(REVIEWER – David Saks, Vol. 72, #1, Pesach 2017)
In November 1938, shortly after the Kristallnacht pogrom, the Indian nationalist leader Mohandas K Gandhi controversially advised German Jews to respond to their persecution by engaging in dignified passive resistance, assuring them that whatever suffering they might endure, they would gain an enduring moral victory over their tormentors. This is encapsulated in the following extract from an article he wrote for his journal Harijan:
Can the Jews resist this organised and shameless persecution? Is there a way to preserve their self-respect and not to feel helpless or forlorn? I submit that there is.
If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German might, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this I should not wait for the Jews to join me in civil resistance, but would have confidence that in the end the rest were bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can.
Gandhi has been strenuously criticised for being, at best, naïve, and at worst blind to the point of callousness to the true depths of Nazi depravity. Amongst those Jewish advocates of nonviolent resistance who reluctantly broke with him over his stance were the philosopher Martin Buber and Rabbi Yehuda Magnes. Gandhi’s critics accuse him of failing to distinguish between the relatively benign British administration in India or even the much harsher but still comparatively restrained white-dominated government in South Africa and a regime that in word and deed defied the most basic norms of civilized, humane conduct. Passive resistance might be effective with those whose consciences might see them eventually balk at continually repressing people who consistently responded to violence with peaceful non-cooperation. How could it in any way prevail, however, against those whose core ideology ran diametrically counter to notions of conscience as broadly understood, if often imperfectly practiced, by the civilized world? In view of all this, it appeared that only force would in the final analysis be effective when it came to ridding the world of so evil a phenomenon as Nazism.
The fall of the Third Reich was indeed brought about in the end by the greatly superior military resources that its opponents were able to bring against it. Even so, there was a fair amount of nonviolent opposition against Nazism, beginning in pre-war Germany and spreading to the various countries that were occupied by Germany during the war itself. In his book Nonviolent Resistance to the Nazis, George Paxton chronicles the various forms which this opposition took and attempts to assess both the degree to which it can be said to have been effective and whether it could, or indeed should, have been practiced to a greater extent than was in fact the case. The author’s own particular interest in the philosophy and strategy of nonviolent resistance is indicated by his previous work as editor of The Gandhi Way, the quarterly journal of the UK-based Gandhi Foundation, and in his book Sonja Schlesin – Gandhi’s South African Secretary (Glasgow, 2006). Schlesin’s life, and particularly her role in the Indian Passive Resistance movement in early 20th Century South Africa, is the subject of Harriet Feinman’s insightful monograph, which appears elsewhere in this issue of Jewish Affairs.
The Nazi era, Paxton writes, “revealed the very worst aspects of human nature”, yet the extreme challenges it posed also brought out the best in many people, generally only at the individual level, but sometimes at the collective level as well. The rescue of Danish Jewry would be an obvious example of the latter. Aside from the many thousands of ordinary people who, at great personal risk, gave sanctuary to Jews or aided in their escape to neutral countries, there were those who found ways to defy the Nazi occupiers and the collaborationist regimes that functioned on their behalf. This might take only symbolic forms, such as listening to prohibited radio broadcasts or wearing symbols of resistance, or it might entail more concrete acts of defiance, including refusing to work in weapons’ factories, register for work in Germany or carry out Nazi orders. As Paxton stresses, total obedience to the occupying power was never inevitable; some form of resistance was always an option. Such acts of resistance did indeed occur throughout Nazi- occupied Europe but, as Paxton concludes, “they needed to be done by more people, with more coordination”.
The question arises as to what might have been the result had nonviolent resistance, rather than occurring piece-meal and primarily underground, had taken the Gandhian approach of coordinated scale non-cooperation organised on a mass scale and in the open. In view of the savage reprisals carried out by the Germans in response to acts of armed resistance – the wholesale massacres following the assassination of SS-Obergruppenführer Reynhard Heydrich, for example – this may have been the only realistic way in which the various captive populations could have posed an effective challenge to Nazi tyranny. Paxton fully recognises that even in countries where it was most employed, such as in Norway and Denmark, nonviolent resistance was not enough to expel the invader. However, he maintains that “had it been used more even more widely and systematically”, a great deal more would have been achieved, since an occupying force, in order to function, “must have a substantial level of cooperation from the occupied population”. The reality is that throughout the war, such cooperation was largely forthcoming, whether out of opportunism or simply fear of what the consequences of disobedience might be.
Paxton also boldly wrestles with the sensitive question of whether the Holocaust might have been averted had German Jews responded at an early stage of their persecution with nonviolent resistance. As is universally recognised, the Holocaust did not – indeed could not – begin with mass shootings and gas chambers. Rather, the path to genocide commenced with non-lethal acts of discrimination that progressively stripped Jews of their citizenship rights but fell short of actual physical harassment. Once the pariah status of Jews had been legally established, it became possible to move on to more direct acts of oppression – arbitrary arrests, round-ups, deportations, seizures of property and, successively, ghettoization, forced labour and finally physical extermination. Observes Paxton, “The Nazis cleverly reduced the impact of restrictions by going through many stages which the Jews could persuade themselves would be the last”. What might have happened, however, had German Jews at the outset refused to comply with compulsory registration, declined to wear the Yellow Star, resisted serving under Jewish Councils under German control or working as slave laborers? In the face of mass disobedience at an early stage of their rule, how would the Nazi authorities have reacted? One also must take into account how principled Jewish defiance may have emboldened anti-Nazi factions within the broader German population to themselves defy antisemitic laws, such as those banning Jews from the professions. It has often been argued that had France and Britain acted decisively against early breaches by Germany of the Versailles Treaty, particularly the remilitarization of the Rhineland, Hitler might have been stopped in his tracks. Similarly, and obviously with the benefit of hindsight, had German Jewry from the outset responded to discriminatory measures with principled, across-the-board non-cooperation, perhaps the eventual catastrophe that engulfed them and their brethren throughout the continent could yet have been prevented.
Nonviolent Resistance to the Nazis by George Paxton, YouCaxton Publications, 2016, 244pp.
DAVID SAKS IS ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN JEWISH BOARD OF DEPUTIES AND EDITOR OF JEWISH AFFAIRS
