German civilian awareness of the Holocaust

[hongi]

To what extent did the general public know of the atrocities happening within the Reich?

[MKSheppard]

To what extent did the general public know of the atrocities happening within the Reich?

They knew what was happening. For christ's sake, the troops on the eastern front took holiday snaps of their work and mailed them back to das fraulein back home.

[Mange]

To what extent did the general public know of the atrocities happening within the Reich?

They knew what was happening. For christ's sake, the troops on the eastern front took holiday snaps of their work and mailed them back to das fraulein back home.

Do you have any evidence to support the notion that "they" (which implies the entire or at least the majority of the German population) knew about what was going on in Poland and the Soviet Union?

Many ordinary Germans came into contact with slave laborers, that's certain, but to what extent the German soldiers on the Eastern front relayed their experiences to family and friends must certainly have varied. The extermination camps were guarded by the SS, not regular army troops and the Einsatzgruppen were made up of Waffen-SS cobbled with people from Gestapo, SD and local volunteers.

While the Wehrmacht to a great extent were complicit in the war crimes in the east, there were commanders who refused to follow the Jurisdiction and Commissar orders (such as von Kluge, von Manstein and Guderian) and whose troops wasn't part of the war crimes to the same extent as other units of the Wehrmacht.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

To quote the Holocaust survivor and author Primo Levi,
"The common German people not only did not want to know,[...] they desperately wanted not to know."

Think about it from their point of view. As an ordinary German, you know that the government of the Third Reich is capable of acts of spectacular brutality, and has eyes and ears everywhere- or at least, appears as if it has, which is half the battle. 'Night and Fog' orders?

It's not safe to oppose the government, not safe to ask too many questions, unless you really want first hand experience of the death camps. Not safe to be caught thinking too loudly.

You're at war. The enemy are trying to kill you all, they're not going to think twice about lying to you. Never mind the lies your own government has told for domestic consumption. It's probably all just allied propaganda, right? And don't bother asking where all the jews and communists and trade unionists and gypsies and homosexuals went.

After all, Hitler's done so much for Germany, pulled it out of the swamp of Weimar, given so many people jobs and futures again, and we all have to stand behind him now, especially as the rest of the world is against him.

Could they have a good reason for that? Could the rumours be true? No, not possibly. After all that would mean that seventy million people, who are not prepared to betray their country, were implicated too by the support they had given to the state. Never mind that they had no choice in the matter.


The german people had all the pieces they needed to work it out, but were afraid to think it through, because after living under the Nazi party, they could guess how terrible the answer was going to be.
Who would want to be offered the choice between being guilty of complicity in the murder of millions, or having to stand up and oppose the state which had cheerfully committed those murders?

So, largely, they avoided thinking about the problem deeply enough to have to make that choice, which intellectual cowardice carried a guilt of it's own later. Still, if failing to face ugly facts really was a crime, most of the world would be in dock along with them.

The German resistance was very small, but not non-existent. There are memoirs, most of them break off around late 1944 or early 1945, and they speak clearly of the fear that pervaded Germany- fear of the Nazi state, of the allies, and of what the german people themselves had done.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I seriously doubt no one figured things were going really badly on the Eastern Front by 1943 when Germany finally got around with mass mobilization. Add in the fact that many of them actively supported and joined the SS, it will be hard to believe word didn't get around about how bad the Nazis were treating the Jews and Slavs.

[Stuart]

Do you have any evidence to support the notion that "they" (which implies the entire or at least the majority of the German population) knew about what was going on in Poland and the Soviet Union?

I'd suggest you look through the pile of evidence gathered for the Nuremburg tribunals - not just the evidence actually presented to the court but the archives that were gathered in process for preparing the indictments. It leaves no doubt at all; the mass of the German population knew exactly what was going on. Ask yourself one simple question, if what was happening was not common knowledge then why did the heroic few who decided to do something about it go to such trouble and take such risks to hide jews from the Nazi security forces.

