I was just wondering how much the German people really knew of Nazi attrocities before the Nazi regime fell. Once they fell, the German people were told (and blamed) I know.
I know I read some place that the German people actually knew very little about the Holocaust because of a clever propaganda machine in place at the time. But I don’t recall where I read this, so I obviously don’t have a cite. Sorry.
Well:)?
From what I understand (studied German politics a few years ago), West Germany accepted full responsibility for the crimes of the Nazis, and schools were required to make it abundantly clear to schoolchildren what they did, and why these things were Not On.
However East Germany never accepted responsibility - according to their communist ideology, the crimes of the Nazis were caused by capitalism, which duped the people. So I don’t think the East Germans were in any way denazified.
Everyone in the neighborhood would know when the police came for Saul and his family and they never returned. Thousands worked carrying out the Holocaust; Im betting their families had an idea at the time…before Germany would obviously lose the war. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and others working in the occupied territories would likely have witnessed something.
I just realised I misunderstood the OP’s question. Sorry!
It’s really a difficult question to answer - while obviously things like extermination camps and mass executions were not exactly printed in the newspapers, it’s not like people didn’t have a clue what was going on. Their Jewish neighbors were being taken away never to return, and Hitler made it perfectly clear in Mein Kampf what he felt about them. Some camps were pretty close to German cities, so people living close by had to smell the fumes from the furnaces. On the other hand, even if you suspected what was up, speaking up against it would not have been a very wise move, so most people didn’t.
While it’s true what Malden Capell said about society as a whole accepting responsibility for the crimes and talking about them, the same isn’t necessarily true for individuals - no one wants to tell their kids and grandkids they were a Gestapo officer or a concentration camp guard. This changed a bit during the ‘68 revolts, when students questioned their parents’ past, but many people chose to leave their personal history in the Holocaust far behind them.
I think it quite possible that the bulk of the German people were unaware of the policy of mass extermination of the Jews. Hitler and his top henchmen played this very close to the chest and the official line for public consumption was ‘resettlement in the East’. Your average German wouldn’t have had any cause to question this and Hitler knew for a certainty that most citizens, despite years of anti-Jewish propaganda, would have been horrified and appalled at the idea of the mass-murder of millions of men, women and children. Heydrich, at the 1942 Wannsee Conference (where top Nazi officials were gather to discuss the details of the final solution to the Jewish ‘problem’), informed his colleagues that the whole subject of the disposal of the Jews must be confined only to those officials who needed to know. All note-taking was forbidden, save for the official minutes kept by Eiichmann and these were retained solely by Heydrich. They were all well aware that German public opinion would be solidly against such a barbaric policy.
As to those Germans who lived in the area of a concentration camp I’m sure they would have been aware of the terrible conditions of the prisoners but I believe all the major extermination camps were far from German territory so here again it’s quite plausible that the locals would have had no idea that a policy of genocide was under way.
I can’t find a cite* but I read somewhere that their were jokes being told about the burning of Jews in WW2 Germany, that would imply that it was common knowledge in some circles
*I tried to look , but only got a lot of iffy neo nazi sites…
You ignore the role of the German military and the Einsatzgruppen (mobile police squads who murdered more than a million Jews in the USSR) in the Holocaust. These activities were not hidden and were witnessed by many. Quite a few Germans suffered from convenient amnesia during the final stages and after the war. It would be impossible for such a massive operation to have been carried out without the efforts of tens of thousands in several different areas such as transportation.
I do remember seeing some documentary that said that Germans who lived near one of the death camps (Auschwitz?) claimed that they had no idea what was going on there. The documentary makers made it clear that they would have smelled the horrible stench, seen the smokes of the ovens, etc etc. I think madsircool hit the nail on the head, that many of them had “convenient amnesia.”
The details probably were not known – the use of gas for mass extermination, the shower ruse, etc. But certainly it would be difficult to live anywhere in Germany and not be aware that Jews were being rounded up, their property confiscated (or simply abandoned and grabbed by greedy neighbors), the synagogues burned and desecrated, etc. I guess the question (and the OP) is EXACTLY how much was public knowledge.
Anecdote time, my mom was born in Germany during WW2 and her biological father was a nazi and all her elder family lived through or served during WW2.
