96% of people who were directly asked to hide a Jew during WWII said yes. The icon of resistance on every t-shirt may never have saved a single life.
There is a photograph from 1936 that has obsessed me since I was a boy. It shows hundreds of German shipyard workers doing the Nazi salute, arms stretched toward the Führer. Every single one of them. Except one. In the middle of the crowd, one man stands with his arms folded across his chest while everyone around him salutes.
For decades, no one knew who he was. The photograph sat in the archives until November 1995, when a German historian placed an ad in Hamburg's evening paper asking if anyone recognized him. A woman responded that same week. It's my father, she said. His name was August Lombesser. He had joined the Nazi party in 1931 just to get a job, then fell in love with a Jewish woman named Irma Eckler. They had two daughters. A month after a family photo was taken — a smiling dad, a mother holding her baby tight — the Gestapo came. The children were sent to an orphanage. Irma was sent to a concentration camp and murdered. August was sent to the front and killed in 1944.
Today, that picture is everywhere. On badges, postcards, t-shirts, and posters. And every time it goes viral, the commentary is the same: Be that guy.
But the question I keep returning to is harder than that. Would I have been that guy? And honestly, would you?
The story of August Lombesser confronts us with an uncomfortable truth: most humans are herd animals. We do what we're taught to do, accept what we're handed, believe what we're told is true. We may feel free, but doing what you feel like often means little more than going with the flow.
The anthropologist Margaret Mead has a quote you've probably seen on a poster: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." That sounds like a happy motto for idealistic do-gooders. It's actually a cold, hard observation. What Mead is really saying is that most people stand on the sidelines. The vast majority leave behind nothing but a fleeting footprint and are soon forgotten. Only a small minority forge their own path and, along the way, change the world.
You might think influence is distributed like a gentle bell curve. Some people have a little, others have more, a small group at the top has the most. But that's not how it works. The most influential individuals aren't two or three times as influential as the rest. They're a hundred, a thousand, a million times more impactful. In statistics, this is called a power law.
And here's what might surprise you: it's not just the rich and powerful who end up on the influential side of that curve. Think about the abolitionists fighting to end slavery, the suffragettes working for women's right to vote. Were they the richest or most powerful people of their time? Hardly. The statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls them an intransigent minority. The world, he argues, is shaped by stubborn, obstinate, headstrong, hell-bent, willful, and relentless advocates. In his words, the most intolerant wins.
So the question isn't whether a small group of people can change the world. The question is: what separates those who act from those who don't?
I know few stories that answer this as clearly as the tale of Nieuwlande, a tiny Dutch town close to the German border where, during World War II, nearly 100 Jews found a hiding place. The proportion of people in hiding there was higher than almost anywhere else in Europe.
To understand Nieuwlande's secret, you have to know about Arnold Douwes.
Arnold came from the town of Bosch. He'd been a willful child, suspended from school three times. As a young man, he couldn't land a job and failed to find a wife. He emigrated to the United States, lived as a vagabond, and was eventually shipped back through Ellis Island as an undesirable alien. By his mid-30s, by every conventional measure, he was a failure.
Until May 10th, 1940, when the Nazis invaded.
That week, he was stopped by a German officer on a motorcycle looking for directions to Leiden. Immer gerade aus, Arnold replied — keep going straight — pointing in the wrong direction. Danke schön, the soldier said, and rode off. It was the first act of resistance by a man who'd been a drifter in ordinary life but now found his calling in wartime.
Arnold started by delivering underground newspapers, then moved on to cutting the cables powering German searchlights. Once the authorities were on to him, he tracked cross-country with his bicycle as his sole possession. That's how he ended up in Nieuwlande in the summer of 1942, where he became the leader of one of the country's largest networks for Jews in hiding.
We know all of this because Arnold kept a journal. He filled 35 little notebooks, stuffed them into jam jars, and buried them in the gardens of homes in his secret network. After the war, he typed his notes into a 247-page volume — the only known real-time diary written by someone hiding Jews in Western Europe. Some Dutch historians consider it as important as the diary of Anne Frank, except this one was written not by someone in hiding, but by someone doing the hiding.