Many ordinary Germans came into contact with slave laborers, that's certain, but to what extent the German soldiers on the Eastern front relayed their experiences to family and friends must certainly have varied. The extermination camps were guarded by the SS, not regular army troops and the Einsatzgruppen were made up of Waffen-SS cobbled with people from Gestapo, SD and local volunteers.

And in 1941 the German Army Commnders had to issue orders to German Heer troops to stop them from volunteering to assist teh Einsatzgruppen because the number of such volunteers was actually hampering operations at the front. And they also had to order Heer troops from using columns of Russian PoWs for target practice due to the amount of ammunition that was being wasted. The idea that the holocaust was just SS and the Heer had nothing to do with it is nothing more than a pathetic German apologia

While the Wehrmacht to a great extent were complicit in the war crimes in the east, there were commanders who refused to follow the Jurisdiction and Commissar orders (such as von Kluge, von Manstein and Guderian) and whose troops wasn't part of the war crimes to the same extent as other units of the Wehrmacht.

Guderian is directly implicated in both the cases quoted above. Sorry, your argument doesn't hold water. Check Beevor's Stalingrad and Ericsson "The Road To Stalingrad" for accurate details.

[Mange]

Do you have any evidence to support the notion that "they" (which implies the entire or at least the majority of the German population) knew about what was going on in Poland and the Soviet Union?

I'd suggest you look through the pile of evidence gathered for the Nuremburg tribunals - not just the evidence actually presented to the court but the archives that were gathered in process for preparing the indictments. It leaves no doubt at all; the mass of the German population knew exactly what was going on. Ask yourself one simple question, if what was happening was not common knowledge then why did the heroic few who decided to do something about it go to such trouble and take such risks to hide jews from the Nazi security forces.

Cite your evidence then.

Many ordinary Germans came into contact with slave laborers, that's certain, but to what extent the German soldiers on the Eastern front relayed their experiences to family and friends must certainly have varied. The extermination camps were guarded by the SS, not regular army troops and the Einsatzgruppen were made up of Waffen-SS cobbled with people from Gestapo, SD and local volunteers.

And in 1941 the German Army Commnders had to issue orders to German Heer troops to stop them from volunteering to assist teh Einsatzgruppen because the number of such volunteers was actually hampering operations at the front. And they also had to order Heer troops from using columns of Russian PoWs for target practice due to the amount of ammunition that was being wasted. The idea that the holocaust was just SS and the Heer had nothing to do with it is nothing more than a pathetic German apologia

And I guess you happened to miss this sentence, uh?

While the Wehrmacht to a great extent were complicit in the war crimes in the east

Read more carefully the next time. There's no question that many regular Heer units were involved in some of the worst crimes of the Second World War. Your allegation of apologia makes me sick.

While the Wehrmacht to a great extent were complicit in the war crimes in the east, there were commanders who refused to follow the Jurisdiction and Commissar orders (such as von Kluge, von Manstein and Guderian) and whose troops wasn't part of the war crimes to the same extent as other units of the Wehrmacht.

Guderian is directly implicated in both the cases quoted above. Sorry, your argument doesn't hold water. Check Beevor's Stalingrad and Ericsson "The Road To Stalingrad" for accurate details.

Was Guderian charged with war crimes after the war? No, it was decided that he did not have knowledge of nor carried out any war crimes.

[Straha]

Was Guderian charged with war crimes after the war? No, it was decided that he did not have knowledge of nor carried out any war crimes.

Which was bullshit. A number of generals fingered Guderian as being guilty of war crimes (including one of Himmler's chiefs of staff), he was part of the planning group behind Operation Barbarossa and was actively involved in the drive East which was motivated perhaps solely on racial grounds.

I recommend that you find "Myth of the Eastern Front" by Smelser and Davies which spends quite a bit of time deconstructing the myths that people like Guderian and Halder erected around themselves and the German high command trying to protect them from the blame of war crimes.

[Mange]

Was Guderian charged with war crimes after the war? No, it was decided that he did not have knowledge of nor carried out any war crimes.

Which was bullshit. A number of generals fingered Guderian as being guilty of war crimes (including one of Himmler's chiefs of staff), he was part of the planning group behind Operation Barbarossa and was actively involved in the drive East which was motivated perhaps solely on racial grounds.

