I was employed in a defense plant (a war plant, of course, but they were always called
defense plants). That was the year of the National Defense Law, the law of “total
conscription.” Under the law I was required to take the oath of fidelity. I said I would not; I
opposed it in conscience. I was given twenty-four hours to “think it over.” In those
twenty-four hours I lost the world. . . .
You see, refusal would have meant the loss of my job, of course, not prison or anything
like that. (Later on, the penalty was worse, but this was only 1935.) But losing my job
would have meant that I could not get another. Wherever I went I should be asked why I
left the job I had, and when I said why, I should certainly have been refused employment.
Nobody would hire a “Bolshevik.” Of course, I was not a Bolshevik, but you understand
what I mean.
I tried not to think of myself or my family. We might have got out of the country in any
case, and I could have got a job in industry or education somewhere else.
What I tried to think of was the people to whom I might be of some help later on, if things
got worse (as I believed they would). I had a wide friendship in scientific and academic
circles, including many Jews, and “Aryans,” too, who might be in trouble. If I took the oath
and held my job, I might be of help, somehow, as things went on. If I refused to take the
oath, I would certainly be useless to my friends, even if I remained in the country. I myself
would be in their situation.
The next day, after “thinking it over,” I said I would take the oath with the mental
reservation, that, by the words with which the oath began, “Ich schwöre bei Gott,” “I swear
by God,” I understood that no human being and no government had the right to override
my conscience. My mental reservations did not interest the official who administered the
oath. He said, “Do you take the oath?” and I took it. That day the world was lost, and it was
I who lost it.

First of all, there is the problem of the lesser evil. Taking the oath was not so evil as being
unable to help my friends later on would have been. But the evil of the oath was certain
and immediate, and the helping of my friends was in the future and therefore uncertain. I
had to commit a positive evil there and then, in the hope of a possible good later on. The
good outweighed the evil; but the good was only a hope, the evil a fact. . . . The hope
might not have been realized—either for reasons beyond my control or because I became
afraid later on or even because I was afraid all the time and was simply fooling myself
when I took the oath in the first place.
But that is not the important point. The problem of the lesser evil we all know about; in
Germany we took Hindenburg as less evil than Hitler, and in the end, we got them both.
But that is not why I say that Americans cannot understand. No, the important point
is—how many innocent people were killed by the Nazis, would you say? . . . Shall we say,
just to be safe, that three million innocent people were killed all together? . . . And how
many innocent lives would you like to say I saved? . . . Perhaps five, or ten, one doesn’t
know. But shall we say a hundred, or a thousand, just to be safe? . . . And it would be
better to have saved all three million, instead of only a hundred, or a thousand? There,
then, is my point. If I had refused to take the oath of fidelity, I would have saved all three
million. . . .
There I was in 1935, a perfect example of the kind of person who, with all his advantages
in birth, in education, and in position, rules (or might easily rule) in any country. If I had
refused to take the oath in 1935, it would have meant that thousands and thousands like
me, all over Germany, were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have heartened
millions. Thus the regime would have been overthrown, or indeed, would never have
come to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist in 1935 meant
that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, like me in Germany were also
unprepared, and each one of these hundreds of thousands was, like me, a man of great
influence or of great potential influence. Thus the world was lost. . . .
These hundred lives I saved—or a thousand or ten as you will—what do they represent? A
little something out of the whole terrible evil, when, if my faith had been strong enough in
1935, I could have prevented the whole evil. . . . I did not believe that I could “move
mountains.” The day I said, “No,” I had faith. In the process of “thinking it over,” in the next
twenty-four hours, my faith failed me. So, in the next ten years, I was able to remove only
anthills, not mountains.
My education did not help me, and I had a broader and better education than most have
had or ever will have. All it did, in the end, was to enable me to rationalize my failure of
faith more easily than I might have done if I had been ignorant. And so it was, I think,
among educated men generally, in that time in Germany. Their resistance was no greater
than other men’s