Fact about WW2 and polad

[Kitsune]

The whole organisation and proceedings of the Holocaust needed tens of thousands of people, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Those who had reasons to suspect something numbered perhaps even a million people...
This may seem a lot...but there were 70 million people in the Reich back then. So only a minority knew or suspected.
This is supported by the fact that there was nearly no jeweish resistance (the one notable exception is the warsaw ghetto uprising). They mostly meekly folowed the orders to be transferred at some places like "Auschwitz"...they did not expect something pleasant, but also had no idea that they would be killed for sure. This is something that influences Jewish/Israeli people to this day...that the Nazis could slaughter them like animals...and many vowed that something like this will never happen again.

Being a German born long after the war I know that I am personally innocent. Even my parents were born after the war. My grandfathers were a field surgeon on the western front and a cook on the eastern front...none of them were even in the Nazi party.
I have visited quite a few foreign nations and have met quite a few foreign people. I found most of them not so different from Germans, the potential for hate or uncaring behaviour seems to be no different.
But nonetheless I feel somehow tainted.

That some Germans try to downplay the events of the Holocaust is obvious. But it is also obvious that the Holocaust is used by many not Germans again and again. Its the main propaganda weapon against Germany...to paint the picture of the ugly Nazi (do you really want to buy cars build by such a people? Buy ours instead !!) Or to German feelings of guilt are used to ones advantage when negotiating with them.
Perhaps in a hundred years things are different.

[Loco]

About holocaust, I saw a tv documental filmed by the french director Claude Lanzmann called "Shoa", 9 hours about holocaust meticulously reserchead, with a lot of interviews, it´s the best document I´ve seen about that, better than any other book, documental or movie I´ve read or seen before, because nothing more after that documental added new things to my aknowledgment. One of the interviews was with a young german woman then, born may be in the 60´s, and she was the daughter of a german killer that by any reason survived Nuremberg trials. She confessed that in her chilhood her father was a good man, she thought that, and she grew up innocent, but when she was a teen she learnt about his father´s past and she crumbled emotionally and never more respected his father, even she couldn´t evite criying ashamed in front of the camera. Clearly, this woman is innocent and in some aspect she´s a victim too, who could accuse her?. But I don´t think few germans knew about holocaust, it was imposible ignoring it, when you see suddenly your neighbour is treated like an animal, oblied to wear a yellow star and prevented of working in his profession, this is a serious thing, for saying the less, and if you don´t move a finger, where, you can be a cooker or a clown but you don´t pretend being an ignorant. Shoa is not melodramatic, is cold and exact: nazis have to move across ALL europe trains loaded with about 10.000 people, they were train-convoys and it was neccessary a great coordination between all train stations of half of europe, involving a lot of people and civil contractors.
Here in Spain we had or own genocide 60 years ago, the problem we have is hangmen and victims were both spanish. Every body claims here that republicans or rebels were murderers, but nobody says: "I murdered people", or "I didn´t see anyting" but there were deads everwhere, here still there are murderers of that time alive and nobody could send them to court becasue some people say: but the people of the other side were murderesr too. It´s sad, but almost any country could do a genocide.
And at last, the history of 60 years ago is really really a serious matter, and I think Germany was lucky enough in the way it was treated both by russians and westerns allied, any german can´t complain about it, other countries were victims of Germany and they suffered more than them after the war. A country must load with the good and the bad things of their history.
Kitsune, don´t be worry, I think nobody seriously is going to call you "nazi", and germans go up and downs through europe safety.
Btw, if people don´t buy germans cars because they are "nazis", many others buy it because they are "german engineering" and hey! Ferraris are italian engineering, and don´t tell me you can do something better than that!!!

[2Sheds_Jackson]

The one thing I've personally heard about people not buying German for reasons like that are - my father in law (who's Jewish) refused to buy or even shop for a BMW because the company never made restitution to the families of the forced labor it used. Many other German companies have - like Mercedes, I think.
It's a valid point, since this happened so recently - many of the victims are still alive, and so are many who profited from the labor. The company stockholders profited from the forced labor, the workers should be compensated. Hey at the wage rate that BMW workers make now, a couple of years salary would be a good amount of $$

[Mr. Nielsen]

But I don´t think few germans knew about holocaust, it was imposible ignoring it, when you see suddenly your neighbour is treated like an animal, oblied to wear a yellow star and prevented of working in his profession, this is a serious thing

I haven't seen the series but i'm a bit sceptical as to who knew what.

