The Holocaust, Germany and a Cosy Myth

Now Holocaust Day is over, it's worth looking at how much British people actually know about the Holocaust, this horrible event that we must never forget. It comes as a shock to learn that one in twenty people interviewed for a poll organised by the Holocaust Memorial Trust do not believe the Holocaust happened at all; 8% believe the scale of the slaughter was exaggerated. The Guardian comments:

"Almost half of those questioned said they did not know how many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and one in five grossly underestimated the number, saying that fewer than two million were killed".

This is understandably blamed upon lack of education about WW2, but I know personally that such ignorance occurred among older generations.

In the 60s, I remember a talk given at a church youth club given by a man who'd served in the Army during WW2. He introduced his talk by telling us that when the Nazi Party (he pronounced it "Nazzy") came to power in Germany, Nazi stormtroopers collected Bibles from local churches and publicly burned them, as seen in the picture above. He was not alone in this; I knew other people of his generation who believed the same.

Only one problem: this is simply not true. The truth, which can be found in any textbook, documentary or reputable internet source that covers the period, is that the SA, (Sturmabteilung) following the Nazi takeover, burned books taken from university and public libraries written by left-wing, liberal and Jewish authors. Disgustingly, these book burnings happened with the active support of the vast majority of German students and academics. Lady Rumbold, the wife of the British Ambassador, who witnessed the burnings, asked why, if the Nazis were burning Jewish books, were they not burning Bibles? The Bible-burning myth seems to have persisted among the WW2 generation, despite an abundance of contrary evidence.

Another myth about Germany and the Nazis was expressed to me repeatedly by a friend who died recently. He asserted:

"I don't believe the German people knew about the Holocaust".

He never offered any evidence for this belief; he simply repeated his unsubstantiated opinion. Like many people of this type, he expressed this opinion so often, it seemed to become an established fact for him. To be fair, a lot of German people who lived through the war said this too - "Davon haben wir nicht gewusst!"  (We didn't know anything about it). Germany, in the immediate post-war years, resembled post-Apartheid South Africa (SA) now. As you can't find anyone in SA now who supported Apartheid, you couldn't find anyone in Germany, barring war criminals, who'd supported the Nazi regime or endorsed their policies. Either they had "been misled" or (hello!) "only obeying orders". I regard this as a "cosy myth" (my invented term), which I will discuss below.

Now, it's very difficult, after many intervening decades, to establish what 78 million people - the population of Germany in WW2 - knew or didn't know. And I am well aware that supporters of this view will simply respond to their lack of evidence for letting the German population off the hook by asking: what evidence is there to show that they did know?

Well, there might be no absolute proof that Germans knew in detail of the Holocaust, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest they had at least some knowledge. First - what did they know already? 

They knew the Nazis were anti-Semitic from the founding of the Nazi Party in 1920, with an openly anti-Jewish element to the party's programme.
Adolf Hitler made clear his views of, and intentions towards, Jews in his book "Mein Kampf" (1925).

They knew of anti-Semitic legislation passed against Jews, culminating in the Nuremburg Laws of 1935. 

In 1933, following the Nazi takeover, they saw how Jewish professionals ( judges, teachers, lawyers and army officers) were forced out of their jobs. That same year, they saw the boycott of Jewish businesses, orchestrated by the S.A.

The Nazi-controlled press waged a vicious anti-Semitic campaign from 1933-45.

German children in school were indoctrinated with anti-Semitic educational material throughout their school career.

Germans in rural areas knew that their Jewish neighbours were forced out by Nazi activity.
All Germans undeniably knew of Kristallnacht, and the accompanying outrages against the German Jewish community, in 1938.

We are sometimes told that the crimes of the Third Reich were "all the fault of the Nazis" and the mass of ordinary Germans were not involved. This cosy myth is exploded by the fact the Nazi Party had 8 500 000 members by 1945. Two million of these were members of the SA, and millions of Germans (33% of the electorate) voted for Hitler in 1933. Jon Greenberg comments, in a parting shot for the myth:

"...it ignores the Nazis’ electoral domination in 1932 and the popularity that came after the first military victories in 1939. The vote results and the assessment of the experts we reached point to a much larger figure (i.e. of Nazis, including non-party members - Blogmeister) in the range of 35 percent."
Since most anti-Nazi Germans (Socialists, Communists and others) were either murdered, intimidated, exlied or incarcerated, and in the absence of mass popular opposition to the Nazis, all this calls into question the idea that the German supposed lack of knowledge of the Holocaust is even relevant. If the Germans could not prevent what happened before 1939 (assuming they wanted to), what could they have achieved during the war years, after the Holocaust had begun?

