These are the questions that underlie the mission of FASPE, the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics, an organization that uses a unique historical lens to engage graduate students in professional schools (Business, Journalism, Law, Medicine and Seminary), as well as early-stage practitioners in those professions, in an intensive course of study focused on contemporary ethics in their fields.
Prior to World War II, German professionals were well-regarded internationally. In many respects, they set the standard for a commitment to quality of practice and for independence from state and political influence. Yet leaders and practitioners in each of the professions, and often the institutions they represented, were intimately involved in designing, enabling and/or executing the crimes of Nazi Germany. Lawyers wrote and enforced the Nuremberg Laws. Doctors designed and carried out the first murders of the handicapped and the opposition. Journalists became propagandists. Business executives used slave labor and entered into contracts with the Nazi regime to produce the weapons of genocide. Pastors and priests too often collaborated and condoned, even promoted, Nazi policies. And, to be sure, such actions were voluntary, not carried out at gunpoint.
FASPE Fellows travel to Germany and Poland for two weeks. They begin by studying the perpetrators: the professionals who looked like, were educated in the same fashion as, and played the same leadership roles in their society as, today’s professionals. How and why did they make the transition from ordinary professionals to becoming accessories to or enablers of mass murder? How could the moral codes governing these individuals break down or be distorted so readily and with such devastating consequences? The answer is that it happened day by day, decision by decision, often in the service of ambition and prestige and not ideology.
Maria Romik
2014 Medical and Seminary Fellows at the House of the Wannsee Conference – Photo by FASPE