What happened before world war two was discrimination, apartheid, mob violence etc. and finally etnic cleansing. If i'm not mistaken nearly all jews had left Germany by time the war started. And it had been seen elsewhere at the time (black people in US for instance, though not US government policy of course) and unfortunately it has been seen again after ww2.

[Mr. Nielsen]

Also.

Holocaust happened outside Germany. I believe all the death camps were placed in occupied Poland, remote areas if I'm not mistaken. So there would be quite few witnesses to them. Mass shootings on the other hand happened all over, and there must have far more witnesses to them.

So I'm not so sure about how many would know, from seing a train transport of jews through germany, that an industrialised mass murder of unseen proportions were going on. And those that knew from having seen mass shootings, been camp guards, been architects designing the gas chambers, would be risking their lives telling the story. And they would also risk not being believed at all.

[S'13]

Also.

Holocaust happened outside Germany. I believe all the death camps were placed in occupied Poland, remote areas if I'm not mistaken. So there would be quite few witnesses to them. Mass shootings on the other hand happened all over, and there must have far more witnesses to them.

So I'm not so sure about how many would know, from seing a train transport of jews through germany, that an industrialised mass murder of unseen proportions were going on. And those that knew from having seen mass shootings, been camp guards, been architects designing the gas chambers, would be risking their lives telling the story. And they would also risk not being believed at all.

Germans knew of Holocaust horror about death camps

John Ezard
The mass of ordinary Germans did know about the evolving terror of Hitler's Holocaust, according to a new research study. They knew concentration camps were full of Jewish people who were stigmatised as sub-human and race-defilers. They knew that these, like other groups and minorities, were being killed out of hand.
They knew that Adolf Hitler had repeatedly forecast the extermination of every Jew on German soil. They knew these details because they had read about them. They knew because the camps and the measures which led up to them had been prominently and proudly reported step by step in thousands of officially-inspired German media articles and posters according to the study, which is due to be published simultaneously in Britain and the US early next month and which was described as ground-breaking by Oxford University Press yesterday and already hailed by other historians.

The reports, in newspapers and magazines all over the country were phases in a public process of "desensitisation" which worked all too well, culminating in the killing of 6m Jews, says Robert Gellately. His book, Backing Hitler, is based on the first systematic analysis by a historian of surviving German newspaper and magazine archives since 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor. The survey took hundreds of hours and yielded dozens of folders of photocopies, many of them from the 24 main newspapers and magazines of the period.

Landmark
Its results, Professor Gellately says, destroy the claim - generally made by Germans after Berlin fell in 1945 and accepted by most historians - that they did not know about camp atrocities. He concludes by indicating that the only thing many Germans may not have known about was the use of industrial-scale gas chambers because, unusually, no media reports were allowed of this "final solution". However, by the end of the war camps were all over the country and many Germans worked in them.

Yesterday OUP said his study exposed "once and for all the substantial consent and active participation of large numbers of ordinary Germans". Its head of historical publishing, Ruth Parr, called it a landmark study of the terror. "He asks and answers some very difficult questions about how much the ordinary German people knew about the Nazi atrocities, and to what degree they supported them," she said.

A leading British-born Holocaust historian, Professor Michael Burleigh, said the book was "original and outstanding, genuinely important". Another authority on the camps, Professor Omer Bartov, of Brown University, Rhode Island, US, described Backing Hitler as "path-breaking - a crucial contribution to our understanding of the relationship between consent and coercion in modern dictatorship".

Conventional wisdom among post war historians has been that - as Lord Dahrendorf, ex-warden of St Antony's College, Oxford, says in his study Society and Democracy in Germany (1966) - "It is certainly true that most Germans 'did not know' about National Socialist crimes of violence; nothing precise, that is, because they did not ask any questions_." A common explanation among influential modern German historians, including Hans-Ulrich Thamer in his study Wooing and Violence (1986) is that the Nazis "seduced" an unwilling or passive public.

