How much did they know?

Very true. Anti-Jewish feeliing was rife throughout Europe in the 1930s, even in Britain (surely not! )

However, the difference here is that Nazi Germany deliberately rounded up and exterminated Jews. Sure, evil-minded bigots in occupied countries assisted them, but you get those everywhere. If Poland (or any other country) had actually started its own little 'cleansing' program, then there would be an issue.

Incidentally, Italy never really bothered to do much about their Jewish population...

 

Cripes, that looks familiar.

 

.

All the germans who were not complete idiots knew that jews were severely mistreated , they saw it in their streets , in the news , in the papers .it was part of the old standing hatred of jews , this had been around for generations

As for the holocaust , the deliberated plan to kill in totality millions of jews
It seems that the decision was taken during the second week of december 41
when hitler and himmler had a very secret discussion ,just the two of them
both being incommunicado for a couple of days , this at the time of the battle for moscow and the recent declaration of war to the U.S.A.
It is postulated that hitler having no concern for american public opinion any more , felt that now was the time , like the turks in WW1 with the armenians
the decision was totally secret , very few people knew of the killing within the killing
the " normal " concentration camps for political opponents acted as covert, resettlement to the east acting as the official policy .



.

 

John Ezard
The Guardian

Details of deaths of Jews and other groups in concentration camps were well publicised

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.


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.


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".


A few quotes from Hitler.....

"Nature is cruel; therefore we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?"

"Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows - at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example - as many as traffic allows.

"Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews."


There were thousands upon thousands of Germans who participated in and/or witnessed the implementation of the "Final Solution" either as members of the SS, the Einsatzgruppen, death camp or concentration camp guards, police in occupied Europe, and thousands with the Wehrmacht.


Any one read either of those books?

 

.

Nope !

The topic under discussion seems to me to be

did the german people , by and large knew of the concentration camps ?
the answers to my mind is yes !

did the german people by and large knew of the extermination camps ?
the answers to my mind is no !

the official story was relocation to the east , concentration camps were seen as bad places for bad people , such as tieresenstat , the "show case" camp
the first camp Dachau was openned for political opponents , trade union officials , communists , jews , criminals, gays and the odd catholic ,

hatred of jews seen as the agents of bolchevism and moral corruption ,was widespread and virulent in europe ,
the balts , poles and ukrainians in particulars were mindful of recent grievances and took revenge with a will ,

a part of eastern europe history which it is now impolite to mention





.

 

the jews themselves were not certain what was happening in the camps to the east ..they knew they were bad news and there were terrible rumours about gas chambers and such ..jews who had escaped the death camps and returned to warn there own people were most often not belived ...allied planners often didnt belive it either ..how is anyone able to say what ordinary german civillians were privy to ...what do most ordinary people know for certain about the world at large even today wether in the usa or the comonwealth where we enjoy the free press and internet face it most people dont know scrunt about anything of any importance ..go out and ask them questions if you think you are surrounded by rhoads scholars ..i would bet that even in 44 not more than 20% of the german population KNEW for certain what went on in the death camps ...

 

Did they know? Mostly no. Did they suspect that something fishy is going on? Yes.

Where i live was annexed to the reich after the fall of Yugoslavia. My granparents (on mothers side) were Slovenes and classified as shutzlinge of the Reich (not worthy of Reich citizenship, but also not worth of deporting to Serbia). According to them anyone knew tht if they made problems they would be deported to forced labour into the reich proper. They knew about concentration camps but only as a place where bad things happen to those who can't keep their mouth shut. Granfathers brothers were classified as aryan and given reich citizenship and forcibly mobilised into the german army. According to the one who survived east front soldiers knew about atrocities (not about the camps but mass killings) and that original story dosn't hold water. They were in the east and they knew about einzatsgruppen killing jews and russians and that there is no way jews were ressetled to the east (they were there after all).
According to him the concluded that something was wrong, knowing how enizatsgruppen worked. None of them had the guts to open his mouth as he would be sent to concentration camp to be "reeducated" (according to them forced labour with SS in charge)

BTW As much as war in the east was being fought as war anihilation it had little to do with jews but more with russians, ukranians, poles and other pesky slavs keeping germans from their earned reward in form of land in the east.

 

Cripes, if that's true it means 16 million Germans knew, and people being people, that figure would be a heck of a lot more pretty quick.

That's right.
Apart from the 6 million gassed, probably another 8-12 million plus were murdered in Poland and Soviet Union.

And it wasn't all down to the Einsatzkommandos, the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS aided and abetted turning over to Einsatzkommandos for immediate execution more than 500,000 "politically undesirable prisoners of war." Selected were Communist functionaries, members of the intelligentsia, and all Jews. Wehrmacht units also assisted the Einsatzgruppen by physically securing areas surrounding mass shootings. They sometimes participated in "combing" operations to ferret out and "cleanse" captured Soviet territory of Jews.

These soldiers no doubt would tell stories when back home on leave.

 

Soviet losses becouse of the war were 25.000.000 +

Not necesserily. You don't open your mouth about things that could land you in concentration camp even to your family (you know they might slip it out and get busted themselves). You never know who works for gestapo. It's better to keep your mouth shut.

Whermacht was anything but clean in this respect. In Harkov alone during the time it was under OKW command around 500.000+ civilians died, mostly as result of hunger ( food was not distributed and population was forbidden to leave the city in search of it).