As for knowledge of the Holocaust in operation, it is undeniable that the regime made strenuous efforts to conceal their mass murders. This is an area worthy of study in itself. As for "ordinary" Germans, Nazis or not, they were, for the most part, secretly listening to Allied radio broadcasts during the war which detailed the atrocities. Besides this, the perpetrators of the Holocaust were writing home describing the mass murders they had seen, even enclosing photographs. One such is the famous image seen below:

Again, during the mass shootings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen behind the German lines in Russia, many "ordinary" Wehrmacht soldiers turned out to watch the spectacle, until forbidden by superior officers. The perpetrators also talked of the killings when they went home on leave; Otto Frank, father of Ann, took his family into hiding after being told of the atrocities against Jews in the Baltic States by a Dutch SS man home from the Russian Front. As for concentration camps of all types, there were hundreds on German soil - according to Goldhagen, 606 in the state of Hessen alone. If ordinary Germans knew nothing of such places, then why did they fear being sent there? The extermination camps ("Vernichtungslager"), including Auschwitz, were situated in other countries where the local population knew of what was occurring behind the barbed wire fences. It seems strange that Polish partisan groups knew of what was happening in Auschwitz, and yet "ordinary" German soldiers said they knew nothing. Another disturbing detail that destroys this myth is the fact that escapees from the Berlin-Auschwitz transports recall that "ordinary" German railway workers taunted them about their eventual fate in the Auschwitz gas chambers. So much for the cosy myth.
It might be thought that I am taking the Patrick Moore view of the German people, past and present: "The only good Kraut is a dead Kraut". Or that I am simply endorsing the view expounded by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in "Hitler's Willing Executioners". This was a book which raised some interesting questions, as Wikipedia says:
"The book challenges several common ideas about the Holocaust that Goldhagen believes to be myths. These "myths" include the idea that most Germans did not know about the Holocaust; that only the SS, and not average members of the Wehrmacht, participated in murdering Jews; and that genocidal antisemitism was a uniquely Nazi ideology without historical antecedents".

In that, Goldhagen does truth a service, but if everyone is guilty, then no-one is guilty. My own view is, hopefully, less simplistic than either the "We didn't know" or the Moore/Goldhagen view.

My view is this: Firstly, as has been said, the first victims of Nazism were Germans, the first people to fight against Nazism were Germans and the longest-serving resistance fighters against Nazism were Germans. Again, as has been said, there was another Germany. BUT - and I can't stress this enough - while there were millions of anti-Nazi Germans, there were still many more millions of Germans who supported Hitler, and endorsed violence against Jews (and many others). No totalitarian regime can survive by terror alone, without widespread popular support.To assert otherwise is an exercise in absurdity. Between these two poles of opinion - total innocence or guilt - there would have been many shades of willingness and opposition (if at all). Complex historical events cannot be reduced to simple-minded, dismissive, pseudo-explanations.

To conclude: I believe the "did they know?" controversy to be founded on a false premise - that had the German people known what was happening, they could, or would, have stopped the Holocaust. This "view" ignores the fact that the Third Reich was a highly efficient repressive state, which would have clamped down severely on any such dissent (and did). The "active arm" of the anti-Nazi opposition - socialists, communists and a few others - was crushed after Hitler's election triumph in 1933. After that, terror reigned. To use a more up-to-date example, if you know that your neighbour is a drug dealer, but, at the same time, you know that reporting him to the police will bring retaliation against you and/or your family, you have a powerful incentive to say nothing. And, as I hope I have shown, many Germans knew, and either approved or condoned the Holocaust anyway.

Cosy Myth: Some people in German uniform who didn't know what they were doing and were only obeying orders pointing guns at some people who we don't know.
Fact: Einsatzgruppen members, fanatical anti-Semites to a man, are about to murder a few of many innocent Eastern European Jews - men, women and children. Some estimates put the number of Jews murdered by these units as over a million.. They also murdered gypsies, Communists, Polish intellectuals and anyone considered to be an "enemy". All their victims perished in mass shootings; a small detail of one such killing spree is seen in the photograph.