In this video I'm gonna discuss what the average German knew about the death camps.
To what extent were Germans aware of what happened to the Jews under Nazi occupation?
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Let's discuss some background first.
1933: Hitlers gained power.
The Weimar Republic ended and Nazi Germany was born.
According to Hitler the Jews were responsible for the country's problems and needed to be
dealt with.
1935: Neurenberger Laws: Jews in Nazi Germany were now officially considered as second class
citizens.
For example mariages between Jews and non-Jews were now illegal.
1938: the Reichskristallnacht a.k.a. the Reichspogromnacht (or the Night of the Broken Glass) happened:
it was a widespread progrom in Nazi Germany.
Around 100 Jews are killed (presumably more), thousands were interned and tens of thousand
fled Germany.
1939: Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War started.
Nazi Germany now found itself governing a significant amount of Jews.
The Germans set up the so-called General-Government which basicly became the dumping ground for
the undesirable people: Jews and Poles.
Understand that many Poles and Jews already became victim of mass shootings carried out
by the SS-Einsatzgruppen.
The nazi's also set up concentration camps to intern Polish people.
One of these camps was Auschwitz, the future extermination camp.
In Polish cities inside the General-Government Jews are being put into secluded ghetto's.
These soon became overcrowded and death by hunger and disease was rampant.
1941: Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and took territory quickly.
Now, even more Jews lived under Nazi rule.
In the summer of 1941 the nazi's then started to shoot the Soviet Jews.
Around one million Jews have been shot in Eastern Europe.
These killings were mostly carried out by special troops – the Einsatzgruppen – who
were assisted by local collaborators: think of Lithuanians and Ukrainians.
In some cases regular German units took part in these killings or witnessed them as
'execution tourists' (this also happened in Poland in 1939).
What were these Germans thinking about these executions? What were their thoughts about it?
It's one thing to be an anti-Semite, it's another to approve mass murder of hapless
civilians.
As one German soldier wrote nine months after the operation had started:
Another German soldier wrote to his wife:
And with R. he meant their son.
What we see here is that both German soldiers approved of the killings. This is how it has to be. However, they are aware
they are aware of the fact that the people back home, aren't ready, so to say, to accept this truth.
Studies of German soldiers' letters found that the fate of the Jews in Eastern Europe was either not mentioned
at all or only peripherical.
So was the German public actually aware of what happened to the Jews in the east?
Well, they were aware of it.
The news leaked back via men on leave and film that was sent to Germany to be developed.
In the autumn of 1941 the execution squads moved west to the Baltics
and German occupied-Poland. And continued their bloody work.
One German who was aware of it was Friedrich Kellner.
Kellner was a German social democrat who wrote a dairy to describe life in Nazi Germany with
the goal to expose the crimes of the Nazis.
On 28 October 1941 he wrote:
Around the same time the deportation of Jews of the Reich began.
From mid-October till November 9 the first 25 trains with Jews from Vienna, the Protectorate
of Bohemia and Moravia as well as 5,000 Roma arrived in Lodz Ghetto.
A second wave followed after that, where the Jews from the Reich were deported to the Baltics.
Many elderly Jews and war veterans were sent to Theresienstadt located near Prague.
The scale was curtailed because of the transport crisis on the Eastern Front.
The local SD (the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany) reported:
German people inmediatly grasped that the deportations of their Jewish neighbours was
not a local affair – like so many bans in swimming pools and park banches were.
This was a central decision, that was carried out across the whole of the Reich.
As was the decision last September 1941 where the German Jews were forced to wear the yellow
star.
On 7 November 1941 Kellner, the social democrat we've talked about earlier wrote about German
anti-Jewish laws that were announced:
By the end of 1941 the deportation of German Jews in the Reich started.
German Jews received their summons and prepared for their departure, packing clothes and food
for the way.
They were instructed to leave all the furniture behind and hand the keys to the caretaker
before leaving.
First they had to report at a collection point where their luggage was checked for forbidden
items.
Often items that were allowed were often confiscated.
And they had to pay a fee for their deportation and an additional 'donation' set at 25% of
the value of property they left behind.
It was a way for the SS to claim a share before the Ministry of Finance would take this over.
In some cases house hold items were later auctioned.
From there they were marched to the railway station.
In the city of Forcheim 12 Jews were marched to the local railway station as a crowd of
people expressed their 'interest and great satisfaction' according to a police report.
In many places this was the first collective event of Jew-baiting since the 1938 progrom.
The marches were accompanied with ill-wishers who chanted and cursed at them.
The shooting in Eastern Europe were ineffective.
It was time consuming, it costed ammunition and was psychlogically
exhausting for the persons that had to carry out the executions.