There's something you need to understand about the Netherlands during the war. After the Nazis were defeated, many Dutch people claimed to have been part of the resistance. That was mostly fiction. Dutch historians speak of the "resistance myth" — the idea that this brave little country rose up as one to challenge the Germans. In reality, there were few serious attempts to resist. My country largely stood by and watched as its Jewish population was transported to camps. The Dutch police helped catch Jews in hiding. The national railways transported them. Most Dutch people weren't Nazis. The majority disapproved. But when it came down to it, most people remained passive.
Arnold Douwes was different, and he had a remarkable method. He rode his bicycle along the Dutch back roads seven days a week, rain or shine, asking everyone he could find if they'd take people in. Except "asking" is too gentle a word. He and his comrade Max Leons ran a good cop, bad cop operation: Max politely testing the waters, Arnold taking the direct approach. He bullied farmers into taking in persecuted Jews. He was especially ruthless with ministers, calling them out as cowards and hypocrites if they refused.
His logic was simple: if everyone in town was hiding someone, no one could snitch.
"So that's settled. Good night." — Arnold Douwes, after producing a Jewish couple in a farmer's living room before the man could protest.
The Jewish couple he left behind that night survived the war.
In the 1970s, the first serious psychological studies were conducted into resistance heroes. Dr. Samuel Oliner and Dr. Pearl Oliner, a husband-and-wife team who founded the Altruistic Personality Institute in California, interviewed more than 400 people who helped protect Jews during the war and compared them with bystanders who did nothing.
I ordered their book, eager to find the answer. I flipped to the appendix, to the tables with all the statistics, and I saw the same two letters over and over again: NS. Non-significant.
Resistance heroes and ordinary people were almost impossible to tell apart. A rescuer could be shy or self-assured, silly or serious, young or old, pious or scandalous, rich or poor, conservative or progressive. The psychologist Eva Fogelman, who also interviewed hundreds of rescuers and regularly attended ceremonies honoring them in Israel, said she was always struck by how, at a distance, they looked like a random group of people. Like subway riders seated in the same car.
And yet both Fogelman and the Oliners reached a few tentative conclusions.
First, feelings are overrated. Very few rescuers reported being motivated by deep-felt sympathy. Many said they had to put aside their emotions in order to function effectively. You had to steal, falsify, bribe, manipulate, or even kill. Above all, you had to be a good liar.
Second, a substantial number of rescuers had similar upbringings. Their parents instilled in them a strong sense of self-worth and taught them to think for themselves. Psychologists call this an internal locus of control — the sense that you are in charge of your own life.
Third, and this is fascinating: both communists and orthodox Christians were overrepresented. It wasn't the moderate middle ground that rose up to resist the Nazi occupiers, but those on the flanks. As one survivor said about his devout Christian rescuers, they won't patronize a grocer who, in their eyes, is too left-wing — but they will take in the Jews he was hiding as part of a shared struggle.
A new generation of researchers in the 1990s was critical of the earlier studies, arguing that the Oliners had relied on circular reasoning. Why did some people risk their lives for others? Because they were good people. Why were they good people? Because they risked their lives for others.
These researchers shifted the focus from psychology to sociology. They stopped looking at rescuers' motives and started looking at their circumstances. Were resistance heroes friends or acquaintances of those they hid? No — more than half had no pre-war relationship with any of the Jews they helped, and nearly 90% helped at least one stranger. Did having a basement, an attic, or some savings make a difference? No. The only thing that mattered even a little was how many rooms your house had, and that effect was minimal.
But then they found it. One variable that determined almost everything. When this condition was met, nearly everyone took action. 96% to be precise.
You had to be asked.
96% of people who were directly asked to hide a Jew during the war said yes.
Even today, people in the Netherlands debate whether ordinary citizens knew what the Nazis planned to do to the Jews. But if you read about the people who resisted, you realize there are two forms of knowing. You can know something and do something about it. Or you can know something and look away, afraid to face the consequences. Being asked was what forced people across that line.
