From what I’ve read of this team’s research, there were all too many candidates – gentile and Jewish, desperate and eager, coerced and willing – who might have betrayed the families hiding in the secret annex.
The heroes and resisters, like Miep Gies in the case of the Frank family, are relatively rare. The vast majority of people who live under a sado-populist regime, including those living under foreign occupation by one, tend to acquiesce to its demands. The Nazi period gave us a whole group of terms for these varied types that we use to this day: Quislings, kapos, “Good Germans”, etc.
The time for the masses to stop the fascists is before they gain power in their own country. It’s lesson I’m afraid current societies have forgotten (assuming they ever learned them in the first place).
