# Nazi Germany: How Much Did the Average German Know? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 28, 2004, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457 "2004-01-28T20:24:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Mycroft\_Holmes](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a5b964/32.png) [@Mycroft\_Holmes](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mycroft_Holmes)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2004, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/41 "2004-01-30T16:36:27Z")
> [@erislover](#): > > 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? > > 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…? Actually, the act of turing in others usually did provide status and a blind eye to other petty crimes. More importantly, it made you look more loyal to the Nazi regime, thus giving you that little bit of extra protection from other people turning you in for something you might have said or done. As to the people who worked in the camps, at least for extermination camps, it was almost exclusively members of the Waffen SS and the SS Totenkopfverbaende. All menial work in the camps (like removing corpses from the gas chambers, etc.) was actually done by the prisoners themselves. Also, since the extermination camps were in Eastern Europe, the only communication with family and friends was by mail, and this was clearly checked and censored (I’ve seen my grandfather’s letters home, so I know). Even the US Army nows about Opsec 😉 . As to who worked in the prisoner camps, and how they communicated with their families and friends, I’ll have to leave that to someone else. ---
**Author:** ![zapomel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/67e7ee/32.png) [@zapomel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zapomel)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2004, 2:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/42 "2004-02-01T02:00:45Z")
Just a note to Mycroft… I realize you’re German, but you should be careful saying anything that intimates that other countries somehow have a better track record in the War. Especially Holland. There were quite a lot of people who resisted, but very many collaborators, and my personal experiences with the Dutch have not left me with an overwhelmingly positive impression. While a few countries (so I’ve read) resisted more vigoously, I gather that most occupied nations pretty much did what everyone here is talking about the Germans doing. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2004, 8:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/43 "2004-02-01T08:17:48Z")
> [@GorillaMan](#): > > The two camps, Auschwitz and Birkenau, are some distance apart. Auschwitz was originally IIRC a POW camp, and was the site of the first (small) gas chamber. Birkenau is much larger, and featured the main chambers. This is pretty much correct. The Auschwitz (Oscwiecim) and Auschwitz II -Birkenau (Brzezinka) camps are within walking distance of each other, though. The Auschwitz camp looks surprisingly understated. I’ve been there three times and it just doesn’t look like what one would imagine a concetration camp to look like. Birkenau is HUGE compared to Auschwitz, and it’s where the trains would roll up to drop off prisoners. It certainly more matches the popular conception of a concentration camp. Auschwitz I was the concetration/work camp, Birkenau the extermination camp. (Although people were executed at both, so far as I remember.) ---
**Author:** ![Mycroft\_Holmes](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a5b964/32.png) [@Mycroft\_Holmes](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mycroft_Holmes)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2004, 8:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/44 "2004-02-02T08:16:45Z")
> [@zapomel](#): > > Just a note to Mycroft… I realize you’re German, but you should be careful saying anything that intimates that other countries somehow have a better track record in the War. Especially Holland. This is true. There were quite a lot of people of almost any nationality that volunteered for the SS. There were even whole Waffen SS brigades made up of volunteers from other countries. some of the people working as guards in the extermination camps were Polish or other nationalities. It wasn’t just the Germans. I guess evil can manifest itself in anyone. I remember a conversation I once had with a Jewish friend of mine. She asked me what I would have done if I had been around twenty years old during World War II and living in Germany. My honest answer was that I probably would have joined the Wehrmacht, as most adult men did at that time, and for the rest I would have tried to stay alive, and keep a low profile. Since my family is not of noble blood or old money, I would never have been an officer or a university student, so my chance of being involved in any type of resistance would have been very low. Like mentioned before, the top priority for most people, was just seeing that they made it through the war alive. I don’t think I would have joined the Nazi party or volunteered for the SA or SS, but you never know. One has to remember that most of the members of the SS were indoctrinated since a very early age, because they were members of the Hitler Youth, etc., and it is very easy to mold the mind of a child. As a simple Wehrmacht soldier, I would have to hope that I was stationed on the Western front (higher chance of survival, better treatment by otential captors). The lowest chance of survival would have been if I had joined the Navy and been stationed on a U-boat. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2004, 4:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/45 "2004-02-02T16:44:55Z")
