She got constant pleas from Germany—the top film studios, the Nazi elite—to come back and be Germany’s biggest star; they offered her the world on a silver platter. But she stayed put and became a US citizen, because by the late '30s she knew damn well what was going on from her German friends and relatives. She became a major target of the Nazis after that, and to this day many Germans have not forgiven her for “treachery to the Fatherland.”
The siting of Auschwitz was certainly logistical. Oswiecem (the Polish name) was - and still is - a major railway junction.
Central Americans and Vietnamese people who were American citizens were not rounded up and taken away forever from neighborhoods in the U.S.
In my grandmother’s town (which was in Ukraine, not Germany) it took a while for the transport to arrive that took all of the Jews to one of the camps. They were all herded into the town square and held there for three days until the trains came. I imagine there were several similar scenes throughout Nazi controlled areas.
In my estimation, people in Nazi Germany and any other Nazi controlled area generally fell into four main groups:
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People who risked their lives and tried to help. A very small percentage, way less than 1%.
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True Believers. The deluded and the stupid. Probably around 10% at most.
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Profiteers. The people who benefitted as much as they could from the situation. Politics meant nothing to them so long as they made money. Far more evil than the previous group. Maybe 15-20%.
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The silent majority. Everyone else. These people just kept their heads down, their eyes and ears shut and just tried to weather the storm. All they wanted to do was survive and keep their family alive.
Haj
If they didn’t know, then tell me why there are “collector german postcards” from that time, available on Ebay? These postcards (if you have the stomach to look at the pics) depict all kinds of shit as cartoons. If it was common enough to have as cartoons on post cards, they knew. Not only did they know, it was something that was accepted as “humour” by some. Yeah, very fucking funny.
What sickens me is, after all of the attrocities and all the years… some bastards collect this shit. Some bastards MAKE A BUCK on this shit; and some rat bastards are willing to PAY for this shit.
Sick sub-human freaks.
I’ll cite Micheal Burleigh’s The Third Reich: A New History on this one, there is alotof historical evidence that the Nazis went to lengths to conceal the extermination, which included the siting of the death camps (simlairly they did go to lengths to conceal their earlier euthanasia programme).
On Dachau, the gas chambers there were almost certainly not ever used for extermination though there was a small gas chamber in a nearby castle that was used for the Nazi’s ‘euthanasia’ programme. The plumes of smoke would of come from the crematorium, which particularly towards the end of the war were overworked mainly due to deaths from diease, starvation and overwork.
I think that your numbers might be low. Here are the results of the last election which cemented the Nazi’s power:
REICHSTAG ELECTION
MARCH 1933
Party vote %
National Socialist 17,277,000 43.9
Social Democratic 7,182,000 18.3
Communist 4,848,000 12.3
Center 4,425,000 11.7
Nationalist 3,137,000 8.0
Bavarian People's 1,074,000 2.7
Other parties 1,533,000 3.8
The Nazi’s formed a coalition with the Nationalists to gain a full majority, then quickly changed the rules to quash the opposition. The 44% for the Nazis was a big leap of 33% or so from the earlier elections, owning at least some part to the burning of the Reichstag which was blamed on Van Lubbe (he confessed, but it could well have been under duress). So I would add more into the “deluded and stupid” column, at least.
The 1933 elections are the wrong elections for gauging actual support for the Nazis, as they took place after Hitler was Chancellor and amid the arrest and murder of socialists, the closing down of media outlets and intimadation by the Nazified police and the SA. The July (37.3%) or November (33.1%) can be seen as a better indicators, even though they also involved political violence and intimdation by the SA.
I think UDS has a very good point. I read an article about Justice Frankfurter of the U.S. Supreme Court, who receved a delegation of Jewish refugees from Germany in the early 40s. They told him what they had heard was going on. He was quoted as saying something like, “It’s not that I don’t believe you - it’s that I can’t believe you.” Frankfurter was Jewish, and a first generation immigrant from Austria, so he would have been aware of anti-Semitism, but he also had a compelling belief in progress. He simply couldn’t accept, without a great deal more evidence, that such horrible things could be happening in civilized Europe.
