WASHINGTON—During a tour of the Holocaust Memorial Museum that gave him occasion to consider how he might have acted in the face of grave injustice, D.C. tourist Tyler Henley told reporters Thursday he was confident that if he had lived in Nazi Germany he would turn Jews in out of fear. “If it really came down to it, and the Gestapo was pounding on my door, I would not have hesitated to give them the names of all the Jews I knew and all the people in my neighborhood I suspected of hiding Jews,” said Henley, adding that he liked to think he would have risen to the occasion and seized the opportunity to save innocent lives, but knew that in reality he would have been “scared shitless” by Hitler’s secret police and done whatever they told him to do. “What happened in Germany under the Third Reich was unforgivable, and had I lived through that horrific time, the courage to act upon my convictions is something I would have lacked completely. If I didn’t know where any actual Jews were, I would have turned in my non-Jewish neighbors for being Jews. Whatever it took to make the jackbooted men at the door go away, that’s what I’d do.” As he continued through the museum’s exhibits, Henley clarified that he would also have possessed the cowardice to turn in Black people, Roma, gay people, and the disabled, among many other groups.