> [@](#): > > 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. Not entirely true. I had a distinctly unpleasant, but worthwhile, experience of visiting Sachsen-Hausen last spring (amid much anti-americanism and exactly when the recent war began). Before the war Jews would often be taken, beaten up, and eventually released for a small ransom and promises to leave Germany. (Oddly, Shanghai was the only place in the world willing to take them in and a lot of Jews wound up there for some years during and after the war.) AFter the war began, though… It wasn’t exactly a gas-death camp, but there were summary executions of a lot of people and it had its own crematoria. I still have the pictures of “Arbeit Macht Frei” on the camp gates. Chilling. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2004, 4:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/46 "2004-02-02T16:46:55Z")
> [@](#): > > 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. Not entirely true. I had a distinctly unpleasant, but worthwhile, experience of visiting Sachsen-Hausen last spring (amid much anti-americanism and exactly when the recent war began). Before the war Jews would often be taken, beaten up, and eventually released for a small ransom and promises to leave Germany. (Oddly, Shanghai was the only place in the world willing to take them in and a lot of Jews wound up there for some years during and after the war.) AFter the war began, though… It wasn’t exactly a gas-death camp, but there were summary executions of a lot of people and it had its own crematoria. I still have the pictures of “Arbeit Macht Frei” on the camp gates. Chilling. Not a lot of people know this, but after the war, many of the camps were reopened by the Soviets, who tended to kill their charges by slower, but nonetheless brutal means. At a presentation of pictures of the camp, I met a man who had been a minor German army officer and who was about to be taken into the camp by the Soviets. He escaped and fled west, and was quite convinced that’s the only reason he survived. ---
**Author:** ![gluteus\_maximus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/f17d59/32.png) [@gluteus\_maximus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gluteus_maximus)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2004, 6:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/47 "2004-02-02T18:29:55Z")
> [@erislover](#): > > That’s pretty much it. During the time the concentration camps were in operation, how much did the average German person know about what was going on in them? Similarly, only a fraction of the military could have been at these places. What about the rest of the troops? > > There was obviously some denial from other western civilizations about the matter, I’ve seen this documented. But I wonder about the population itself, how much they were aware of. Just **HOW** is this a factual question? Next, we’ll be asked: “Palestine at the time of Pontius Pilate: How much did the average Jew know?” or "East Africa in the late 16th century: How much did the average slaveowner know? or “Dallas in '63: How much did the average Texan know?” or “The USA in 2000: How much did the average American voter know?” ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Milton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/6bbea6/32.png) [@Mr.Milton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Milton)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2004, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/48 "2004-02-02T18:54:34Z")
MC said: “simlairly they did go to lengths to conceal their earlier euthanasia programme…” . And therein may be part of the answer to the OP: BBC (and later in the US, the Discovery Channel) ran a special on this T-4 program, and the book “Nazi Germany: The Racial State” describes its evolution in some detail. The government at the time went to some lengths to debate euthanasia publicly, controlling the debate as can best be done in a state with control over the media. So while most everyone --even from an early age-- had been exposed to the official line on the goverment position and its euphemisms, fewer knew the full extent or the sordid detials. This is, however, no excuse. Even without knowledge that the definition of “incurables” was streched way beyond limits, people knew they were being presented with the state’s rationale for killing defenseless persons under the guise of Building a Better Germany. The same with the Jews, Roma, Homosexuals, Jehova’s Witnesses, &c., &c. &c. One would have to have been blind, deaf, and an idiot (and thus “life unworthy of life” subject to death by T-4) to know that even only by the evidence of the government-run media they were being presented with the image of whole classes of people who need to be “removed”. When told that these groups are at least in some cases the equivalent of “bacilli” and rats (as in the widely shown film “The Eternal Jew”), it doesn’t take a V-2 rocket scientist to figure out what “removal” means in the general sense. So… did the average German know that Jews and so on were being taken to large death factories in the east for mass extermination by gas? Probably not. Did they know Jews and other “undesirables” were somehow being “removed” --permanently-- en masse as a matter of their own government’s policy? Yes. Whether or not “don’t ask, don’t tell” in this context is aquiescence or even complicity is another (great) debate. Sidebar/hijack: Zyklon B: You all know Zyklon B was used on a massive scale at Auschwitz and similar places for killing people in the gas chambers. You may also know it was not originally designed for that purpose, but rather was produced even before the Nazi era for fumigating buildings, etc. I was surprised to discover that it was also used for that latter purpose in the United States. I recently attended a conference in a building of the US Health & Human Services in the Washington DC area. During a break, I had the chance to peruse an exhibit on the history of the US Public Health Service (USPHS). A picture from the Depression era shown two fine fellows with the equipment they are about to use for fumigating some rural building; it includes several cans of the familiar and clearly marked Zyklon B. Except for that name, the rest of the label appears to be in English. The general size and proportions of the cans are the same as one sees in the Holocaust history books and so on. ---