While you bring up a compelling point regarding how people would evaluate the credibility of any rumors they may have heard about the death camps, I would respectfully offer the opinion that citizens of Germany may have noticed the increasingly subversive methods their government was taking. These citizens may have started to notice the underhanded methods the government would take in removing people without explanation and sending them to camps of varying horror. Given such a pretext, receiving said information regarding the atrocities of the death camps, the citizens may have found the information to be more pertinent than had they not had such a secretive, omniprescent government.
The website at http://www.keom.de/denkmal/information.html has an extensive amount of information online about the camps, including maps. The database and most of the site is in German only, but from this page, if you click on the third choice (Massenermordung) and then again (Vernichtungslager) you can see where all the extermination camps were (Note that those are the 1941 borders of Germany).
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum site is another excellent site. The Maps page also shows locations of camps and other events.
Other nationwide events that most Germans would have known about are the ‘German purity’ movements (like the mass book burnings in 1933) and the open violence to Jews on Kristallnacht(Nov. 9, 1938).
It’s worth noting that Dwork and Jan Van Pelt’s Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (1996, Norton) rather brilliantly argues for this as only partly the reason. They see the site as central to a long history of the town as a crossroads of much of eastern European history. A border where people were often interred. A disputed patch of land ripe for Germans wanting to found an ideal new community.
None of this contradicts the significance of Oswiecem as a major rail junction, but these are plausible other layers to the issue.
I accept the points you make. But the German government was not all that underhand in its antisemitism. Antisemitism was open and official. Most, if not all, Germans would be fully aware that the Jews were persecuted as a people, that they were systematically arrested and taken away, and that they did not return.
It did not follow, however, that they were being murdered, and I still think that this would have been a very difficult thing to accept. Official and open antisemitism, persecution, population movement and deportations were not invented by the Nazis. Within the memory of many persons then living, similar policies had been pursued (though less systematically) in Tsarist Russia, but there was no systematic genocide. I really think that that was a quantum leap which it would have been very difficult for anyone to believe without the clearest possible evidence.
According to the exhibits I saw at Dachau, many people did return from(and to) the camps, especially earlier in the war.
Indeed, especially as the early camps (like Dachau) were conceived of as prisons. People were sometimes released. But I think not many Jews were released.
Do you remember Schultz and his favorite statement “I know nothing”?
I strongly recommend reading I Will Bear Witness , a published diary by Victor Klemperer. He was a German Jewish academic who managed to survive in Germany through the war, due to being a WWI veteran and having an “Aryan” wife. He lived in Dresden, which makes his survival even more amazing.
It is surprising to see how much he managed to hear, both about the war at the front, and stories about massacres and death camps outside of Germany. the most remarkable quality though was his ability to “read between the lines” of Goebbel’s propaganda…
Another source is Ian Kershaw’s The Hitler Myth, which compiles “public opinion” (not taken by gallup polls but mostly by Gestapo eavesdropping). One interesting detail from that book is the service member’s obituaries in the local papers. That was one of the few spaces where any form of content not written by Goebbel’s propagandists was published at all. In the beginning of the war, most obituaries contained the line “For Führer and Fatherland…”. That phrase suddenly diminishes after Stalingrad and by the latter months of the war, few obituaries included such dedications to the regime, and family submitted death notices were no longer accepted. This illustrates how in a total police state, we only have very indrect clues over public opinion or common perceptions of events.
It shows a lot of Germans did hear bits and pieces about the Holocaust and the progress of the war after Stalingrad, and those who expressed their misgivings aloud often ended up in trouble.
In short, many Germans did know things, but they either chose to ignore them, or felt utterly powerless to do anything about it, with a very few brief and ultimately futile exceptions (such as the “White Rose”).