I recommend that you find "Myth of the Eastern Front" by Smelser and Davies which spends quite a bit of time deconstructing the myths that people like Guderian and Halder erected around themselves and the German high command trying to protect them from the blame of war crimes.

That may very well be the case (and I agree that Halder and Guderian were trying to shift the blame), but what specific war crimes are you saying Guderian was personally responsible for (in addition to have been part of the planning of Barbarossa)?

[Straha]

Was Guderian charged with war crimes after the war? No, it was decided that he did not have knowledge of nor carried out any war crimes.

Which was bullshit. A number of generals fingered Guderian as being guilty of war crimes (including one of Himmler's chiefs of staff), he was part of the planning group behind Operation Barbarossa and was actively involved in the drive East which was motivated perhaps solely on racial grounds.

I recommend that you find "Myth of the Eastern Front" by Smelser and Davies which spends quite a bit of time deconstructing the myths that people like Guderian and Halder erected around themselves and the German high command trying to protect them from the blame of war crimes.

That may very well be the case (and I agree that Halder and Guderian were trying to shift the blame), but what specific war crimes are you saying Guderian was personally responsible for (in addition to have been part of the planning of Barbarossa)?

I'll pull out my copy of the book later to get specifics but the main thrust of the accusation was that they made prolific use of slave labour from captured civilians to better their operational (and, sometimes, personal) goals. And that they (Guderian included) would often use the cover of "anti-partisan warfare" to excuse wide spread anti-semitic and slavic slaughter. There's a fair bit more, but I don't want to start making accusations here lest I remember wrong and confuse him with someone else.

[K. A. Pital]

Do you have any evidence to support the notion that "they" (which implies the entire or at least the majority of the German population) knew about what was going on in Poland and the Soviet Union?

The mere fact that ordinary Germans sent back photos of murdered POWs and civilians to their families for amusement speaks tons about the general attitude of the German population... sadly.

... there were commanders who refused to follow the Jurisdiction and Commissar orders (such as von Kluge, von Manstein and Guderian) and whose troops wasn't part of the war crimes to the same extent as other units of the Wehrmacht.

You mean the same Manstein who wrote this?

However, von Manstein did issue an order on November 20, 1941: his version of the infamous "Reichenau Order", which equated "partisans" and "Jews" and called for draconian measures against them. Hitler commended the "Reichenau Order" as exemplary and encouraged other generals to issue similar orders. Von Manstein was among the minority that voluntarily issued such an order. It stated that:

"This struggle is not being carried on against the Soviet Armed Forces alone in the established form laid down by European rules of warfare.
Behind the front too, the fighting continues. Partisan snipers dressed as civilians attack single soldiers and small units and try to disrupt our supplies by sabotage with mines and infernal machines. Bolshevists left behind keep the population freed from Bolshevism in a state of unrest by means of terror and attempt thereby to sabotage the political and economic pacification of the country. Harvests and factories are destroyed and the city population in particular is thereby ruthlessly delivered to starvation.
Jewry is the middleman between the enemy in the rear and the remains of the Red Army and the Red leadership still fighting. More strongly than in Europe they hold all key positions of political leadership and administration, of trade and crafts and constitutes a cell for all unrest and possible uprisings.
The Jewish Bolshevik system must be wiped out once and for all and should never again be allowed to invade our European living space.
The German soldier has therefore not only the task of crushing the military potential of this system. He comes also as the bearer of a racial concept and as the avenger of all the cruelties which have been perpetrated on him and on the German people."
...
"The soldier must appreciate the necessity for the harsh punishment of Jewry, the spiritual bearer of the Bolshevik terror. This is also necessary in order to nip in the bud all uprisings which are mostly plotted by Jews."
(Nuremberg trials proceedings, Vol. 20, pp. 639–645 [3])

The order also stated: "The food situation at home makes it essential that the troops should as far as possible be fed off the land and that furthermore the largest possible stocks should be placed at the disposal of the homeland. Particularly in enemy cities a large part of the population will have to go hungry."

