German fighter pilot spared enemy bomber in WWII -- and it proves empathy critics dead wrong

Empathy is nether onslaught lately. 

The all-important quality to spot the satellite done different person’s eyes is present being recast arsenic thing corrosive.  

The statement goes similar this: if you’re empathetic, you’re being manipulated into accepting each mode of ideas, behaviors oregon policies that you would different reject. Empathy, successful this view, is simply a Trojan equine for weakness. 

But that’s a unsafe distortion. 

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True empathy is not agreement. And it’s decidedly not surrender.  

It’s the refusal to trim different idiosyncratic to a caricature. It recognizes that the radical we disagree with person reasons for their choices. And radical are intrinsically valuable, adjacent if we’re connected other sides.  

Far from weakening conviction, empathy really strengthens it by grounding our beliefs successful humanity, not hatred. 

A communicative from World War II illustrates this. It reminds america that adjacent successful our darkest moments, empathy indispensable triumph. 

On Dec. 20, 1943, successful the frenzied skies supra war-torn Europe, 2 bitter enemies met successful what remains 1 of World War II’s astir singular encounters. 

An American B-17 bomber, piloted by 21-year-old West Virginian Charles Brown, was shredded by force fire. Bullets had torn done the fuselage. Several unit members were bleeding out. The level was hardly holding together, yet inactive successful the air.  

Flying adjacent was the enemy: Franz Stigler, 28, a seasoned German combatant ace. His occupation was simple: stroke the Americans retired of the sky.  

Stigler had each inducement to propulsion the trigger.  

Pilot Charles Brown reunited with German aviator Franz Stigler connected September 20, 1997. (Courtesy of Adam Makos)

In the kill-or-be-killed quest to scope aerial superiority, the likelihood against the German’s endurance were overmuch worse than the Americans’. Of the 40,000 German combatant pilots successful WWII, lone 2,000 lived to spot the war’s end.  

For Stigler, each termination mattered.  

But erstwhile Stigler flew up alongside Brown’s limping bomber, thing bonzer happened, according to historiographer Adam Makos, who chronicled the unthinkable brushwood successful his publication "A Higher Call."

Stigler didn’t crook his instrumentality guns connected the Americans.  

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Instead, Stigler risked his ain reputation, vocation and adjacent life, to alert for miles successful adjacent proximity to the bomber’s wingtip, providing a shield for the damaged force level from different fighters.  

Instead of sidesplitting his enemy, the German combatant aviator escorted the sputtering American bomber to safety. 

Even much remarkable, Stigler was 1 bomber termination distant from the Knight's Cross, Germany's highest grant for valor. He gave that up by sparing Brown. 

For decades, the American 8th Air Force classified the incidental arsenic apical secret. The German subject sealed the grounds arsenic well. Stigler was ordered ne'er to talk of the enactment again, astatine hazard of facing a firing squad. 

German combatant ace Franz Stigler, 28, showed his humanity by sparing an American bomber. (Courtesy of Adam Makos)

Some explicate the incidental arsenic chivalry, a relic of an older codification of honor. Others disregard it arsenic an anomaly, a glitch successful the machinery of war.  

But to me, it was thing deeper.  

True empathy.  

Stigler remembered his humanity. He chose to spot his enemies not arsenic targets, but arsenic people.  

And that prime reverberates today. 

We unrecorded successful a civilization that rewards outrage. We’re told that empathy is naïve, and that to recognize different person’s symptom is to surrender our convictions.  

But Stigler’s determination shows otherwise. Empathy is the courageousness to emergence supra a tribal reflex and enactment by a higher call.

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Empathy is strength.  

Stigler risked his ain reputation, vocation and adjacent life, to alert for miles successful adjacent proximity to the bomber’s wingtip, providing a shield for the damaged force level from different fighters.  

When we’re successful the beingness of radical we dislike oregon disagree with, adjacent those we see enemies, we look the aforesaid prime Stigler faced.

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Do we trim them to caricatures, oregon bash we retrieve their humanity? 

In an epoch erstwhile part is the currency, empathy is essential. 

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