I spent several weeks in 2008 and 2009 traveling in Germany to research, shoot and screen a documentary. The subject of the film was a German-born American Jew who returned to his childhood hometown in 1969 — 30 years after his family’s harrowing escape from the country.
During my first visit, while searching the town archives for local photographs taken during the Nazi era, I was surprised to find only a few photos were available.
“There is little in the archives from those years,” my colleague Reverend Karl explained over beers one evening. “The photos you seek are in the private collection of a local man called Albert Weber. I can ask him if he’d be willing to work with you.”
Later that week, Reverend Karl drove me to the home of Mr. Weber who had agreed to share digital images of his historic photo collection. As we pulled into the shaded drive, Karl stopped the car and turned to me.
“Cyd,” he said, “there’s something I need to tell you about Mr. Weber before you meet him.”
I waited for him to explain, and as he sat silent, I suddenly felt that a gut punch was coming my way.
“Weber’s father was a local Nazi Party leader who was awarded this property.”
Reverend Karl gazed down the leafy drive leading to the house.
“Before the war, this home belonged to a Jewish family. They all perished in Auschwitz.”
An icy wave of dread moved from my scalp to the soles of my feet.
“Yes — Mr. Weber owns nearly all the photographs from that time because they were confiscated by The Party,” Reverend Karl explained.
He looked over at me before continuing.
“To hide their crimes? Perhaps. Or maybe because they took everything that did not belong to them. They took everything.”
A jumble of thoughts flashed across my mind: Can I do this? Should I? What will it mean if I turn away? If I go forward?
Reverend Karl seemed to take my stunned silence as acceptance and continued down the drive to a rambling, surprisingly modern-looking wood-paneled house. I followed him to the door and stood behind him as he rang the bell. A late-middle-aged man with a white tuft of hair and twinkling Santa Claus eyes opened the door and invited us in. I made a mental calculation and determined that by the time World War II had ended, the man was either a very young child or had not yet been born.
“Please sit down,” said Mr. Weber, gesturing toward a big sofa. A blue and white flowered china teapot and delicate matching cups sat on the rugged wood coffee table.
I looked around the spacious living room with its beamed, vaulted ceiling and oversize furniture and pictured a Jewish family gathered there. I imagined their celebrations, their loves, their losses, their everyday lives lived out in the shelter of this home. Their home.
Mr. Weber handed me a cup of tea. I lifted the cup to my face and took in its earthy scent. Looking over the cup’s rim, I considered Mr. Weber as he spoke in German to Reverend Karl.
Did he ever think about that family? Did he imagine their lives? Did he dream of a Jewish child sleeping in the bed his father had stolen for him? Clearly, he personally carried no responsibility for what the Nazis had done to that family. Or to Germany. Or to the world, for that matter. But how could he possibly stay in this home knowing its history?
Mr. Weber seemed — I don’t know — nice? He seemed normal. Not cruel nor hateful nor evil. Could it be that Mr. Weber truly felt this home, confiscated by murderers, was just the home he grew up in? Given its history — knowing how and why it came into his family’s possession — how could he?
The contradictions were more than I had bargained for on that October afternoon. I’d come there believing that the Nazi era was dead and gone — that the German people had largely reckoned with their past. I wasn’t yet ready to consider the remnants. The complications.
Later, I spoke to Dr. Bauer, a Holocaust historian and another of my German colleagues, about the complex nature of my feelings about Mr. Weber. He nodded knowingly and confided that he’d had his own moments of disquietude about his country’s past.
Dr. Bauer told me that in 1963, when he was a high school student, he attended a portion of the Auschwitz Trials held in his hometown of Frankfurt. Beforehand, he and his fellow students believed they knew whom they would see facing trial: not human beings, but “devils, monsters, beasts.”
“Instead,” he said, “we encountered normal people. Elderly, quiet people.”
He described individuals “you would not have noticed in the tramway.” These people who had done such unthinkable things at Auschwitz, he realized, came from typical German society. They were friends, neighbors, co-workers, uncles and aunts.
“It is not a matter of ‘they’ but of ‘we’ — they are us,” he told me.