The sense she gave me was that people did know in general, but were afraid and felt helpless to do anything even if they didn’t personally agree. She gave the sense people just wanted to survive through it, if the government is rounding up and killing people en masse would you go picket your local government office?
I guess an example I’d give is Guantanamo Bay, even if the average american disagrees with prisoners being held without trial and the use of torture during interrogations what exactly can they do about it? Lead a solo assault in a canoe?
Hell even to this day americans joke online about being dissapeared by homeland security, what if it was a real serious threat?
Here’s an interesting article I found on the subject . . .
What Did Most Germans Know about Nazi Concentration Camps - Part IV
It notes (as is well-known) that a great many German citizens claimed ignorance, but were disbelieved by American soldiers. It tells of several cases in which American soldiers rounded up the people of nearby German towns and forcibly marched them through the camps.
This is one of a whole series of articles on this and related subjects. (I didn’t read very many of them just now.) At the bottom there are a bunch of links to other articles. One of the articles explicitly states that they are talking about concentration camps, which were in Germany and often near cities, as distinct from the death camps which were elsewhere.
According to one such story that I remember reading some years ago, American soldiers forced the mayor of a small town to view the nearby camp. The mayor, of course, claimed ignorance, which the soldiers thought was baloney. The following day, the soldiers returned to the town to force the entire population to view the camp, and found that the mayor and his wife had killed themselves (perhaps out of fear of what the Americans might do to them).
ETA: That article, and other linked ones, include lots of photos.
I see that several other posts have appeared, even now in the middle of the night, even as I typed up the above.
As has been pointed out before, the Nazi leadership tried to keep the mass murder of Jews a secret. So when somebody who served in some official capacity knew what was going on, he generally did not talk about it to friends and family, as instructed.
Other civil servants took part in the process of deportation of Jews, but did not know or even could have known what the purpose was. So for instance local civil servants who worked for the city, the police and the tax service were told to make sure that a certain Jewish family reported to the local train station on a certain date.
During the war, many Germans had other things on their mind. They suffered the hardships of war everyday, i. e. bringing up children who grew up without a father, feeding them and hoping the house they lived in was still standing after the next bombing raid.
Concentration camps as such were a well known fact of life. The general perception was that these were places were the Nazis kept their political enemies which could mean anything from telling a joke about how Aryan looking Adolf Hitler was or listening to foreign radio stations on the radio.
My father (who was a teenager when the war ended) was specifically told by his father (my grandfather, who had voted for the social democrats) to keep his mouth shut about everything remotely political or else risk being taken to (insert name of local concentration camp).
But I would assume that the nature of the Holocaust as a premeditated mass murder of millions of Jews was not known to the average German.
I don’t buy the idea that the “average German” knew nothing about the deportations and mass murder of the Jews. You had the propaganda guy (Goebbles) giving weekly radio speeches, encouraging the German people to harass and murder Jews-then there was “Krystalnacht”-when Nazi-led riots smashed the windows of Jewish-owned shops and synagogues (while the civil police stood by and watched).
Yes, I suppose if you lived in a remote, rural area, you might not have known what was going on…but not if you lived in a city.
I believe you are misunderstanding Donnerwetter. Of course people were aware that Germany was not a good place to be a Jew - and many people were, horribly enough, probably okay with that, with the Jews being the enemy and leeches on German society and all. But the industrial scale of the murder was not well-known until after the war, and concentration camps in the minds of many people were just pretty hardcore prisons, not factories of death.
There’s a whole book about this, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners.
In Goldhagen’s own words,
(1)By analyzing the evidence regarding anti-Semitism in German society before and during the Nazi period, I concluded that the vast majority of Germans in the 1930s held a set of anti-Semitic beliefs about Jews that included the belief that Jews and Jewish power had somehow to be eliminated from German society.
(2)By investigating the perpetrators of the Holocaust, I established (a) that the perpetration of the Holocaust was carried out by a large number of Germans (at least 100,000), who came from all social backgrounds and all walks of life and (b) that many knew that they could exempt themselves from killing without suffering punishment.
From a review of Goldhagen’s book:
"Was Slaughter of Jews Embraced by Germans?