**Author:** ![Paradoxical](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/77aa72/32.png) [@Paradoxical](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paradoxical)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2004, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/49 "2004-02-02T22:21:55Z")
gas chamber I’m sure was painful, ovens I’m sure were very painful, but the weird torture performed by the doctors _very_ painful. A friend of my fathers (friend is german) said that he’d seen footage of a women being put into a freezer, WHILE the sick “doctors” taunted and teased her! Did such things happen on a large scale among the german doctors? I also read somewhere that the U.S. offered to let the german doctors go, if they a.)worked here, or b.)turned over the “research” they had performed, is this also true? ---
**Author:** ![GorillaMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/50afbb/32.png) [@GorillaMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GorillaMan)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2004, 10:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/50 "2004-02-02T22:37:48Z")
> [@Paradoxical](#): > > gas chamber I’m sure was painful, ovens I’m sure were very painful, but the weird torture performed by the doctors _very_ painful. A friend of my fathers (friend is german) said that he’d seen footage of a women being put into a freezer, WHILE the sick “doctors” taunted and teased her! Did such things happen on a large scale among the german doctors? I also read somewhere that the U.S. offered to let the german doctors go, if they a.)worked here, or b.)turned over the “research” they had performed, is this also true? I’ve no idea what scale the ‘medical’ experiments took place, and I suspect it’s a matter of much conjecture among historians. But there’s no doubt that it took place systematically - in Auschwitz there was a specific building dedicated to such activities. IIRC, the doctors were particularly fascinated by twins, and also by Jews who were considered to have Aryan characteristics. ---
**Author:** ![alice\_in\_wonderland](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alice_in_wonderland/32/176_2.png) [@alice\_in\_wonderland](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alice_in_wonderland)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2004, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/51 "2004-02-02T22:40:31Z")
> [@Paradoxical](#): > > I also read somewhere that the U.S. offered to let the german doctors go, if they a.)worked here, or b.)turned over the “research” they had performed, is this also true? Well, I’m not sure if this particular thing is true; however, I do know that on my floor we have caches of drugs which cannot be used because they were developed using prisoners as guinea pigs. I’m not sure much sympathy would be given to the Drs’ in order to get access to their research as much of it was usless (unless one wants to develop a torture chamber), and most of it cannot be used in any meaningful way. ---
**Author:** ![bonzer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/45deac/32.png) [@bonzer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bonzer)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2004, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/52 "2004-02-03T01:01:23Z")
> [@Paradoxical](#): > > Did such things happen on a large scale among the german doctors? This is a good question, though it’s difficult to answer precisely. A lot of research has been done on the German medical (and, more generally, the scientific) community under the Nazis, but one has to realise that there’s a wide continuum of involvement. At the broadest, due to the restrictions preventing Jews holding such positions, virtually everyone in a professional role in Germany after 1933 was at least aware of the persecution of the Jews who were _colleagues_. Nazi stereotyping was clearly pervasive through their national health policies throughout their time in power. In that sense, all doctors who remained were again implicated. The euthenasia programs run by T-4 were widely known about in the prewar period and may even have involved a significant number of doctors, at least to the degree that they were refering patients and overlooking what might be happening to them. However, there is the counterargument that the T-4 personnel were possibly deliberately selected from “marginal” figures, so that the medical technicians involved were not necessarily representative. Once one gets into the wartime experiments on concentration camp inmates, the really delicate issue is the **use** of the data generated. There really doesn’t seem to have been many qualms amongst anybody about using this research. One still gets cases of specimins turning up in German universities that were prepared from camp victims. Once upon a time the attitude seems to have been that data is data, regardless of the ethics of its origin. In spite of its title, Robert Jay Lifton’s truly stupefying _The Nazi Doctors_ (1986, Basic) really only concentrates on those doctors - German and Jewish - who served in the death camps. At the risk of minimising the utter horrors perpetrated by them, I suspect this group of German doctors actually only numbered a few dozen. ---
