Nazis

The Nazis, the National Socialist German Workers' Party that ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945, appear in the novel primarily as the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the systematic genocide of six million Jews and millions of others. They function as the historical benchmark of absolute evil, a reference point against which the characters—particularly Augustus Waters—measure their own struggles with cancer and mortality.

Historical Context and the Holocaust

The novel references the Nazis most directly during Hazel and Augustus's visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. There, they learn that Anne Frank, her family, and four others hid from the Nazis in a secret annex for two years before being discovered and deported. Of the eight people in hiding, only Anne's father, Otto Frank, survived the war. A wall label in the museum explains that of the deported Dutch Jews, only 5,000 out of 103,000 survived—a statistic that underscores the scale of the genocide. Augustus corrects Lidewij when she says Otto Frank "survived a war," insisting, "He survived a genocide." This distinction matters to him: the Nazis did not merely wage war; they committed industrialized mass murder.

The Nazis as a Measure of Evil and Heroism

Augustus frequently invokes the Nazis as the ultimate antagonists in his fantasies of heroic action. During the visit to the Anne Frank House, he asks Hazel, "Are there any Nazis left that I could hunt down and bring to justice?" When she replies that they are all dead, he adds, "But it's not like the Nazis had a monopoly on evil." This leads him to propose that they become "a disabled vigilante duo roaring through the world, righting wrongs, defending the weak, protecting the endangered." The Nazis thus represent for Augustus the kind of clear-cut, external enemy that his own illness—cancer, which is made of his own cells—can never be. He later laments that he does not even get a battle, that his war is a civil war "with a predetermined winner," unlike the fight against the Nazis, which had identifiable villains and a just cause.

The Nazis and the Problem of Meaning

The Nazis also serve as a counterpoint to the novel's central question about whether suffering can have meaning. Hazel reflects that the Nazis did not have a monopoly on evil, and that the universe is devoted to the creation and eradication of awareness. The Holocaust, with its 103,000 Dutch Jewish dead—including four Aron Franks without museums or historical markers—represents the kind of vast, impersonal oblivion that Augustus fears. Unlike the Spartans at Thermopylae, who died in a battle that could be romanticized, the victims of the Nazis died without glory, without meaning, and often without anyone to remember them. This aligns with Peter Van Houten's observation that "there is no glory in illness" and that the Rijksmuseum contains paintings of every kind of death except that of a cancer patient. The Nazis, in their systematic erasure of human life, embody the universe's indifference that Hazel and Augustus must confront.

The Nazis and the Limits of Fantasy

Augustus's fantasy of hunting Nazis is ultimately a fantasy of control and meaning in a world that offers neither. He imagines a heroic errand, a life and death that serve a greater good. But the novel undercuts this fantasy: the Nazis are all dead, and Augustus's real enemy is not an external villain but his own body. The only battle he can fight is against cancer, which is made of him. The Nazis thus function as a foil to the novel's central argument: that the real heroism is not in fighting a visible enemy but in noticing the world, in walking lightly upon it, and in loving another person despite the certainty of loss. Hazel's eulogy for Augustus, which speaks of "a forever within the numbered days," offers a different kind of heroism than the one Augustus imagined—one that does not require a Nazi to defeat.