Difference Between Bystander And A Perpetrator

In the mid 1930s heading into the mid 1940s, The Nazis created harsh living conditions for Jews living in Europe. The Nazis, lead by Adolf Hitler, were a right wing political party that took control of Germany and eventually expanded to the other European countries around them including Poland and Austria. Using the Nuremberg laws in 1935, the Nazis began separating Jewish people from everyday society . Four years later in 1939, Jews were forced to live in Ghettos that were overcrowded and barely maintained. Not long after in 1945, the “final solution” was implemented. Innocent Jewish men, women and children were shipped in train cars to Concentration camps. The conditions in these cars were brutal. Passengers would go days without food,
These people were loaded on and off these cars like cattle by men working for the Nazi Party. In most definitions, the difference between the bystander and a perpetrator is how involved someone is in a specific event. A bystander usually has no intention of causing harm to anyone or thing and is aware of the events happening around them, but doesn’t necessarily know how their actions are affecting other people. A perpetrator is one step further of continuing to live a normal life or not, but purposely committing these crimes and for the most part they are ok with the effects of these harmful actions. Although there are many different views of how different people view the definition of a bystander and how that vaires of a perpetrator, the train organizers, maintainers and engineers began the Holocaust as bystander that quickly lead them to be perpetrators by the time the Holocaust ended in
These men’s jobs cost thousands of people their lives. Because of this, thesy are perpetrators by the end of the Holocaust. A Railyard worker named Adolf Johann Barthelmass reflected on his memories of watching millions of people board and get off overcrowded trains. He explained, “The car was still filled with the bodies of deportees who had died on the train and the SS had forgotten to have the bodies removed at Birkenau”(Document G). These trains were jammed tight with people, and in some cases dead bodies. There's no way to prove that Barthelmass was working for the NAzis intentionally of if he just needed work. Because of this he, like every other worker, began as a bystander who watched people suffer. As soon as these men started to fix broken trains, build new ones and increasing space within them, they became perpetrators who can be blamed for thousands of deaths. A Treblinka Death Camp survivor, Samuel Willenberg, traced their mens work back to being a perpetrator when recalling “The trains were lengthened and the cars were overloaded” (Background Information). Willenberg points out how these ‘innocent’ men worked hard to build trains longer and more effective knowing the goal was to be able to transfer people quicker. Although Barthelmass was one of these men, his has a similar story from a different