From: dzk@cs.brown.edu (Danny Keren)
Subject: Re: Jews For Germans
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 03:05:44 GMT

godfrey@vxdesy.desy.de writes:
 
# I'm sorry but it is absolute crap that most Germans didn't know what was
# going on.  No-one can hide something as big as the disappearance of 6,000,000
# people, nor can anyone have failed to hear the nazi propoganda.  I guess
# you would have me believe that during 39 - 45 most Germans believed that
# Germany was at peace with the world, didn't notice the bombs or know about
# the fighting and just carried on in the same peaceful way as usual - 
# shopping, munching bratwursts etc.?

The situation is more complicated than this. Certainly, there was
rampant antisemitism in Germany. Certainly, the Germans knew very
well a big war was going on. But with regard to the Holocaust, it
is not so simple. 

When I ran into "Holocaust revisionism" on usenet, I began to
do quite a lot of reading on the subject, and, although I am
certainly no scholar of WW2 and the Holocaust, I went through a
rather large amount of material, including reading - and typing
in - many original Nazi documents that were captured after
the war. With regard to the question "how much did the Germans
know", let me make a few points:

1) There were hardly any public announcements on the goal of
   exterminating Europe's Jews. Hitler did, twice, threat to do
   so - in his speeches of January 31, 1939, and January 30,
   1942. But these threats were probably buried inside hours
   of inflammatory retoric and consisted of a few short sentences.

   Except for these, I could not find any public declarations by
   leading Nazi officials about the plan to finish off the Jews.
   Yes, sure, there were many disgusting antisemitic publications,
   like "Der Struemer" (whose editor, Striecher, was hanged after
   the war), but no messages like: "The extermination of the Jews
   has began, and is going according to plan" etc.

2) It is very obvious, when reading the correspondence between
   Nazi officials who were running the extermination machine, that
   an extreme effort was made to keep it secret. A whole family of
   camouflage terms was invented: "special treatment", "resettlement",
   "special action", "evacuation" etc. There was a severe restriction
   about photographing in the death camps, and about telling what
   was going on there. A striking document with regard to this is
   the verdict of the SS high court in Munich, May 24 1943, in the
   trial of SS-Untersturmfuehrer Max Taubner. Taubner participated
   in mass executions in the East and photographed them. The verdict
   goes to say: 

   "By taking photographs of the incidents or having photographs
    taken, by having these developed in photographic shops and showing
    them to his wife and friends, the accused is guilty of 
    disobedience. Such pictures could pose the gravest risks to
    the security of the Reich..." (Taubner was imprisoned).

   This is but one example - but, as I said, the necessity to keep
   the extermination secret is very strongly stressed in many other
   documents and speeches (such as the famous speech by Himmler in
   Posen, October 6 1943).

   Evidently, such secrecy was very practical from another point
   of view - it made the rounding up of the Jews much easier. In
   some of the rare cases when they knew what was awaiting them, 
   they put up a hard fight - like in the Warsaw ghetto.

   If so many Jews didn't know what was going on, it means that
   Himmler, Eichmann, and their fellow devils did a good job in
   keeping it secret. 

3) Often, it is claimed that the Germans had to know that so many
   Jews, who were their neighbours, could not have simply disappeared
   into thin air. But that is one of the most blatant errors
   prevailing about the Holocaust: a rather small part of the 
   Jewish victims were Germans. There were more Polish, Soviet,
   Hungarian, Rumanian etc Jewish victims than Germans.


All this doesn't answer in full the question "how much did the
Germans know?", but points to that maybe they didn't really
know that much - at least not all of them. One also has to
remember that Germany was involved in a furious war which has
engulfed all of it, and, probably, what was happening to the
Jews of other countries wasn't on the top of their agenda. 

-Danny Keren.


Newsgroups: soc.culture.german