Gellately, professor in Holocaust history at Clark University, Massachusetts, offers a mass of detail to support the theme of an earlier work, Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, which caused an international sensation in 1995. Goldhagen's theme was that "what the Nazis actually did was to unshackle and thereby activate Germans' pre-existing, pent-up anti-semitism".

Gellately began his inquiry after finding a press report -published as routine - of a woman reported to the Gestapo for "looking Jewish" and allegedly having *** with a neighbour. "For decades my generation had been told that so much of the terror had been carried out in complete secrecy," he writes.

His media trawl, with a research assistant, found that as early as 1933 local papers reported the killing of 12 prisoners by guards at Dachau, the first to be set up as a "model" concentration camp initially for communists. On May 23 the Dachauer Zeitung said the camp was Germany's most famous place and brought "new hope to the Dachau business world". By 1934 the main and widely read Nazi-owned paper Volkische Beobachter was reporting a widening of policy to other "political criminals" including Jews accused of race defilement. By 1936 communist prisoners were no longer mentioned: in a photo-essay in the SS paper Das Schwarze Korps emphasised the camps as places for "race defilers, rapists, ****** degenerates and habitual criminals".

This broadening mission, as Gellately calls it, was reflected in Volkische Beobachter photographs of "typical subhumans" including Jews with "deformed headshapes". For the first time their detention was said to be permanent. In January, 1937 Berliner Borsen Zeitung reported the SS chief Heinrich Himmler as announcing the need for "still more camps" for "those with hydrocephalus, cross-eyed, deformed half-Jews and a whole series of racially inferior types".

In November, 1938 the anti-Jewish pogrom on and after "the night of broken glass" was reported countrywide in papers as heroic. The propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, announced that the "final answer" to the Jewish problem would be by way of government de cree, according to Volkische Beobachter

In late 1939, the year war started, newspapers acting on government orders announced a post-8pm curfew on all Jews in case they "molest Aryan women". That November the first summary executions of "anti-socials" by police without trial were reported. Papers were told to report these clearly and forcefully. In March, 1941 the Hamburger Fremdenblatt reported the first mass auctions of posses sions of detained or killed Jews. Hamburg became the wartime clearing house and Gellately says at least 100,000 citizens bought at the auctions.

After this the focus switched. Most press reports about Jews were about those outside Germany. This was because the official but unpublicised final solution was being implemented. But enthusiastic denunciations by ordinary citizens of Jewish and other "internal enemies" continued to be copiously reported. Backing Hitler discusses 670 cases. By the end of the war Hitler was still getting 1,000 private letters a week, many of them denunciations.

Book by Michigan author says Germans knew of the Holocaust

Detroit Free Press | June 5, 2000

BY L. L. BRASIER | FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

Historians have long debated how much ordinary German citizens knew about or participated in the torture and murder of Jews during World War II.

A Michigan professor says he has proof that most Germans knew about the killings, some helped the Nazis, and few did little to stop the atrocities.

In his new, controversial book, "Nazi Terror, The Gestapo, Jews and
Ordinary Germans," Eric Johnson, a professor of history at Central MichiganUniversity, relies on hundreds of interviews and thousands of surveys conducted with Germans who lived under the Third Reich.

In his 10 years of research, he found Gestapo files detailing citizen
participation in the persecutions. He also found transcripts of BBC radio
reports that detailed the slaughter. His work left him shaken and convinced that had it not been for the complacency -- and at times, outright support-- of Germans, Hitler would not have been able to exterminate 6 million European Jews.

"It took a whole society to murder the Jews: Train operators and cleaning women and bankers and lawyers and doctors all played a role in sending the Jews off to their deaths," he said Sunday. "It was a partnership."

The book, "a benchmark work," according to Publishers Weekly, has caused a stir. For one, it challenges some widely held theories that the Nazis, operating secretly and at remote concentration camps, were able to murder millions without alerting citizens.

That view has long rankled those who were there, particularly the Jewish
survivors.

"Of course the German people knew, they all knew," said Ruth Lehman, 79, an Oak Park Auschwitz survivor who belongs to the Michigan Holocaust Survivors Organization. "It's important for the truth to come out now because there aren't that many of us left," she said.

Johnson lived in Germany for five years while researching the book and
talked with dozens of Germans who admitted knowledge of the killings and
torture. The people were sometimes remarkably candid.