The evidence for this order was first presented by prosecutor Telford Taylor on August 10, 1946, in Nuremberg. Von Manstein acknowledged that he had signed this order of November 20, 1941, but claimed that he didn't remember it. This order was a major piece of evidence for the prosecution at his Hamburg trial.

While Paget got von Manstein acquitted of many of the seventeen charges, he was still found guilty of two charges and accountable for seven others

So Manstein was a genocide-complicit cowardly lying ass. So long.

And most higher Wehrmacht staff were complicit in what happened in the East.

Do you really believe Halder, Guderian and other "proud prussians" in the highest echelons of the Wehrmacht had no idea of what kind of crimes their military machine was used for? Did they not see the orders of Keitel, Reichenau and so on and so forth?

That is hard to imagine. How about "mere soldiers" like Von Leeb and Kuchler, who were executing Hitler's plan for a total murder of an entire city's population (Leningrad) - which is IIRC the largest urban mass murder in history (maybe only Pnom Penh would come close)...

Guderian helped to bring about the mass murders in Byalostok and Minsk; since the mass murders started early after the capture, hardly he could not know of what was going on; or his troops be completely out of those deeds.

Given the access to documents and the level of national planning the Nazi generals were on, it's impossible for them not to know, and not to be complicit in those acts.

[Stuart]

Cite your evidence then.

You will find THIS is a good place to start. You're going to have to wade through a lot of documents and it'll take months. Start with the rail system and its use, the conduct of slave labor workforce and the disposition of the property of jewish people in German controlled This is not an issue that can be exoplored by a single reference. Warning, you won;t sleep well for months if you do the job properly.

And I guess you happened to miss this sentence, uh?

No, but I answered the points you were making sequentially.

Read more carefully the next time. There's no question that many regular Heer units were involved in some of the worst crimes of the Second World War. Your allegation of apologia makes me sick.

Good. Any discussion of the way the entire German military and the civilian population were complicit in the mass murder of millions of people should make you sick. So should attempts to ameliorate or cover up that complicity by alleging that the civilian population had no knowledge of what was going on.

Was Guderian charged with war crimes after the war? No, it was decided that he did not have knowledge of nor carried out any war crimes.

He should have been. A lot of people who should have been charged were not, a decision was made to concentrate on the most culpable. A mistaken decision in my opinion. Guderian is directly implicated in the issue of both orders I quotes (See Beevor, Stalingrad) and therefore should have been charged. That he was not charged was a miscarriage of justice but then, nobody is perfect. I would refer you to Grazhdanin Stas's comments on Manstein to deal with the rest of your comments.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

You will find THIS is a good place to start. You're going to have to wade through a lot of documents and it'll take months. Start with the rail system and its use, the conduct of slave labor workforce and the disposition of the property of jewish people in German controlled This is not an issue that can be exoplored by a single reference. Warning, you won;t sleep well for months if you do the job properly.

Holy.. that is a golden lode of material... very nice link Stuart. Thank you.

[Alferd Packer]

When I was studying the Holocaust over in Germany, the simplified statistic I most often saw was that about 1/3rd of the population actively supported the Holocaust, 1/3 passively did so, and the remainder were either ignorant, incapable of resisting, or actively attempted to resist.

[D.Turtle]

Anecdotal only:

IIRC (its from some time ago), my grandmother told me that at the time (during WW2) they thought about this matter the following way:

That Jews and others were being taken away was known. However, they thought that this was being done without the knowledge of Hitler, and if only Hitler would know what was going on he would put a stop to it, as Hitler would never ever condone such a thing...

Again, this is only a vague recollection (I could ask them about this again sometime), so take it with a large grain of salt.

[Mange]

Cite your evidence then.

You will find THIS is a good place to start. You're going to have to wade through a lot of documents and it'll take months. Start with the rail system and its use, the conduct of slave labor workforce and the disposition of the property of jewish people in German controlled This is not an issue that can be exoplored by a single reference. Warning, you won;t sleep well for months if you do the job properly.

Thank you, but I'm already very well familiar with that site.

