Where were the whistle blowers?

The banality of evil is best understood by its ubiquity. It wasn’t a few villains committing monstrous crimes. It was a whole industry dedicated to the goal of genocide on an enormous scale. The microcosm of the family in “Zone of Interest” can be multiplied thousands of times. And where were those who blew the whistle or tried to stop the horror?

In effect The Holocaust was normalised and not just where it happened or just by those directly involved. You can’t construct gas chambers, operate them, bring victims to them and repeat daily without building a complex and managed infrastructure. The shock of “Schindler’s List” is that Schindler whilst not, quite, unique was one of the very few who resisted.

Frau Hoss of course knew what her husband was doing. And across Europe there were many thousands of Frau Hosses equally turning a blind eye. Murder on an industrial scale requires more than structure and organisation. It requires complicit shoulder shrugging by everyone from the industrialists of I.G.Farben to the drivers of the Auschwitz bound trains. 

And when we say “Never again” we should make sure that we don’t delude ourselves that death and destruction and murder of the innocents has stopped. Reports reach us every day confirming that it hasn’t. And, like Frau Hoss, some of us look the other way and tend our gardens.