**Author:** ![kmg365](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ec9cab/32.png) [@kmg365](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kmg365)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2004, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/53 "2004-02-10T14:06:47Z")
> [@Jack Sarang](#): > > Nobody was ever gassed at Dachau. The facilities existed but were never used. Thousands of people were cremated in the ovens at Dachau because of the high rate of prisoner death. The camp initially only had one oven, they had to build a second, larger oven to keep up with the demand. Your above statement that “nobody was ever gassed at Dachau” is totally false. It is a perpetuation of the neo-nazi myth being perpetuated by Holocaust naysayers in Germany and elsewhere, who deny that any Jewish people were gassed on German soil. If you have any doubts about whether gassing of Jewish and other prisoners took place at KZ Dachau click on [this](http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/GasChamber/Exterior01.html) and look at the photos in the middle and bottom of the page. Also, if you are still in doubt, peruse this rather informative [link](http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/GasChamber/Index.html) from the _Dachau Scrapbook_, which among other things, states the following: > [@](#): > > _Quoted from the **Dachau Scrapbook:** _ > "Shortly after the liberation of Dachau, the American Army released a photograph which clearly showed that a gas chamber was in operation there. The photograph was published in American newspapers and magazines and was then shown in a traveling exhibit which started in St. Louis and ended in Washington, DC. Films of Dachau taken at the liberation of the camp were shown in the weekly newsreels in American movie theaters. American congressmen traveled to Dachau in early May 1945 and stood in the largest gas chamber, examining its fake shower heads. Their Congressional Report, based on this visit, was entered into the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg as evidence that a homicidal gas chamber was used to murder prisoners at Dachau. > > "After the liberation of Dachau, the Army quickly set up a museum in the new crematorium and General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered that as many American soldiers as possible should be brought to the camp to view the evidence of Nazi atrocities, particularly the notorious gas chamber disguised as a shower room. However, Eisenhower himself never visited any of the three major Nazi concentration camps in Germany, nor did he mention any gas chambers in his book, Crusade in Europe. > > “At the Nuremberg war crimes trial, eye-witness testimony about prisoners being killed in the Dachau gas chamber was given by Dr. Franz Blaha, a Czech Communist who was a prisoner in the camp and a prominent member of the International Committee at Dachau. At the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi war criminals, a film was shown which included some footage of the Dachau gas chamber. Visitors to the Memorial Site can see the gas chamber footage from this film in a 22-minute movie shown every half hour in the museum.” _-from [scrapbookpages.com](http://scrapbookpages.com)_ ---
**Author:** ![Amethyst](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/919ad9/32.png) [@Amethyst](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amethyst)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2004, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/54 "2004-02-10T19:43:29Z")
I remember reading a book that discussed the experiments performed by Dr. Mengele on concentration camp prisoners. Many of the experiments seemed to focus on how much pain people could handle - and from what I recall they sounded far more like torture than they did scientific experiment no matter how many notes he took. I’m not going to repeat any of the gruesome experiments I remember but some of them were so extreme I can’t see any scientific value - just experiments that served to intrigue and delight the sadistic Mengele. As an aside, does anyone think any of the holocaust museums would be interested in a collection of non-fiction books about WW2, nazi german, concentration/extermination camps, the Nuremburg trial, and holocaust survivors. Or do they have more than enough such donations? My late mother had a collection of such books. She had a (rather morbid?) fascination which what happened, really wanting to understand why and how it could happen. She was in her 20’s during WW2 in Canada, living in a town where the British airmen trained for the war, and was totally unaware of the atrocities happening in Germany. After the war when the facts were made more public, she was aghast that this could happen and that ‘no one’ knew about it. It was this that drove her to make reading and researching the events and collecting the books. I don’t really want to just give the books to a used book store if they could bring value to some organization. And as another aside, it wasn’t just the Germans who were antisemitic. My father was Slavic (another group targetted for extermination by the Nazi’s IIRC). And while he was very accepting of people of all races and colours, every now and then he would say something that would have an antisemitic tone to it that would totally floor me. But as I understand it, continental Europes of a certain age were raised in a antisemitic environement. (This of course, is no excuse.) ---