In January 1942 the Wannsee Conference took place.
Where Nazi leader came together to discuss the Final Solution to the so-called Jewish Question.
The decided the Jews had to be exterminated. This was facilitated in death camps where the Jews were being gassed.
Jews therefore were no longer deported to the ghettos in Eastern Europe but to the death camps such as
Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The deportations to the death camps involved too many different authorities and could therefore
never kept a secret.
Think of soldiers who witnessed it, railwaymen that took care of the deportation wagens or
government officials that took care of the empty appartments.
Over the course of 1942 Goebbels (propaganda minister) de-escalated the anti-Semitic rethoric.
Before that they even publicly spoke of extermination.
Now it was toned down.
In the months were the killings reached its peak only a few anti-Semitic articles appeared
in German newspapers.
Reason for toning down the anti-Jewish rethoric was to avoid giving the Allies amunition for
anti-German propaganda.
This had the following result that no explicit words were used.
Historian Stargardt put it like this:
To illustrate what the effects were let's take a look at a private family affair.
A 40-year old German engineer was classified as 'indispensable' by the authorities and
therefore could keep his job as an engineer and wasn't drafted to serve at the front.
His brother-in-law was serving at the front and wrote in a letter that there were no longer
any Jews left in Kiev (the Ukrainian capital).
When his brother-in-law was on leave he talked to him about it. He expressed his revulsion about the murder of hapless civilians.
His brother-in-law replied:
The engineer didn't want to contradict his brother-in-law and stopped the conversation.
This created a sense of 'knowing without knowing'. People made efforts not to know.
If people claimed they didn't know it was due to their efforts not to know.
Also the Catholic Church, earlier having protested against the gassing of psychiatric patients
now remained quiet.
What did German people know about the death camps?
By the end of 1942 there were many sources to the German public about what happened to the Jews
in the East.
Countless soldiers had witnessed the shootings and in some cases participated in the mass executions of Jews.
Even the names of Sobibor and Treblinka became known to the public.
However, information about what happened exactly in these places remained sketchy.
A very few visitors were allowed inside the gassing facilities.
One of them was an SS-officer named Kurt Gerstein who visited Belzec in August 1942.
He was the head of technical disinfection services and had to advice on how to disinfect
clothes.
He witnessed the arrival and gassing of Jews from Lwów (Lemberg, now known as Lviv).
Later he took the train back to Berlin where he shared a cabin with a Swedish diplomat. He told him what he saw
and urged him to tell the world.
The report of the Swedish diplomat was buried by the Swedish government.
Gerstein reached out to the Catholic Church and the Swiss legation; all in vain.
He contacted his father, a retired judge, who remained unmoved.
As knowlegde spread, it didn't directly raise the topic of moral responsibility.
Since there was no public discussion only a few comdemned (in silence) what was going
on.
Which also had to do with the following.
As news from the vicinity of the camps rapidly spread errors crept in.
Tales of electrocution started to spread, reaching Warsaw.
A German captain stationed in the city – I mentioned him earlier in the video about the German perspective on the
occupation of Poland – he wrote that he had heard that Jews were sent to a camp near Lublin
to be burned alive in electrically heated chambers.
There were other rumours too such as gassing tunnels which cropped up in different dairies
of Germans citizens of the Reich. Then there was the fake story of Jews being turned into soap which gave way to dark humour
among German citizens. All to mask the feeling of unease and responsibility.
This all shows that most German people were very
well aware of the camps, yes. People died there? Yes. But the exact details remained
Under which exact circumstances, people weren't aware of. Also about the numbers.
Even Nazi leaders weren't up to date on the numbers; on how many people were killed.
As the war progressed German cities were bombed systematically.
A German merchant noted after he witnessed the 1943 bombing of Hamburg:
Other voices were like:
Interesting enough: many German people linked the 1938 pogrom to the bombing, because
apart from the deportations the 1938 Kristallnacht was the last anti-Semitic action that
lingered in the mind of the people.
Many people viewed the year 1938 as the start of the German war against the Jews, which
set in motion the chain of escalating mutual retaliation.
As the Allies approached the German camps the inmates were systematically murdered or
forced to march through the bitter winter cold towards the centre of the Reich.
Many perished during these death marches, because of exposure and malnutrition.
As the Americans liberated several camps, they gathered the civilians of nearby towns and villages
making them clear the bodies or walk past the bodies to show them what their government had done.
A coined phrase was: "davon haben wir nichts gewusst"
("we knew nothing about that").
You can judge for yourself.
Was it a matter not knowing or not wanting to know?
The topics of the death marches and the inhabitants forced
to watch the atrocities of the Nazis, as well as other people who became victim of Nazi terror, there is much more to cover.