Bear in mind that those non-Jews that helped the Jews were themselves living within tyranny; the difference between them was a matter of the degree they were subject to victimization. Within the Nazi tyranny the single most targeted, abused, and scapegoated persons were the Jews. The Nazi state poured an enormous amount of resources and manpower into their goal of eliminating the Jews. To protect, hide, and help them was the ultimate act of treason against this state in that it further stretched manpower and resources that were needed on the war front. From a purely practical point of view, helping Jews acted as a means to undermine the regimes goals and war effort.
But this in itself is not enough, nor does it address your question.
There was a rational component to the morality of helping them, in fact, reason was the source of their moral choice. One cannot divorce the rational from the moral, if it is truly moral - it is rational. A mans life is not only the ability to continue breathing, but also the ability to make choices according to his values. A moral persons life within a tyranny is already at risk, what one is arguing here is not whether one can avoid the risk to ones life, but the degree to which one is willing to place an already at risk life - to greater risk. By placing themselves at the ultimate risk of death to help the Jews, they were making the single most selfishly life-affirming act that one could commit within the context of Nazi Germany. Short-term they did indeed place their lives at greater risk, but long-term within the black and white - life or death context they were forced into, if life was to have any true meaning their reason dictated that the act of saving an innocent human beings life in a culture of death - was the most moral action they could take.
The non-Jew that recalls his motivation in saving the lives of Jews will tell you of his inability to stand by and do nothing in the face of such evil, or his love and respect for human life, or his need to do something to strike out against the tyranny, or his great empathy for the greatest victims of that tyranny, or even of his Christian morality that inspired him to help his brother. He will record his emotional responses to his deepest values as his primary rationale for the risk he took. But in every case it was an emotional response to that part of his values that were the most rational. The fact they are unable to connect morality to reason intellectually does not negate the fact that their motivation was derived from this nonetheless.
The people that helped the Jews did not do so on the spur of the moment, they did not do so stupidly, they were not acting against their reason - the act was a triumph over their fear. Their religious and/or philosophical beliefs may have held reason and morality to be antagonistic towards each other (and thus they could not articulate the rationality of their acts) but within them there was great degree of an integrity that was still whole and heroic. They acted upon that part of them that was the highest and noblest: I can think of nothing more rational than that.
George
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