Word: nazis
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Typical of the more questionable characters on the stage of the German resistance was Rhodes Scholar Adam von Trott zu Solz. Because of his vehement loyalty to Germany, many of Trott's English friends suspected him of being a Nazi...
...Oxford years, Trott sowed the seeds for friends' future misunderstandings of his character. MacDonogh points out that because Trott became so much of "an honorary Englishman" in his years at Oxford, his friends had trouble understanding his return to Germany in 1933 to work against the Nazi regime...
...efforts against the regime were interpreted by the American and British governments in light of this and other blunders. When Trott journeyed to England in June of 1939 and at the beginning of the war to the United States, many of his former friends thought he had become a Nazi. Trott, unfortunately, was too guarded in his explanations of the German underground to dispel such fears...
History, sadly, does not bear out that claim. Throughout the Nazi occupation, cases of citizens rescuing Jews were the exception, not the rule. And denunciation in those cruel times seemed much more common. The rescuers know that, of course. But by insisting on the banality of their heroism, they have launched a powerful challenge to our jaded moral notions of the status quo. To single them out as unusual suggests, in effect, that there was something abnormal about them. On the other hand, to treat them as ordinary human beings is to argue that altruism is accessible to anyone -- saints...
...When you look at the rescuers as a large group, you cannot put them into any of the categories that you are used to," says Nechama Tec, professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and author of When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland. They include both rich and poor, educated and barely literate, believers and atheists. "But on closer examination you see a series of interrelated characteristics," she notes. She found, for example, that many of the rescuers were individualists. "Most of us do what society demands at the moment. But because...