In Kragujevac 7.000+ were executed in retaliation for and guerilla attack. Those were killed by whermacht troops not the SS.

 

The massacres were often documented under ''partisan'' round ups.

And the Wehrmacht were often up to their necks in it . Commanders not only knew about but actively encouraged it. Some, like Reichenau, commander of the Sixth Army, issued a directive 1941 emphasizing the need for harsh treatment of "Jewish subhumanity."

And Manstein issued an order on November 20, 1941: his version of the infamous "Reichenau Order" which equated "partisans" and "Jews" and called for draconic measures against them. Hitler and Field Marshal von Rundstedt recommended the "Reichenau Order" as being exemplary and encouraged other generals to issue similar orders. Not all did, but Von Manstein and Reichenau was among those who voluntarily issued such an order.

Alan Clarke in his book ''Barbarossa'' says that troops even wrote home describing what happened when they went on their ''partisan''sweeps and even sent souvenirs, such as locks of hair of murdered victims.

 

16 million is way to high a number ..i wish to revise my estimate ...i would guess that less than half a million germans knew about the death factorys and that would include the germans working there...as to partisan sweeps and intentional starvation in the east this would be well known among heer troops imo...

 

How much did they know ?

Hmm, how much want they to know ?

Considering some facts should be the best, for example that they lived in a time, which had not this ultimative audio-visual media that we have today, nearly every household has a tv or computer/internet. In this time they had just a Volksempfänger-Radio, newspapers, which reports Victories, Boogers, the general things of the daily routine and reports, which egged on the jews and their "evilness" and the cinema. So every media (newspapers, radios, cinemas) all were controlled by the NS-Regime, which of course did not publish any information about a gassed jewish mother, who was not selected for life and that her husband died of starvation and the work under terrible conditions. Even though the NS-Regime murdered more then six million human beings, they published not one report about the process of killing these peoples. Just the Propaganda against them. They showed movie clips in the cinema, how the SD-Einsatzgruppen arrested jewish people at various polish locations, but with the comment that this were criminals and they mentioned everytime the context between the Judaism and the Communism, so that gave the impression that they were the evil jews, who had a connection the the communism and the destruction of germany and the european culture. You know, the NS-Regime, even if it was stupid and the pure shit of shit, had a remarkable skill of psychology, proved in many cases. (That caused their success). The non existing information or misinformation, caused a feeling of indifference, who could imagine at that time, a "factory", which murderd more then one million people, could you imagine something like that. It had never been existing before so how should they imagine and know, what happend to the Jews. Even most of the Jews did not know which treatment they had to expect, when they arrived in the camps, the guards told them that they had to go to the showers for example and then ??

Also neraly every german family had sons, fathers, uncles, gradnpas and brothers at the front and with the time they had to take care about their own life caused by the bombing raids (not very human itself). So if they were worried by the own pain, how could they organise a investigation or a resistance. It´s the same mentality, we have today, most think, ahh the other will solve the problems, I´ve to take care about myself and probably the Jews will have a nice life there in a work camp, oh it´s not ok, yeah, but what can I do, what will happen to my family etc. ? You know, a remarkable skill of psychology, which allowed them to paralyze the people of germany. There are so many facts, don´t know where to start.

Even most of the camps in Germany were former camps for "Politisch Unzuverlässige" /"Faithless political elements", for social democrats, for communists, for former SA-Members, for critics. They said that this were the enemies of Germany, that they want the destruction of our nation, that they caused the suffering of the german people. So even if some would have disagreed with this treatment, they would tolerate it with grinding teeth, coz these are the enemeys and when the first Jews were arrested and put into such a camp in 1938, there were already five years gone until the Faithless political elements were arrested, so after five years no one would care about it, if this would have been Jews or Social democrats etc, because this camp is for Faithless political elements", so or so. It was step for step, the Holocaust wasn´t there in his complete scale in 1938, the NS-Regime went one step for another to "solve the jewish question"

This is poem about the loss of the freedom of opinion, coz Dachau was at used for people of the political oppostions, not for Jews until 1938.

No, they aren´t in the different league, but they had different impacts on the Holocaust. They are different in the way of rising, for example dachau and Bergen-Belsen were at first not for jewish people, but also for political enemies and that was it, what it was in the mind of the german people. A camp like a prison, today, am I wrong ?

Regards,
Che.

 

aziz

Yes,Che, you are!

 

Re: aziz

Nice reply, wish I could associate it with the post somehow

Regards,
Che.

 

aziz

Well Che, you did finish by saying "am I wrong?"

 

Re: aziz

Oh I agree with you that I was wrong about the last sentence A camp like a prison, today, am I wrong ? if you understand it as comparsion of Dachau and a todays prison at all, that would be wrong, but it was in the peoples mind at this time, coz they thought that there were people, who were arrested for the state of affairs, that they were against the german people and endanger the society. That doesn´t have to mean that this is allright, but that was the point of view at this time.

Regards,
Che.

 

aziz

Actually Che,I meant that you were/are wrong in the whole of your post, not just the last few words.

 

Re: aziz

But why, I would agree with you, but I don´t know exactly whats wrong about the situation in Germany and the people behavier, how I delineated it ?

Regards,
che.