A longtime former employee at one of President Donald Trump's golf clubs was mistakenly deported to Mexico, The New York Times reported — sending U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement into a mad scramble to correct the error and bring him home."Alejandro Juarez stepped off a plane in Texas and st...
Most German citizens didn’t know about the mass killings till after the war, even most soldiers.
People being disappeared with no records being kept…
We can’t hide behind ignorance later if/when we find out people were executed. That’s the whole point of accountability, without the accountability we have to assume worst case scenario. Or else the worst case scenario will happen under the guise of incompetence and the false belief no one would do this.
People knew they weren’t coming back from those trains.
They didn’t know exactly how they were going to die, but they knew they wern’t going to live on a farm somewhere. They just didn’t ask questions because that could get you on the next train.
People hid and smuggled and lied for their friends and in-laws. You don’t take that risk from ignorance.
They knew, ignorance in exchange for reason. Like those people who say that ice detention centers give you hot meals and free place to live
Hey just so you know, it’s total bullshit that the german populace didnt know about the holocaust. Some of the civillians may not have known about the specific mechanics, but many were even aware of the gas chambers masquerading as showers, jews included.
People tried to hide behind ignorance after the fact, as I have no doubt they will try to do once this latest atrocity is done. I very much agree that simply being aware does not put us into any position different than the german population in WWII, we must strive to do better than their example.
I think how many German people knew how much of the truth back then isnt too important. Some people knew some things.
Im more concerned about the strive to do better you mentioned. What does that look like? Do we all need to start neighborhood militias?
How much you are willing to risk is a personal choice.
Get to know your neighbors, get back in touch with friends and family that you know are sympathetic. Give your time and effort to groups in your area that are resisting, whether legally, physically, or however that looks to you.
Starting the French underground is a big lift, but the French underground did not spring fully formed out of nothing. You have to find ways you can help.
I think no one can answer this definitively, but I’m willing to say no to militias, for various reasons (longer conversation).
What we have here is to some extent a privilege of urban density, but it’s more of a “watch” than a militia. In short, civil disobedience. People volunteer as eyes/ears and meat shields for their neighbors. I haven’t yet been detained but have accepted the possibility.
The reason it works better is another long conversation but, in short, it ensures every attack of the enemy costs them something, and sometimes quite a lot. The resulting war of attrition is winnable because each act of unwarranted aggression erodes legitimacy, boosts recruitment, and increases public resolve.
People knew about the concentration camps, though, and must have seen there were many more people going in than they could hold. Dachau was maybe 10 miles from Munich, that’s walking distance. No way people didn’t know, whatever they claimed later.
A 10 miles walking distance??? Just send me to the camps.
Lol, you can walk ten miles in about 3 hours at a regular pace. Most reasonably fit people can, anyway. Not everyone has access to cars, and even less so in the '40s. 10 miles would be considered close on foot, much less by bicycle.
So they said. There’s a lot of counter-evidence to it:
https://www.auschwitz.org/en/education/e-learning/podcast/keeping-the-functioning-of-auschwitz-in-secrecy/
They kept meticulous records by using cutting-edge technology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
Amen to accountability. Using intent instead is pretty much a blank check for the privileged to oppress the average person with impunity.
They did…
But they kept it at the camps, or in secret memos only for high ranking party members.
Again, just because trump claims incompetence in the present when we ask where people are, doesn’t mean we have all the information.
trump says the Epstein list doesn’t exist too, and we haven’t seen it either…
But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Like, you’re assuming common people knew then what common people knew after. That’s a dangerous assumption when we’re living thru it
Think of how much shit comes out normally 5-10 years later. We still haven’t been hit by the really bad shit trump did his first term.
As bad as 2016-now looks, it’s an almost guaranteed that by 2045 we’re going to find out it was much worse.
Edit:
To clarify this was the (valid) justification for going after some teenage secretaries at the camps and random offices when they didn’t go after every single soldier.
Because someone had to type that shit up, a few low level people were the exception and weren’t ignorant.
That being said, if you’re a 16 year old girl some old Nazi made his secretary, you were probably going thru your own personal hell and couldn’t exactly snitch even if you wanted to.
But…
In the context of how widespread the knowledge of the camps was, it’s a relevant tidbit that backs up how few Germans really knew what was happening.
Yeah, it’s bullshit. The exterminations were generally known amongst the German public, particularly in the East. Mass executions were even broadcast live on the radio as early as 1941. The deportations left paper trails perfectly accessible to any interested member of the public, and forced labour from the camps became a common sight in public, and with it came the public beatings and summary executions at the hands of their SS overseers.
This is somewhat misleading and I assume you’re being informed by the wikipedia article?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_of_the_Holocaust_in_Nazi_Germany_and_German-occupied_Europe
The reference cited is a scan of the JTA daily news bulletin 1941-07-18 in which it is stated
This isn’t a direct source for the radio broadcast but we can surmise that a person living in Germany at the time, who heard that a search for weapons was conducted and persons executed as a result during war time, may have been misled by the context into believeing that either these executions were not widespread or unlawful.
Not to mention that not everyone would have heard the broadcast to begin with. Media is much more accessible today than it was in 1941.
You need to consider how a reasonable person may interpret such news and the way the news was delivered, propaganda was not (and still isn’t) well understood by the public.
While there were paper trails these weren’t exactly being handed out to the public, and anyone asking too many questions would have faced suspicion as a spy, traitor, communist or Jewish sympathiser.
Executions were typically done out of sight of the general populace, especially at the start.
By painting everyone in Germany as complicit you’re ignoring the reality, that information can be controlled by a Government, that it can skew public perception with propaganda, and that people were often living in fear of their lives by the time they did find out.
What was happening then was every bit as out in the open as what’s going on today is. It was documented, it was reported, there was audio and video and still a third of the population refused to believe it while another third was cheering it on.
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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):
[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
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I’m not going to do a better job than Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_of_the_Holocaust_in_Nazi_Germany_and_German-occupied_Europe#Nazi_Germany
But the jist is while many were aware the Nazis wanted to do it, they weren’t aware it was really happening.
And every sign they had then, America has now…
Not sure where you’re getting your info, but Wikipedia is properly sourced and disagrees with you
Wait, what are you claiming Wikipedia is saying?
“many historians argue that Germans were provided information explicit enough to indicate that the Jewish people were being massacred”
What’s one complete article compared to a partial sentence stripped of all context?
Like if there’s one word that being removed from a sentence is a giant red flag…
“However” has to be up there.
Like, it’s hard to see that deliberate and unnecessary ommision as anything other than an intentional and explicit choice to bias people who didn’t click the link…
Read what you posted. The context is saying that they don’t know for sure what % of the population knew, and they lay out some arguments supporting both sides. You used the link as if it proved the population didn’t know. But that clearly isn’t what it says.
My point wasn’t that the link proved the opposite of your opinion, it was that the link doesn’t prove your opinion. That is a different bar.
The word “however” basically means “in contrast to the previous sentence”. It exclusion doesn’t change the meaning of the quote. It simply shortens it by allowing the exclusion of the previous sentence. I am not disputing that some experts believe the population didn’t know. I am disputing that the link proves that the consensus of experts believe the population didn’t know. That is how you presented the link, with obvious intent to mislead anyone who didn’t read it into thinking it supported as fact that the population didn’t know.
Nah man, people absolutely knew what was going on. The other comment pointed out it’s bullshit Germans were unaware of what was happening. They just didn’t do anything about it. Remind you of anything? And they kept meticulous records. Basically this entire comment is total bullshit.