**Author:** ![tadc](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f07891/32.png) [@tadc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tadc)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2004, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/55 "2004-02-10T20:33:18Z")
> [@kmg365](#): > > Your above statement that “nobody was ever gassed at Dachau” is totally false. It is a perpetuation of the neo-nazi myth being perpetuated by Holocaust naysayers in Germany and elsewhere, who deny that any Jewish people were gassed on German soil. So you’re calling the german government “holocaust naysayers”? According to the official exhibits at Dachau, there was (is) a gas chamber, and it wasn’t ever used for exterminations. Given the open and full-disclosure nature of the exhibits I saw there, I can’t imagine why they would lie about this one thing. ---
**Author:** ![panamajack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/47e85d/32.png) [@panamajack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panamajack)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2004, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/56 "2004-02-10T21:26:13Z")
It’s certainly possible, though doubtful, that some people were killed by gassing at Dachau. There is no doubt that one of the chambers there was intended for killing humans. The point (and I think the point **Jack Sarang** was making) was that it was not used for mass executions of prisoners as at the extermination camps. The best evidence (circumstantial) is that gassing may have been used in an experimental form. Apparently an effort was made to kill people without them realizing it (hence the shower ruse). I kind of doubt it was a concern for humane killing; probably to make it easier to stomach. This [essay](http://www.holocaust-history.org/dachau-gas-chambers/) on the Dachau gas chambers provides a good deal of the primary evidence involved. The conclusion is worth quoting : > [@](#): > > The intentional destruction of human life by whatever means is still murder. It is quite sufficient, for the moment, to demonstrate that the Nazis intended to use a homicidal gas chamber in Dachau, and that they designed, built and equipped such a chamber in the Dachau Concentration Camp. ---
**Author:** ![kmg365](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ec9cab/32.png) [@kmg365](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kmg365)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2004, 10:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/57 "2004-02-10T22:23:41Z")
> [@tadc](#): > > So you’re calling the german government “holocaust naysayers”? Never said any such thing. I simply said that such people can be found in Germany and elsewhere, including the U.S. > [@tadc](#): > > According to the official exhibits at Dachau, there was (is) a gas chamber, and it wasn’t ever used for exterminations. Yes, I too have been to Dachau. When I went, that line was being proffered as well as another line that the crematoria had never been used either, thus going hand-in-glove with the theory that KZ Dachau was never a fully operational Vernichtungslager (extermination camp), but simply a model camp of mostly POWs and political prisoners. However, this contradicts the findings of Allied tribunals and the findings of U.S. Army made at the end of the war. Since I read German, I noticed that there is a disparity between what the placards at Dachau say and what U.S. investigators said in official reports at the end of the war. The good folks at Dachau have done an effective job at spinning the facts to soften its image and present itself in the best light. Read the links I’ve provided concerning the disparity between German and U.S. Army characterizations about what kind of place Dachau was. My personal opinion is that the caretakers of Dachau and the town of Dachau itself, have over the decades, actively tried to tone down the nature of the exhibits at KZ Dachau, including removing, altering and/or withholding inconvenient details little by little over the years since the end of the war. The current exhibit, from what I’ve heard, is significantly sanitized an dumbed down from the U.S. Army exhibit that was set up for the benefit of U.S. military personnel there after the war (the U.S. Army had an active military base at Dachau until 1973). The town of Dachau, especially, is especially defensive about its role during the war years and of being connected in any way with the KZ. Interstingly, the town of Dachau’s German-language official tourist brochure, which advertises the virtues of its spas, shopping and scenery, goes as far as to deny that any of its townspeople of having any knowledge or anything to do with the KZ during the war. The brochure also disingenuously states that Dachau was nothing more than a camp for political prisoners and POWs, and that the Allies exaggerated much of what happened there after the war. Of course, we all know that this is a lie. > [@](#): > > Given the open and full-disclosure nature of the exhibits I saw there, I can’t imagine why they would lie about this one thing. If you can’t see why, then you are naive. The Germans are experts at spinning things and duping the public. They are experts at hiding evidence, twisting facts, and in propagandizing. As someone who has also visited the USHM and Yad Washem in Israel, I found the whole exhibit at KZ Dachau to be severely lacking and an affrontery to those who believe in full disclosure of what happened during the Holocaust. The exhibit at Dachau, IMO, conveniently ommitted many inconvenient details regarding the true nature of the camp. More specifically, I found the exhibits at Dachau cleverly sanitized, and curiously devoid of anything too graphic, too distasteful, too shocking – save a few pictures regarding a medical experiments on prisoners (all justified by their potential for saving lives – albeit at the expense of the prisoners’ lives), and only a handful of pictures featuring dead bodies or anything unpleasant like that. Instead of emphasizing the death aspect of a death camp, the Dachau exhibit, which has been dumbed down little by little by its curators over the years, has