Remember professional ethics

In this lesson from On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder mainly takes the time to remind us of the many lawyers, doctors, and businessmen who helped to execute the Nazi program of mass-murder. Most of the examples Snyder gives are enthusiastic Nazis for whom “professional ethics” just got in the way of their percieved racial mission. Men like Hans Frank, Hitler’s personal legal advisor, who became governor-general of Poland and then oversaw the rounding up of Jews into the Warsaw ghetto and the construction of the Poland-based murder camps like Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka and Belzec. In short, Frank was a monster who very much deserved his execution in 1946.

As someone who does not represent a profession, this lesson feels a little distant to me. But among the legal, professional, and business professionals under an authoritarian government, there seem to me two types who cooperate with the regime (whatever regime that may be): true believers and those that go along to get along. It strikes me that the true believers are a lost cause, mostly. The go-along-to get-along crowd, though, are cowards and not likely to be pursuaded to be brave.

The doctors, lawyers, and businessmen who refuse to cooperate will be punished, through either through banishment from one’s professional sphere or something much worse.

I worry about my own physicians and nurses at the present moment. Some of them are, I think, immigrants, and most of them are not white. What happens to them under the new regime?

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