Reading about the Holocaust, one of the things that jumps out (other than the horrific nature of it, of course) is the lengths the Nazis went to in order to keep the process secret; from ambiguous language like massacres being ‘actions’ and telling Jews they were being ‘resettled in the east’, operations to hide the evidence to just building the death camps far away from Reich heartlands.
The reason why is obvious - keeping up the resettling lie made it easier to kill their victims. But did the Nazis also fear that Germans would baulk at the idea of exterminating the Jews? The knowledge of the German people of the shoah and their complicity in it has been debated since it first came to light, but I want to remove all ambiguity.
So let’s say on January 1st 1943 - when Operation Reinhard is well under way - Goebbels wishes the Reich a happy new year on the radio. He goes on to state that since the Jews are untermensch, subhuman vermin, the Reich has been removing them and other undesirables from all walks of the German folk community and killing them as quickly and cheaply as possible at extermination camps established for the purpose of providing a Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe.
What happens next? The most obvious result is that the Jews no longer have just disturbing rumours to go on, and will resist tooth and nail any Nazi attempts to move them. But what of the German people at large? Although being indifferent to previous suffering of Jews under Nazi laws, will they think that murdering them is a step to far and rebel against the cabal of gangsters in charge, or shrug that the Jews had it coming for dragging them into war?
Possibly more assassination attempts (not by people who are particularly concerned about Jews, but who take the announcement as further evidence Hitler is leading Germany to ruin) like the July 20 Plot, but as long as Hitler survives, the war plays out as usual. People who were going to be massacred at the camps get massacred in the ghettos instead.
I’d say most (non-Jewish) Germans will probably just try to keep their heads down and not get arrested. Germany is a police state after all. More Jews may make attempts to escape Germany and German-occupied areas. The US might get over its anti-Semitic tendencies and let more Jews in
Very easy. The Germans did not exactly do anything which had not been done before, including by their opponents.
Mass revocations of disliked groups was something that was more or less standard in that era and the time preceding. In the same way, rounding up and putting people from groups in camps was also a commonplace occurrence. The US and UK had done that in living memory.
It was also known that people tended to have a high mortality rate in these situations.
It was known that the Germans were relocating and incarcerating persons of Jewish origin. It was also known that a great many were dying.
What was unexpected was the fact that so many were being deliberately eliminated.
My uncertain belief is that once the population in general was conditioned to all hate Jews, the population in general would not be less inclined to allow the ‘authorities’ to continue killing Jews. Americans didn’t want them, nobody wanted them. They all could have been saved if the right politicians had decided that finding a way to assimilate 10 million people into a world depressed economy was feasible. Easier, by far, to just turn them away.
The question might also extend to all the other European countries where local people were told to round up the Jews lest they be taken instead. In Poland, later, after most Jews were already dead, the Germans started systematically killing Poles, as well. Belarus area, even worse, perhaps. But all over Europe, once the Germans took military control, they enlisted the local non-Jewish population to rid their country of Jews and Gypsies, etc.
Before we get too hypocritical in the ‘States’, remember how we treated the Mormons? They were scorned and feared by other Americans, even their own family members who had not converted. their communities were always subject to being raided and their material goods subject to seizure, their leaders lynched… Only by escaping, finally, to Utah area were they able to put a barrier between themselves and the rest of the US long enough to establish themselves as a valid part of the American fabric. IMHO>
The same way you and I now sort-of-know and sort-of-don’t-want-to-know about industrial farming and how pigs, and poultry chickens and turkeys are mistreated to get all of us cheap meat.
Responses like:
I didn’t know! … (It was easier and more pleasant not to look up too many facts and images that might hit home and cause you to either do something, or accet that you’re the kind of person who doesn’t do something)
What was I to do? …(Correct, for the average citizen during the Holocaust. But for many people nowadays, even going to another store that does sell free range/organic meat and paying a few extra dimes is already too much trouble).
Taint the messenger. …Sjeesh, PETA, grow a sense of perspective already. Sjeesh PETA, do you have to show me those horrible pictures? I’m eating here ! And why are you exposing my kids to such horror when all they did was order chicken McNuggets?
Rationalize away the impact. …Jews aren’t really people, they’re subhuman. They were attacking us, first. …Fish don’t feel pain. Chickens are dumb. Pigs don’t get bored. Cows stop missing their calves once they’ve stopped mooing constantly.
Wait. So the holocaust is like modern industrial livestock farming?
So is the decimation of the American Indian population like the near extinction of the buffalo by a combination of commercial hunting and disease form domesticate European cows?
And people wonder why noone takes PETA types eriously.
I don’t know about this. Americans care more about Europe than they do Africa. Most Americans can point to more than one European country on the map. Most Americans have European ancestry and may even have relatives still back in the mother country. People take vacations in Europe. They study abroad in Europe. We speak a European language. Our culture has a ton of European influences. People have high expectations for Europe.
They don’t have high expectations for Africa. Americans see a bunch of Africans killing each other and they just think, “Those crazy people are doing it again! What else is on TV!” We don’t see all the ethnic divisions and different nations, and we don’t even try to. We just see Africans. You see one fly-blown African face, you’ve seen them all.
I don’t think the mere knowledge of the Holocaust would have launched us into WWII. Nor I don’t think another European Holocaust would motivate us to do but the bare minimum. But I don’t think we’d be giving it the Rwandan treatment either. We’d be slow to move, but we would still do something.
I wonder if many more Jewish scientists or the ones with Jewish espouses would had left Europe earlier and more of them would had been available for the Manhattan project. I also think that even a few scientists that where not Jewish would had leaved in disgust, like Max Plank, I didn’t know that he even dared to talk to Hitler in one occasion to defend the Jewish scientists. His son was later involved in the plot to kill Hitler, the gestapo killed him and Max Plank did lose his will to live and died a few years after the war.
Others like Enrico Fermi fled to America and led the team that designed the first nuclear pile that went critical on 2 December 1942, demonstrating the first artificial self-sustaining chain reaction that made possible the Manhattan project. I do think that with more awareness of the Holocaust and talent many of those efforts would had happened sooner and the bomb would had been ready in time to drop on top of Hitler.