Those who were asked almost always said yes. In many cases, the question was a turning point — people then helped more Jews afterward, and many who were asked went on to ask others.
The resistance worked like a virus.
Everyone has their own threshold to act. A tipping point to taking action. There is a very small minority that needs zero encouragement to do the right thing. The psychologist Cass Sunstein calls these pioneers "the zeros," and Arnold Douwes clearly falls into this category.
Most of us only dare to act once others have led the way. The ones need only one person. The twos take action if they have two allies. And the millions will only act if half the country has taken to the streets.
Even Martin Luther King wasn't always Martin Luther King. In December 1956, shortly after the historic Montgomery bus boycott, the 27-year-old King admitted: "If anybody had asked me a year ago to head the movement, I tell you very honestly that I would have run a mile to get away from it. I had no intention of being involved in this way."
"If anybody had asked me a year ago to head the movement, I tell you very honestly that I would have run a mile to get away from it." — Martin Luther King, December 1956
This is also why revolutions can gain momentum so quickly. The zeros ignite the ones, the ones ignite the twos, and then there's no stopping it.
The historian Anton Howes, who studied the origins of the Industrial Revolution by sifting through the biographies of 1,452 British inventors, found the same pattern. They were rich and poor, rural and urban, heretics and devout churchgoers, professors and amateurs. But time and again, people only innovated after being inspired by other inventors — a co-worker, teacher, friend, neighbor, or family member. It was as if they were infected by a belief in progress.
Once people started resisting in World War II, they generally didn't stop. A mere 3% of the people interviewed by the Oliners took part for less than a month. For the bulk of the rescuers, resistance lasted longer than two years, and 65% helped more than five Jews survive.
If you want to change the world, it's not about whether you're cut out for it with your precise mix of personality traits. It's not about who you are. It's about who you can become.
You don't do good things because you're a good person. You become a good person by doing good things.
Most of us aren't zeros like Arnold Douwes. But if you're open to being inspired by others, you can lower your own threshold for taking action. So expose yourself to the virus. Get started. And once you've started, ask others to join in.
Now, here's the part of the story that usually gets left out — probably because it's not very inspiring.
On November 15, 1995, the very same day Lombesser's daughter saw the ad in the Hamburg paper, someone else recognized the photo. He thought it was his father, Gustav Weygard. When the paper published Lombesser's gripping story a few days later, the son decided not to respond out of respect.
But we now have strong indication that it is Gustav Weygard, not August Lombesser, in that famous photograph.
We know for certain that Weygard worked at that shipyard. We know he consistently refused to do the Nazi salute. And the resemblance is, if anything, more striking than Lombesser's.
Why does this matter? Because, according to his son, the deeply religious Weygard thought it was blasphemous to revere a fellow man as a saint — even when that man was Adolf Hitler. Whenever someone said "Heil Hitler" to Weygard, he'd respond with a simple "Guten Tag."
He may have simply been a man who folded his arms.
Nothing indicates Weygard was sympathetic to the fate of the Jews. He continued working for the German war industry until the very end and differed little from most other Christians in Nazi Germany who did nothing to resist the regime.
Brave? Yes. Admirable? Sure. But he didn't save a single life.
You know who did? Arnold Douwes. Maybe we should put him on a t-shirt.
Douwes didn't just refuse to go along. He got on his bicycle, rode through the rain, knocked on doors, and asked people to act. He was rude about it. He was relentless. And because of him, nearly a hundred Jews survived in a tiny village where, by all rights, they should have been discovered and killed.
More than 70 years ago, in one of his most famous sermons, Martin Luther King made the point that nonconformity isn't in itself a virtue. It's not about what you think or say. It's about what you do to move the needle.
So would I have joined the resistance? I honestly don't know. But I've come to think it's the wrong question. It was never about folding your arms in a crowd. It was about what you did when someone knocked on your door and asked you to hide a stranger.
The real question isn't: would you have been the man in the photograph? The real question is: who is asking you right now? And if no one is, who are you asking?