been showing less and less to unsuspecting visitors over the years, with increased distortion, speculation and questioning of information that was previously accepted as fact by Allied tribunals and war crimes investigators after the war. In lieu of providing graphic images and multimedia presentations that allow visitors to come to their own conclusions, the museum placed an inordinate emphasis on their German-language placards, which essentially retold events with a suspicious pollyanna spin to everything that left a bad taste in my mouth as I read German. I felt the Dachau museum curators were trying to lead us to their own conclusion that Dachau was less of an active death camp, and more of a “model camp” – and whilst a few people did die there, it was mostly b/c of natural causes and disease. Also, the exhibits seemed at Dachau to emphasize the efficiency of Germany’s camps and subcamp system with its rail connections and extensive hub of transportation networks throughout Germany, at the expense of gory details of what happened at the camp. I found these points interesting, but ultimately detractors, and therefore, suspiciously reeking of propaganda and denial, which Germans are into bigtime. Ultimately, I found the exhibit at Dachau did an injustice to what really happened there and failed to convey accurately in an open manner that Dachau was the site of wholesale genocidal slaughter of the Jews and other nationaliites that Germans considered “untermensch.” ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2004, 11:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/58 "2004-02-10T23:26:53Z")
Bill Clinton could have a field day with this – "depends what your definition of _know_ is. Think about your own pool of knowedge… is it even possible to divide along lines of things you know by direct personal experience against things people have told you that you have seen no reason to doubt? I actually remember validating the acceleration of earth’s gravity in a physics class as 32 ft/sec squared. And that’s assuming the accuracy of the instruments I used. Do I “know” this more or better than I know the speed of light (through a vaccuum) is about 186,000 miles per second, which I’ve never personally tested? I honestly don’t know the answer to that question, though the physicist Richard Feynmann would probably answer _yes._ You don’t know something unless you can personally validate it. By that standard, only prisoners, victims and occasional eyewitnesses _knew_. And the eyewitnesses were generally expected to be sympathetic to the regime, or they wouldn’t be allowed to see what they did. I suggest that this is the unstated standard used by many Germans in disclaiming knowledge of the ugly details. They can then define anything they hear second hand as “unsubstantiated rumor” that is, in retrospect, is dicounted as not being real “knowledge”. BTW, I don’t mean to suggest that Feynmann himself would apply the same standard to the OP. But it appears that there was a great deal of information available to those who cared to listen. Whole job categories of Germans would know more than the average. Cops, transport workers, the medical research community, housing officials and probably a bunch more that I can’t think of would have some knowledge of the system that might lead them to verifiable conclusions, had they chose to look a little more closely. And then dared speak out to family or friends. Some undoubetly did and some didn’t, and it’s very tough to distinguish among them later. After all, who would voluntarily answer, “Yes, I knew about it but I said and did nothing because they were just Jews”? ---
**Author:** ![tadc](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f07891/32.png) [@tadc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tadc)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2004, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/59 "2004-02-10T23:45:16Z")
> [@kmg365](#): > > When I went, that line was being proffered as well as another line that the crematoria had never been used either, […] > > Since I read German, I noticed that there is a disparity between what the placards at Dachau say […] > > The current exhibit, from what I’ve heard, is significantly sanitized an dumbed down When did you visit? I went in '02, and what you describe is very different from what I saw. You seem to imply that the placards were only in German… also not true on my visit. There was definitely no denial that the ovens were used. They described in detail how additional ovens were built to keep up with demand. It was definitely not sanitized or dumbed down… if it had been any more explicit I would have been physically ill, and I am not a squeamish person. > [@](#): > > If you can’t see why, then you are naive. The Germans are experts at spinning things and duping the public. They are experts at hiding evidence, twisting facts, and in propagandizing. Sounds to me like you’re somewhat biased on this subject. And some of your “facts” are in direct contradiction with my observations, which calls into question the rest of your input. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2004, 11:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457/60 "2004-02-10T23:46:48Z")
> [@kmg365](#): > > …I felt the Dachau museum curators were trying to lead us to their own conclusion that Dachau was less of an active death camp, and more of a “model camp” – **and whilst a few people did die there, it was mostly b/c of natural causes and disease…** I can’t speak to the accuracy of your interpretation, but this rationale is a common one among Holocaust deniers. What deaths there were, were exagerated, and more due to diease than deliberate violence. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-germany-how-much-did-the-average-german-know/226457.md?page=4)