They admitted they supported Hitler and were often anti-Semitic. They
viewed the Gestapo, Hitler's brutal police force, as an ally and protector,
and Jews as "criminals." And they said they knew what was happening to the Jewish people once they were loaded on trains bound for concentration camps.

One woman, who lived in Cologne, told of her anatomy professor bragging about medical experiments he had been conducting on Jewish brains.

Another man told how his father, a physician near Auschwitz, took him aside and told him how thousands of Jewish people were being gassed. He was warned not to discuss it outside the family.

Sometimes, Johnson came face to face with Nazis. In his last interview
before he returned to the United States, he sat with an 88-year-old Germanman in a shabby apartment in Cologne. The man, a former member of the SS auxiliary, had been a Dachau concentration camp guard and a soldier.

The German described an afternoon where he and the five other men in his detachment killed 300 Jewish women and children, administering "mercy shots" to the backs of their skulls as they stood in a ditch.

The German people made such atrocities possible, Johnson argues, because of their "deeply flawed culture" at the time.

"They had an excessive acceptance of the law, whatever the law might be," he said. "In other words, if it was law to kill Jews, than that was a good thing. It is slavish obedience to law, something you still see in Germany today."

[2Sheds_Jackson]

I haven't seen the series but I’m a bit skeptical as to who knew what.

What happened before world war two was discrimination, apartheid, mob violence etc. and finally ethnic cleansing. If i'm not mistaken nearly all jews had left Germany by time the war started. And it had been seen elsewhere at the time (black people in US for instance, though not US government policy of course) and unfortunately it has been seen again after ww2.

You have to remember the huge scale of this operation. There were massive camps built, with specialized buildings, equipment supplies etc. The recovered goods from these camps such as clothes, shoes, jewelry, metals, glasses, hair etc were also sold off.

All this infrastructure required planning and support. Bids for this stuff went out as a matter of policy - i.e. the German gov't needs to build "x" number of camps, with "x" number of buildings with "x" number of showers that actually dispense gas, "x" number of large self-sustaining ovens that keep burning using only the bodies of the burned for fuel (i.e. not coal fired), trucks, trains, carts, poison gas canisters, etc. - how much of this can your company do, what will it cost, how long to build?

All this planning etc was done well in advance of the wider war. This was not something that popped up in the last month.

At many of the camps, they became very efficient. They put the "showers" near the cremation ovens. In fact, there were metal rails, like train tracks that led from the showers to the ovens. The corpses were piled onto tracked carts, and pushed over to the disposal area. The blueprints, drawn up by civilian architects clearly laid all this out. How could there be any question as to what this was for?

Do you think that the hundreds of firms that received these requests didn't know what they were for? What about the munitions and other firms that used the slave labor? What about the firms that bought huge piles of hair, glasses that were no longer needed etc? These companies had thousands of people who directly participated in the planning and execution of this plan. In addition, as has been said, this was national policy, and clearly explained in print and in film.

As an aside - the cremation ovens didn't work properly at first. They had been designed by engineers to keep burning using the body fat of the humans they digested. Since the victims were so malnourished, there wasn't much fat to burn, so they had to be redesigned to work properly. They needed to work that way because coal, oil, and wood were projected to be in short supply.

Obviously the final solution was a well known operation, with tens of thousands of people either participating by working at or with the camps, or participating in the planning and support.

Again, I'm not condemning present day Germany or the German people. It's just a horrifying lesson in what can happen when people - any people are seduced by power.

[Kitsune]

I have read Eric Johnsons book...and also it is somehow well researched and well presented it also seems to be written with evil intend.
This became clear to me as I read "I shall bear witness" written by Victor Klemperer, a jew. In it he describes how he survivied the times because of the silent help of countless Germans who helped him.

This is the trick: While every case Johnson describes may be true, he seems to want to create a certain impression. He claims that most Germans knew it or something...and then states numerous cases which are proving it...all of them true.
But if he wanted to prove that Germans are a good and kind people...he coudl have written a book decribing cases of compassion and mercy...one after the other...and all of them true, too.

This makes his book essentially propaganda...especially dangerous, intelectual propaganda, because it is not obvius but cleverly disguised as a scholary work.