I can believe that most Germans didn’t know. Denial is a poweful force; it’s only natural to want to believe that your government is right.
Consider this analogy: you hear rumors that “Camp X-ray” in Guantanamo Bay is, in fact, an extermination camp. Not just suspected terrorists, but all sorts of “undesirables” (homeless people, illegal immigrants, and even some government critics) are being sent there for the express purpose of eliminating them. Would you believe this? A year ago, I would have laughed openly at such a suggestion. These days I’m not so sure, but I can see how many people would simply refuse to believe such a rumor.
You are quite correct. I am German and I know from my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents that antisemitism and general xenophobia were very common in Germany ever since the 19th Century. Even today, Germans still seem to be a very xenophobic and racist people. Just look at some of the things that happened in Germany just a few years ago, here. My wife is Brazilian, and she say that she felt a lot more uncomfortable in Germany than she does here in the Netherlands.
The town where my parents grew up (in the Rhein-Main area) had a population of about seven thousand before the Nazi regime gained power. Of those seven thousand, about 600 were Jewish or of Jewish ancestry. I think the whole town must have noticed when quite a few houses and shops were suddenly empty and closed. Also, the Jews from the general area (about three thousand in total) were kept at a former school in the center of Darmstadt for almost a week, and then sent in three transports to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz (March 20, September 27 and September 30, 1942), never to be seen again. In the later stages of the war, most of these houses (the ones not “confiscated” by high ranking party members) were used to house slave labourers from Eastern Europe, who worked in the factories near the town. Some of the companies in the general area that used slave labour were:
Bopp & Reuther (Mannheim), Draiswerke (Mannheim), Grosskraftwerk (Mannheim), Hutchinson (Mannheim), Matra-Werke (Frankfurt a.M.), Odenwaelder Hartsteinindustrie (Hanau), Deutsche Asphalt AG (Neu-Isenburg), Heinrich Lanz AG (Mannheim), Naxos-Union (Langen)
at the end of the war the houses were again empty, and were then used to house large numbers of so called “Heimatsvertriebenen”. These were Germans living in the German speaking parts of Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, etc. There are still quite a large number of these families living in my home town.
Also, my own grandfather was a colonel in the Waffen SS and died on the Russian front. Though he doesn’t mention anything in his letters home, there is no possible way he could not have known what was going on. And I am quite sure he at least told my grandmother, although she never talked about it.
So, all in all, it seems quite likely that most people had at least a general idea about what was happening, but most people were also too afraid for their own lives to do anything or say anything. I know from speaking with my grandparents, that you weren’t able to trust anyone, because you never knew who might be inclined to inform the Gestapo or even the local police, about any so called “subversive” acts.
The act of turning others in or being turned in has been given more than a passing mention here, and it makes me wonder: what did one get out of turning someone else in? Money? Status? A blind eye towards other petty crimes?
I ask this because the explanation is becoming somewhat impossible otherwise, it seems to me. If rumors spread, people were talking, and thus I think it is safe to say that, due to the government’s fear of communicating these very things that they were actually true. Is there a way for me to understand the thickness of fear that existed due to the police state? No, but doesn’t that itself indicate the extent of what was being hidden? It is almost like we want them to say, “You don’t know how horrible it was!” accusatively, then follow that up with the plea, “We didn’t know how horrible it was!”
Anti-semitism was open, check. Been that way for a while. Routinely rounded up and shipped away, never to return, check. But this doesn’t indicate that they were being killed, only deported. We have some reports in this thread that [nearly] everyone knew, and others that they suspected but didn’t know, and still other reports that it is really quite possible they didn’t know.
Perhaps the matter just wasn’t as clear as I thought. Who worked in the camps, only the police? Didn’t the police have families? If they thought they were doing right, are we so sure they didn’t discuss it…?
The answer seems less clear to me now than when I opened the thread! 
But thanks for the responses so far, very informative.