Germans in general knew. If you keep with personal insults you’ll get banned outright. Anyways i didn’t know why you’re so defensive of Germans 80 years ago. It was every bit as known then as what’s going on now is known. This is not really disputed. Did the average German know exactly what was happening in Auschwitz and Dachau? No, but probably more did than you’d think. But the average German absolutely knew people were being rounded up and disappeared, and never heard from again. It is profoundly ignorant to claim people weren’t aware their neighbors were being abducted.

From askhistorians on reddit, since this is a settled issue in spite of your lack of awareness. Unlike the Germans lack of awareness, since they were aware.

This question is always difficult to tackle because of the question to gauge what exactly was known (as in the details) and what was not. However, as a general rule, current scholarship can say with great certainty that the German population knew that atrocities were occurring and that people were being killed in large numbers, even if they didn’t know place names such as Belzec, Treblinka or Sobibor.

The existence of Concentration Camps as camps for political enemies was well-publicized and known since 1933. In fact, it was hailed as a necessary and important step of the new regime in a variety of news outlets. Here are some examples: Münchner Neueste Nachrichten reporting the opening of Dachau; a newspaper from Brandenburg reporting about prisoner transfers to Oranienburg; the Sindelfinger Zeitung reporting arrests of communists and their transfer to the Heuberg Concentration Camp in March 1933.

Another, well-publicized example of the awareness of the German population of the atrocities of their government were the protests against the T4 killing program of the mentally and physically handicapped. With the start of the war in 1939, the regime had started a centralized killing program, transporting inmates of facilities for the handicapped and mentally ill to six central killing facilities (Hadamar, Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, Brandenburg and Bernburg).

Now, these people were German citizens with families that cared for them, at least to a certain degree. Through a variety of factors such as bureaucratic fuck-ups in the administration of the program (some families were notified twice, got send multiple urns with ashes etc.) and through the publicity these facilites gained in the towns were they stood (it’s hard to disguise a crematoria and people dumping ashes into a river), word got out about this and the churches, especially the Catholic Church, lead a publicity campaign against this program.

Clemens August Graf von Galen, the bishop of Münster, condemned this program in his sermons. Lothar Kreyssig, a judge who was the legal guardian of several people killed in one of these facilities reported the murders to the police. Knowledge spread throughout Germany and people started protesting. Hitler was booed at one of his rallies.

Public anger got so out of hand, that the political leadership of the Reich saw itself forced to officially stop the program in August 1941. While the killing, especially of children, continued in a decentralized fashion, the regime had learned its lesson. It is very likely that there is no written order for the murder of the Jewish population (in contradiction to the T4 program, where a written order exists) because of these protests.

However, once the wide-spread murder of the Jews started in 1941/42 the German population also slowly gained knowledge of what transpired. First of all, there was the circumstance of neighbors being deported and never returning but especially as time went on, Wehrmacht soldiers who had witnessed atrocities or had heard of them from colleagues became an important source for information as well as for rumors.

Felix Römer in his book about the Wehrmacht cites from conversations the Allies recorded in POW camps without the knowledge of the recorded soldiers. One exchange he cites is the one between between the Viennese Artillerie-Gefreitem Franz Ctorecka and the Panzer-Gefreiten Willi Eckenbach in August 1944 in Fort Hunt (translation my own):

C: And then Lublin. There is a crematoria, a death camp. Sepp Dietrich is involved there. He was somehow caught up in this in Lublin.

E: Near Berlin, they burned the corpses in one of these thingies [“einem Dings”], the people were forced into this hall. This hall was wired with high-voltage power-lines and in the moment they switched on these lines, the people in the hall turned to ashes. But while still alive! The guy who was in charge of the burning told 'em: “Don’t be afraid, I will fire you up!” He always made such quips. And then they found out that the guy who was in charge of burning the people also stole their gold teeth. Also other stuff like rings, jewellery etc.

[Römer, p. 435f.]

What is so interesting about this exchange is first of all, the extent of knowledge present, from the knowledge of a death camp near Lublin to the knowledge of Sepp Dietrich’s involvement, to both the murder and the theft or property. But it secondly also shows the amount of rumors that circulated since the killing with elector shock did not turn out to be true.

What this in the end demonstrates is that Wehrmacht soldiers not only heard stuff or saw it but also spread knowledge, among each other and among their families when they were visiting home. And since a huge amount of people served in the Wehrmacht knowledge spread rather quickly.

Another episode which exemplifies this is the Rosenstraße protest: In 1943, there were still Jews in Berlin. Most of them forced to perform forced labor but they were still there, mainly due to the fact that they were married to a German spouse. The regime wanted them deported and ordered them arrested. They were brought into the Rosenstraße jail in Berlin and the deportations were planned.

However, when their relatives, spouses and others got wind of what was transpiring, they staged a protest in front of the jail against their deportation. The regime tried to threaten them, on March 5 even rolling out armed SS-troops with machine guns but they were undeterred and kept up the public pressure.

The regime, fearing for moral in the war, was forced to concede. On March 6, all the arrested Jews were let go from the Rosenstraße prison. Despite threats and warnings, there was no repeat of the action on part of the regime, mainly for propaganda reasons.

This episode demonstrates the knowledge about the atrocities of the regime on part of the public and also, taken together with internal discussion on the topics of mixed race persons and spouses, just how effective public protest was in Nazi Germany. The regime was very aware that the First World War was in large parts lost because of public unrest and demoralization. In order to prevent this from happening again, they were acutely aware of public mood and morale.

In internal discussions, they opted against mass-sterilization, arrest, deportation and murder of both Jewish spouses of Germans (as well as against forced divorces) and people they classified as mixed race Jews in Germany. They were simply afraid of public mood.

Similarly, despite all the efforts to keep the Holocaust secret, the public was aware, at least in the broad strokes and in many a case of rather curious details such as gas chambers and crematoria. In short, the view that the Germans knew nothing is not historically accurate. Their ignorance after the war was in large parts feigned.

Sources:

• Felix Römer: Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht von Innen.

• Frank Bajohr, Dieter Pohl: Der Holocaust als offenes Geheimnis. Die Deutschen, die NS-Führung und die Alliierten. Beck, München 2006.

• Robert Gellatey: Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, Oxford: Oxford Unversitiy Press, 2001.

• Nathan Stolzfus: Resistance of the Heart, New York: W.W. Norton, 1996