And I guess you happened to miss this sentence, uh?

No, but I answered the points you were making sequentially.

My apologies then.

Read more carefully the next time. There's no question that many regular Heer units were involved in some of the worst crimes of the Second World War. Your allegation of apologia makes me sick.

Good. Any discussion of the way the entire German military and the civilian population were complicit in the mass murder of millions of people should make you sick. So should attempts to ameliorate or cover up that complicity by alleging that the civilian population had no knowledge of what was going on.

I agree that a sizeable minority of the population was aware of some of the crimes that were going on (one of the points I thought I'd expand on in an earlier posts was for example the contact with slave laborers) and that many knew much more than they were letting on after the war is certain, but to say that the civilian population as a whole was complicit (or that the majority was aware of the Holocaust or the horrors in the east) is really out there.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I agree that a sizeable minority of the population was aware of some of the crimes that were going on (one of the points I thought I'd expand on in an earlier posts was for example the contact with slave laborers) and that many knew much more than they were letting on after the war is certain, but to say that the civilian population as a whole was complicit (or that the majority was aware of the Holocaust or the horrors in the east) is really out there.

No, it is absolute objective fact, and you just ignored the evidence for it because you're afraid to own up to the fact that a whole civilization was culpable for mass murder on a terrifying scale.

[Mange]

I agree that a sizeable minority of the population was aware of some of the crimes that were going on (one of the points I thought I'd expand on in an earlier posts was for example the contact with slave laborers) and that many knew much more than they were letting on after the war is certain, but to say that the civilian population as a whole was complicit (or that the majority was aware of the Holocaust or the horrors in the east) is really out there.

No, it is absolute objective fact, and you just ignored the evidence for it because you're afraid to own up to the fact that a whole civilization was culpable for mass murder on a terrifying scale.

No, it's a disputed claim to say the least. However, I'll concede the issue for now. And I should add that the fear of retaliation which existed towards the end of the war shows that even though what was going on in the east wasn't made public to the German people, many at least suspected or had inklings of the events while many others chose to look away.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

There's nothing more pathetic than a sniveling little shit who has to proclaim they're really right even as they concede.

[Mange]

There's nothing more pathetic than a sniveling little shit who has to proclaim they're really right even as they concede.

Oh, spare me your self-righteous diatribe. All I meant to say was that the particulars of the Holocaust was kept secret from the German population and so the stories of what was happening had to trickle down, but that knowledge became very widespread.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

There's nothing more pathetic than a sniveling little shit who has to proclaim they're really right even as they concede.

Oh, spare me your self-righteous diatribe. All I meant to say was that the particulars of the Holocaust was kept secret from the German population and so the stories of what was happening had to trickle down.

Which is a completely unrelated issue from whether or not the average German knew. None of us are saying Goebbels produced newsreels showing the gas showers in operation and showed them in theatres to cheering crowds, but universal civilizational culpability is clear from the scope of the participation required to execute the holocaust, and so the average German was both knowledgeable, and culpable, even if it wasn't trumpeted from loudspeakers in the street. The knowledge was impossible to escape.

[Mange]

There's nothing more pathetic than a sniveling little shit who has to proclaim they're really right even as they concede.

Oh, spare me your self-righteous diatribe. All I meant to say was that the particulars of the Holocaust was kept secret from the German population and so the stories of what was happening had to trickle down.

Which is a completely unrelated issue from whether or not the average German knew. None of us are saying Goebbels produced newsreels showing the gas showers in operation and showed them in theatres to cheering crowds, but universal civilizational culpability is clear from the scope of the participation required to execute the holocaust, and so the average German was both knowledgeable, and culpable, even if it wasn't trumpeted from loudspeakers in the street. The knowledge was impossible to escape.

Alright, I understand your point, I concede fully. My apologies.

[Big Orange]

I'd say the Allies were far too soft on the non-SS side of the Nazi military when almost fully exonerated officers like Von Manstein had a similar mindset to Himmler in regards to utterly crushing the peoples of Eastern Europe, while many non-German civilians can be similarily held accountable to mass murder as well (and were more directly exposed).