“We Germans are not special,” he added, noting that the dark side of human nature exists in each of us. What happened in Germany could happen anywhere. Even in the United States.
Every word Dr. Bauer said that day made sense, but I didn’t want to believe them to be true. I wanted to believe that we’d learned from history. I wanted to believe that we wouldn’t regress — that the moral arc of the universe would forever bend toward justice.
Now, just 15 years later, in this summer of 2025, I sit on my porch overlooking my back garden where the peony blooms have waned and the hydrangeas nod their ivory heads in the shade of the pines. It’s peaceful here, but beyond my gates, the world is anything but peaceful.
In Germany, an extremist anti-immigration party, the AfD — the Alternative for Germany Party — has risen. That organization, with known ties to neo-Nazis, is now the third leading party in Germany. Other countries are seeing right-wing and white supremacist groups and political parties growing in popularity, as well.
Something’s happening here, in the United States, too. We’ve once again elected Donald Trump to the highest office in the land — a man his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired Army Gen. Mark Milley, has called “fascist to the core.” Trump told the American people he would be a dictator. Now, he’s making good on that promise.
Most disturbingly, he has directed the Department of Homeland Security to terrorize our immigrant communities by snatching people off the street and disappearing them into prisons and detention camps. He’s pushed through legislation that drastically increases that department’s budget, exponentially surging the numbers of unaccountable, unidentified, masked men to form an American Gestapo. He’s ordered that more states build detention centers to house “enemies of the people,” which, in my mind, immediately conjures up images of concentration camps.
The actions of the Trump administration have frightened many Americans — enough so that millions of us took to the streets for the “No Kings” march on June 14 to protest Trump’s illegal power grabs. In my hometown of Colorado Springs, over 10,000 people carried signs and protested our increasingly cruel and lawless federal government. Yet, an alarmingly large swath of seemingly reasonable, “normal,” everyday people — some of whom I’ve known my entire life — are cheering on the extremism and violence. Watching the dark side come out in those I love is terrifying and heartbreaking. In some ways, it feels almost as if they have been disappeared and replaced by unrecognizable — and unspeakably cruel — versions of themselves.
Suddenly the question of what happened to “normal everyday people” in Nazi Germany becomes an American question. What is happening to us and why?
Some psychologists believe a concept called right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) can help explain why certain individuals follow strongmen and demagogues. A “cluster of traits,” which, according to authors John W. Dean and Bob Altemeyer, includes “submission to perceived authorities, aggression toward outgroups sanctioned by those authorities, and a desire to enforce traditional social norms,” certainly might offer clues for some people’s attraction and loyalty to Trump.
However, even those of us who don’t exhibit RWA tendencies live lives that are, in some ways, built at the expense of others — stolen native lands, sweatshop goods, national prosperity brought about by slavery. My own childhood home in Topeka, Kansas, is located on a site where the Kansa (or Kaw) native tribes thrived before they were forcibly removed by the U.S. government to “Indian Country” in 1873.
Neither I nor Mr. Weber are personally responsible for our countries’ past crimes. But we can — and should — be responsible for how we move forward. We cannot allow ourselves to deny or look away from the past or from what is occurring now. Terrible atrocities have happened all over this world because good people did nothing, as so many Germans did nothing, and as so many people in this country are doing nothing now.
We’re all vulnerable to complicity in these crimes — maybe not because we have the capacity to step across a clear line into unthinkable evil, but because of our failure to see the continuum we’re already on.
We have a choice before us. We can indulge our dark side or be the light. We can speak the truth. We can challenge the lawlessness being perpetrated in our names. We can, as still-free Americans, defend the voiceless who cannot defend themselves. We can be the light.
Note: Some names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals mentioned in this essay.
Cyd Chartier is a writer who has also worked in documentary film. Her work has been published in HuffPost, BuzzFeed, Rocky Mountain Reader, and Athena Talks. She has an MFA in narrative nonfiction and is the author of a memoir, “The Hallelujah Bus.” Cyd lives in Colorado Springs with her husband and two rescue cats. For more from her, visit cydchartier.com.
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