The questions your grandchildren will ask—and the answers history will not forgive you for giving.
Picture the living room. It is sometime in the 2040s or 2050s. The furniture has changed. The technology is unrecognizable. But the silence in that room will be familiar to anyone who has read German history—the specific, weighted silence that falls when a young person looks at someone they love and asks a question they have been working up the courage to ask for years.
What did you do?
The Germans have a word for the people who made the Holocaust possible without pulling a single trigger: Mitläufer. Fellow travelers. The ones who went along. Not the architects of the thing, not the true believers whipped into frenzy at Nuremberg, but the vast, ordinary middle. The neighbors who watched the storefronts get smashed and said nothing, the civil servants who stamped the forms, the good people who decided that keeping their heads down was a reasonable response to the unreasonable. They didn’t build the camps. They just didn’t stop them. And when it was over, they went quiet for a generation and hoped their children wouldn’t ask.
Their children asked.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the postwar silence that had served as the psychological mortar of West German society began to crack. A generation that had grown up in the rubble, been told to look forward, been handed a restored economy and a deliberately incomplete accounting, started pulling at the threads. They sat across kitchen tables from parents who had stamped the forms and watched the storefronts burn and told them: we didn’t know. We couldn’t do anything. Everyone was doing it. We were just following orders.
That last phrase has its own particular history. At Nuremberg, the men who ran the machinery of extermination offered it like a legal sacrament: Befehlsnotstand, acting under orders, compelled by the chain of command, absolved by the structure above them. The tribunal rejected it. History rejected it. And the children of Germany, and later, their children, refused to accept it too. They gave it a name, Kollektivschuld, collective guilt, the idea that a society bears moral responsibility not just for what its leaders do, but for what it permits, enables, and quietly cheers.
America has always believed it was exempt from this kind of reckoning. There is a long tradition in this country, comfortable, bipartisan, and almost entirely self-serving, of insisting that what happened in Germany could never happen here. We are different. Our institutions are stronger. Our people would not go along.
They went along.
Not all of them. Not even most of them, perhaps. But enough. Enough to fill arenas, enough to pack cable news ratings, enough to re-elect a man who had already shown them exactly who he was. Enough to confirm judicial nominees after seeing the cages at the border. Enough to send campaign contributions after watching tear gas fired into peaceful crowds. Enough to shrug at the open courting of foreign authoritarian governments, at the weaponization of federal agencies against political opponents, at the systematic dismantling of the norms and guardrails that Americans once trusted to hold. Enough to say: I don’t love everything he does, but the economy, but the judges, but the emails, but the alternative.
That is the Mitläufer bargain in its purest American form. You do not have to believe in the thing. You only have to decide that your comfort, your tribe, your grievance, or your tax rate is worth more than the people being ground up by the machine.
The complicit never see themselves that way. That is precisely what makes them dangerous. The SS officers who ran the paperwork at Auschwitz did not think of themselves as murderers. The village mayor who posted the deportation notices thought of himself as a functionary of an unpleasant but legitimate government. The judge who sentenced a man to death for telling a joke about Hitler told himself he was upholding the law. They were not monsters. They were people who had made a series of small, individually defensible choices that added up to catastrophe.
This is the mechanism. It does not require a majority of true believers. It only requires enough people to decide, at each critical juncture, that the cost of standing up is higher than the cost of going along. And at each juncture, the machinery moves forward a notch. And each notch becomes the new normal. And the people who would have been horrified by the first notch find themselves, years later, explaining the last notch as a reasonable response to circumstances.
America has never really had a Vergangenheitsbewältigung about anything. Not about slavery. Not about the extermination of its indigenous people. Not about Jim Crow. We have always preferred the forward-looking national mythology to the backward-looking moral inventory. We convinced ourselves that the forward momentum was itself a kind of justice.
Joe Broadmeadow
So here is what the future room will look like. Your grandchild, maybe ten years old now, maybe not yet born, will sit across from you and will ask, with the directness that young people reserve for the moral failures of the adults they trusted:
Did you support him?
Did you know what he was doing to people?
When they took the children and put them in cages, did you say anything?
When he called the press the enemy of the people, when he suggested his political opponents should be imprisoned, when he stood on a stage and asked a foreign government to help him win an election, what did you do?
Did you at least refuse to vote for him again?
Or did you tell yourself a story that let you sleep?
Those are not rhetorical questions. They are the exact questions the second generation of Germans asked their parents. They are the questions that fractured families across West Germany in the 1960s, that drove a generation to the streets in 1968, that became, slowly, painfully, and without full resolution even now, the foundation of something the Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung: the coming to terms with the past. Notice that phrase. Coming to terms. Not moving on. Not getting over it. Terms. The reckoning has conditions, and those conditions must be met.
America has never really had a Vergangenheitsbewältigung about anything. Not about slavery. Not about the extermination of its indigenous people. Not about Jim Crow. We have always preferred the forward-looking national mythology to the backward-looking moral inventory. We convinced ourselves that the forward momentum was itself a kind of justice.
It is not.
What is coming, not in years, but in decades, in the long hinge of historical memory, is the question. The same question the German children asked. The same question that reveals not just what a person did, but who they were. What they valued. What they were willing to sacrifice, and what they were willing to sacrifice others to protect.
History does not ask whether you were a monster. It asks whether you were willing to let one operate without making any effort to stop it..
What will you say when they ask?
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