated from journalist Dorothy Thompson and "certain Congressmen with metropolitan constituencies." As a result, U. S. Secretary of State Cornell Hull and Under Secretary Sumner Welles concluded that a strategy far preferable to trying to hold off this pressure would be "to get out in front and attempt to guide" the pressure, mainly in order to forestall moves for more liberal immigration legislation. In other words, the State Department felt that the best way to handle the refugee crisis would be to seize the initiative before pressure built and to spread the responsibility among the thirty-two nations instead of upon the U. S. With this rationale, the State Department recommended that President Roosevelt call the Evian Conference.

    At the Evian Conference, U. S. representative Myron Taylor stated that the U. S. would make the German and Austrian quota fully available. Delegates from other countries despaired of admitting more refugees than currently allowed. The British delegate did not mention the prospect of British controlled Palestine (present-day Israel), the most logical place for the Jewish refugees. Instead, he asserted that the British Commonwealth was largely unavailable because it was already overcrowded and, in any event, the climate was too severe. Britain itself, the delegate continued, was completely out of the question as a place for refugees because of the high rate of unemployment. The French delegate said that France had already reached "the extreme point of saturation as regards admission of refugees." The Belgian and Dutch representatives spoke similarly. The Australian delegate observed that thinly settled Australia should not be considered a refuge because "as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one." The Canadian delegate insisted that Canada's high unemployment precluded the admission of great numbers of refugees. The Canadian foreign minister, drawing the line on immigration and referring directly to the refugees, said, "None is too many." The delegate from New Zealand described Evian as "a modern wailing wall." The Dominican Republic was the only nation that offered any measure of hope to the refugees. The Caribbean country volunteered to contribute large (but unspecified) areas for agricultural cultivation. Jewish farmers in Europe, however, were few, except for young Zionists in whose heart Palestine was the only destination.

    Jewish representatives at the Evian Conference failed to reach a unified approach to the refugee crisis. The "disintegration and rivalry" at Evian, wrote the "Congress Bulletin," a weekly publication of the American Jewish Congress, was "a spectacle of Jewish discord and disruption."

    The chief concierge at the Hotel Evian reflected on the proceedings:
 

"Very important people were here and all the delegates had a nice time. They took pleasure cruises on the lake. They gambled at night at the casino. They took mineral baths and massages at the Esablissement Thermal. Some of them took the excursion to Chamonix to go summer skiing. Some went riding; we have, you know, one of the finest stables in France. But, of course, it is difficult to sit indoors hearing speeches when all the pleasures that Evian offers are outside."

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