When on January 20, 1965, the president-minister of Bade-Wurtemberg, Kurt Kiesinger, rehabilitated Gerstein, he based his ruling on the fact that "Gerstein had fought against National-Socialism with the measure of his forces and he suffered the consequences." From a juridical point of view, Mr. Kiesinger's decision is satisfactory, but it makes no reference to the fundamental argumentation on which the Tubinga Tribunal based its guilty sentence [of Gerstein]. It is however precisely this argumentation that goes to the heart of the problem that his case poses to public opinion: the Tubinga Tribunal, although conceding that Gerstein's position was one of resistance to Nazism, he was condemned because his efforts were useless: "... he should have understood" the text recites "that alone he could never have stopped the extermination nor save even a few lives..." Gerstein therefore was accused of having attempted to resist within the limits of his forces, not to have acted like the large majority of "good" Germans, not to have waited in silence until all the Jews were dead. The "innocence" of those who passively assisted to the crime was opposed to the "guilt" of he who, in order to resist, had to, up to a certain point, make a pact with crime. But this compromise was typical of all opposition within a system such as the national-socialist regime, one had to act "from the inside" and at times take part in the execution of orders. In this condition the distinction between Good and Evil was in part blurred to the point that he who resisted had to, at a certain point, appear to be on the executioner's side. This is the ineluctable consequence of the human condition within a totalitarian system. But in turn is the passive spectator of a crime innocent?

If therefore the resistance from the inside of a totalitarian system is by its nature ambiguous, it leave only to be defined by a single yet essential criteria: the danger involved. There were many Germans who invoked the argument of resistance within the system to explain their participation in Nazi crimes, but how many were there who demonstrated their will to resist by taking actions that, had they been discovered, would have entailed death? Kurt Gerstein was one of these.

It is the total passivity of the "others" that gives the story of Gerstein its unique character and its exceptional importance. Had there been in Germany thousands or even hundreds of Gersteins, and each would have attempted to cancel shipments of toxic gas, misplace documents or provoke delays in the construction of gas chambers or crematories, if others had attempted to warn the Jews in occupied countries and above all ceaselessly inform the Germans and the world, undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of Jews would have been saved precisely by these complicit "officials" of the regime. At that point all these Gersteins would have been heroes, recognized as such.

The true drama of Gerstein is that he was alone in his actions. The silence and the complete passivity of the Germans, the absence of any sort of reaction by the Allies or the neutral states, or to put it better, by the entire Christian West faced with the extermination of the Jews, makes Gerstein a deeply tragic person, closed in an impenetrable circle of solitude and incomprehension: just as his pleas went without echo, his sacrifice appeared "useless" and he was charged "guilty."