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
A basic question posed by students of the Holocaust has to do with the psychology of the ordinary perpetrators of the genocide against the Jews. How, some scholars have asked, did those who carried out the slaughter overcome the moral scruples it would be normal to feel when faced with the annihilation of an entire people, a far-flung people, moreover, that posed no threat to the German homeland.
That is the wrong question, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen argues in this masterly, powerfully argued book. ‘‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’’ is an attempt to demolish the standard views about Germans and the Holocaust by arguing that when it came to the Jews, average Germans had no moral scruples to overcome in the first place.
The perpetrators of the anti-Jewish slaughter, Mr. Goldhagen contends, did not kill Jews because of threats or some German propensity for obeying authority. They participated in the slaughter because they were steeped in a historical culture of anti-Semitism. They tortured and massacred Jews, starved them, toyed with them, punished them for their birth, and they did so voluntarily, even eagerly, with unsurpassable malice and cruelty.
‘‘The German perpetrators,’’ Mr. Goldhagen wrties, ‘‘were assenting mass executioners, men and women who, true to their own eliminationist anti-Semitic beliefs, faithful to their cultural anti-Semitic credo, considered the slaughter to be just.’’
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/09/bsp/hitler.html
And another review with a lot of facts from the book:
http://www.spectacle.org/696/goldhag.html
Marlene Dietrich: “Do you think we *knew *of those things? Do you think we wanted to murder women and children? Do you believe that? *Do *you?”
Spencer Tracy: “Mrs. Bertholt, I don’t know what to believe.”
Marlene Dietrich: “Good God. We’re sitting here drinking. How could you think that we knew? We did not know. We did not know.”
Spencer Tracy: “As far as I can make out, no one in this country knew.”
Everybody was aware how the Jews were bullied, insulted, maltreated, kicked out of jobs, schools, universities, having their civil rights taken away etc. Even the deportations were not a secret but I doubt many anticipated or even suspected that the ultimate goal was the murder of a whole section of the population.
To some degree, the situation was like that of African Americans in the American South of the Jim Crow era. The Jews in Germany had become second class citizens by law. There were segregated schools, kindergartens, hospitals etc.
Also keep in mind that the German Jews weren’t really a very visible minority everywhere in the country (unlike African Americans in the South). For instance, in our small town in Western Germany there lived only one elderly Jewish lady (who was later deported and presumably murdered, but that became only known after the war). In many cases, people did not even know that their neighbours were Jewish until the Nazis came to power.
This is one of those things where I think people are loathe to suggest the Germans were to any degree unaware of what was happening, but I’m not sure the history supports that.
Did the Germans know Jews were being arrested, abused, denied basic rights, and shipped away? Absolutely. But the big massacres in the USSR and Poland and the later establishment of “mechanized death factories” (which came later, because just rounding up tons of Jews and shooting them all was proving to cause serious emotional problems for the soldiers which was one of the major reasons they created the gas chambers) was probably not known.
Finally, the Holocaust killed something like 6m Jews, the vast majority, over 5.7m, were not German Jews. In 1933 when the Nazis took power there were only around 0.5m Jews living in Germany, some .3m of them left Germany because the writing was on the wall. Some .185m-.195m died in the Holocaust (most of those who stayed.) That’s a lot of people, but still the bulk of the Holocaust was perpetrated against Eastern European Jews, Jews in Poland especially. This isn’t too surprising, Eastern Europe is where many of the European Jews lived. The Polish monarchy had long been very accepting of the Jews. The German (or rather Prussian) monarchs in the 18th century had some programs which accepted Jewish resettlement, but Jews never moved there with as many numbers or as much permanence as they did in several Eastern European countries (especially Poland.)
Mind Germany before its territorial acquisitions was about 65m in population, so even before the majority of the Jews fled Germany they were under 1% of the pre-war German population. So it’s not unrealistic to believe the Germans were unaware of the full details of the Holocaust–the Holocaust mostly was perpetrated against non-German Jews. Now, many members of the German military probably knew, but speaking of the civilian population, I’m not sure in a repressive totalitarian regime how they would necessarily be aware of things happening hundreds of miles away from home. It is not like Germans were allowed to visit these areas.