SLIPPERY ROCK — When a Holocaust scholar spoke at Slippery Rock University on Wednesday afternoon, she focused on a perspective discussed not often enough: how everyday people became complicit in the activities of the Holocaust.

Susan Bachrach is the curator of special exhibitions at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Although she’s been studying the Holocaust for 24 years, she’s spent more than six years working on the latest exhibit at the museum called “Some Were Neighbors: Collaboration and Complicity in the Holocaust.”

The exhibit initially arose after the museum did interviews of museum patrons before and after they went through the exhibits, and one of the most notable things was how much people managed to distance themselves and blame only the Nazis, Bachrach said.

“(The interviews) were very revealing and somewhat disappointing because at both points (before and after), if you ask people who is responsible for the Holocaust, they just focus on Hitler or the Nazis,” she said.

“That’s a little disturbing that people are obviously distancing themselves from the subject by putting the bad Nazis, bad Hitler over there. There was really a desire to bring the subject a little bit closer to people by talking about the ordinary people.”

In Bachrach’s presentation, she explained how everyday people, those who were civil servants, tax collectors and nurses, were complying with the actions of the Holocaust, motivated by a number of factors.

“A lot of people think that people must’ve really hated the Jews, but that’s not necessarily the case,” she said.

For instance, many civil servants claim they were simply doing their jobs, even those tax collectors who were responsible for gathering quarterly taxes on Jewish people during the time. Bachrach said that collection came up four times a year, so collectors were becoming complicit by repeatedly levying a 20 percent to 25 percent tax on all of the assets owned by Jewish people.

“Like so many German civil servants after the war, (one tax collector) said he was simply doing his professional duty and following the law,” Bachrach said. “Was he complicit or not?”

Some were driven by social pressures and the need to conform, while others were motivated by emotions like jealousy, revenge and greed.

One of the most surprising things is that the everyday person could often benefit from the typical looting of the Jewish people’s belongings, according to Bachrach. While it was always known that some people benefitted from the Holocaust, more and more scholarly research has been done on the subject in the past 20 years.

“Once people acquired property, belongings, home, they really developed a stake in the continuing persecution,” she said.

“It casts things in a very different light if you think that a lot of people were benefiting. It’s very clear that the Nazis used this too when they were going into local areas and they were looking for local collaboration to identify Jews or to hunt down Jews who evaded arrest. (The Nazis) promised sometimes what we would think of relatively small rewards or collaborators who participated in these mass shootings, they often got the housing that their victims lived in.”

A lot of this took place in rural societies, Bachrach said. For that reason, many of the people who benefited were typically poor, suffering from a wartime economy.

“So the temptation to benefit was enormous,” she said.

One story in the exhibit describes a man who hid a family of Jewish people on his land, but his brother sold him out to settle a family feud after he did not get the family inheritance.

Of course, some of the “neighbors” helped, but understanding the actions of everyday people provides a new insight to how an event like the Holocaust could take place, she said.

“Not everyone acted exactly the same,” she said. “It would be really interesting to know why, and we should learn more about why, in some situations, people acted one way and in others, they didn’t. Remember that there are so many pressures on us in everyday life to conform, to defer to authority, and maybe if we are a little more aware of this when the moment comes, when we need to summon a little courage, it will give you a little boost.”

While nobody may know how they would act in circumstances like those of the Holocaust, it’s important to consider what each individual’s moral and ethical convictions would have them do.

“(The goal of the exhibit) really is, in the biggest sense, to provoke people into thinking a different way about the subject matter and about responsibility and how is it shared to a certain extent,” Bachrach said. “I think it’s a problem if we think that human beings like us could not have gotten involved. That’s delusional.”

In fact, some of the feedback the museum has received is that the exhibit is rather disturbing, and Bachrach does not disagree.

“I found this topic very disturbing,” she said. “I had not thought about this level of complicity before either, and it is disturbing.”

Bachrach’s presentation ended with a quotation from Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others”: “Once we begin to learn about violence and oppression, we can no longer pretend that evil is only perpetuated by those completely unlike us, or assume that there was a safe divide between ‘good’ people and ‘bad’ people.”