The Nazis made "documentary movies" showing the conditions of concentration camps: neat houses, well treated and fed prisoners and stuff. The Jews who were deported were said to be resettled...and there is another Nazi "documentary" of such a village of re-settled jews (a fake) showing a nice village with quite happy people...
Why bother to create such propaganda stunts if everyone knew anyway? Best proof: why did nearly every jew meekly accept his fate? In many cases they got a letter: be at this-and such trainstation. You will be resettlet. Destination: Auschwitz. If they KNEW what would happen (a German jew read the same newspapers as everyone else) that they would be gassed...why did nearly everyone go without resistance? Not that they believed that **** with the happy village...even most Germans knew that the Nazi leadership produced propaganda stuff without end...there were lots of Berliner jokes depicting Göbbels as liar and bigmouth ( One: "1 Göbbels is the scientific unit for the energy you need to switch of a million radio receivers...", that shows what many Germans thought...) but I think they thought they still had a chance, perhaps a labor camp or something.
And the Germans weren't exactly having a good time either...if you have already lost your father and your brother it numbs you for the pain of others...Add to this the Nazi propaganda, depicting Jews as rats or parasits
which would slowly destroy the "body of a people" or the accusation that those international Jews were responsible for the American entry into the war, which were bombing the cities all the time...sure lies and propaganda. But if you throw a lot of dirt at someone, some stains of it will stay on him.
And lets not forget: At first the Nazis supported the emigration of jews...especially to palestine. Reinhard Heydrich said once: "As nationalsocialist I am zionist as well of course". So while everyone knew about oppression, how many knew about the attempted total anihilation? Some hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million knew or had reason to suspect something. But certainly not everyone.
But its a damn dufficult topic, thats for sure.

[duck]

Almost every German soldier on the Eastern Front had taken part in massacres in some way, either actively or as spectators. Higher Wehrmacht officers knew about the gas chambers already in 1943. But after the war it was simpler to begin a new life by actively forgetting about all this and just blaming everything on "the Nazis". And who would want to tell their children or grandchildren wartime stories of gassed Jews or machine-gunned Russian women and children?

[Kitsune]

@duck:
You seem to know a lot about this. Sources?

Please keep in mind, duck, that according to some...sources..."almost every soldier" of the American forces in Vietnam took part in massacres , either actively or as spectator, as well. And the US generals knew of the killing and burning of 1-2 million civilians in Vietnam and Cambodia. SEAL teams murdered amd tortured countless innocents...all done by Americans, for profit or because Americans enjoy evil for itself. If someone told you otherwise he is just lying or hiding the truth. Who would want to tell his children and grandchildren of those massacres, rapings and babykillings. It was much easier to blame it all on the CIA.

Do you believe that as well?

[duck]

You are using a natural defensive mechanism, but your grandparents generation (NOT meaning your grandparents) is responsible for countless massacres and the Holocaust. It cannot be compared to Vietnam, SEAL teams have very little in common with the Einsatzgruppen and Totenkopfverbaende. Carpet bombing is not the same as burning families alive in barns. And remember the anti-war movement in the US and Europe. For the most part they were free to voice their mind, now compare that to the Scholl sisters or count Stauffenberg.

Quote from Alan Clark's "Barbarossa": p.193

"Those who went to the East passed already into a different world, separated by a gulf almost as wide as that which had existed in the Great War between the permissionaries of Paris and the hills of Verdun. Once they had traversed the frontier of the occupied territories they were in a belt of country, up to five hundred miles across, where the septic violence of Nazism festered openly-no longer concealed beneath the trim roofs and Gemuetlichkeit of suburban Germany. Mass murder, deportations, deliberate starvation of prisoner cages, the burning alive of school children, "target practice" on civilian hospitals-atrocities were so commonplace that no man coming fresh to the scene could stay sane without acquiring a protective veneer of brutalisation.

One young officer, lately arrived in the East received an order to shoot 350 civilians, allgedly partisans but including women and children, who had been herded together in a big barn. He hesitated at first, but was then warned that the penalty for disobedience is death. He begged for ten minutes time to think it over, and finally carried out the order with machine-gun fire. He was so shaken by this episode that after being wounded he was determined never to go back to the Eastern front."