On June 14, 1994, we interviewed a man named Adam Grolsch for about four hours in his home in Krefeld, Germany. He candidly told us many things about his experiences as a radio operator in the German army during World War II, including how he had frequently listened to BBC broadcasts during the war and how he had personally observed the shooting of thousands of Jews from the Pinsk ghetto in October 1942. Six days after his interview, he sat down and wrote us a brief letter, which we received two days later at our office at the Center for Historical Social Research at the University of Cologne. His ostensible reason for writing was to make a minor correction to what he had said about the BBC broadcasts he had listened to while he was stationed on the eastern front. In addition to this, however, he wanted to communicate that the interview had brought back painful memories that continued to trouble him deeply. At the end of his letter, he wrote, “After our intensive discussion about the Holocaust in Pinsk that I experienced directly, I was haunted the entire night by nightmares. What must it be like for the surviving victims?”
A year later, on July 24, 1995, we interviewed a man named Herbert Klein in a hotel room in Saddle Brook, New Jersey. This interview also lasted for about four hours and was also very candid. Furthermore, it also brought back painful memories to the interviewee, especially because Herbert Klein was just such a surviving victim of the Holocaust that Adam Grolsch had in mind when he had written to us a year earlier. Born two years later than Adam Grolsch, in 1922, Herbert Klein had been raised in the German city of Nuremberg. His father led the local Jewish community during the entire Nazi period before he and his family were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in June 1943. In our wide-ranging interview with him, Herbert Klein talked at length about his experiences as a Jewish man in Nazi Germany and explained that he was one of a very small number of Jews from Nuremberg to survive the Holocaust.
After our interview, he too could not rest easily. Over the next three days, he phoned us several times about minor corrections and additions he wanted to make to his interview, and then he invited us to visit him at his home before we left the New York/New Jersey area. When we finally went there, much of our discussion revolved around a magazine article he gave us to read about a man of good conscience who had written objectively about the Holocaust but had caused considerable pain to some by not understanding some things correctly about what and whom he had written.
Adam Grolsch and Herbert Klein are only two of the nearly two hundred people we interviewed face-to-face and only two of the more than three thousand people we surveyed in writing about their experiences during the Hitler years in Nazi Germany. They are two of the many people, both Jewish and non-Jewish, we have had contact with in the course of the research on this book who have made crystal clear the importance of getting things right, both factually and interpretively.
Although we have tried our level best to “get it right,” some of the evidence that we have uncovered leaves room for differing interpretations, and we ourselves continue to disagree on a few issues. The most significant of these relates to the questions of just how much the German population knew about the mass murder of the European Jews while the Holocaust was being perpetrated during World War II and exactly how and when they came to know about it.1 Nevertheless, despite modest interpretative differences, we are in broad agreement about the answers to the other questions this book confronts, several of which are central to the understanding of dictatorial terror, Nazi society, and the Holocaust. Among these are the following: Did most Germans support or oppose Hitler and the Nazi regime? What aspects of Nazi society did German people find most to their liking? How much and what forms of terror did they experience? Did Jews and non-Jews have experiences with Nazi terror that were similar? Did both Jews and non-Jews live in constant fear of denunciation and arrest? How widespread and popular was anti-Semitism, how was it manifested, and to what extent did it abate or grow worse over time?2
The questions we address and the evidence we present are of vital importance, for our study is the first to ask systematically a large cross section of the German population, both Jewish and non-Jewish, about their everyday lives in Nazi Germany and about their brushes with Nazi terror, as well as their knowledge about the mass murder of the Jews. Furthermore, we believe that our study is unique in another way: it has been conducted in an international and cross-disciplinary fashion, combining the expertise of an American specialist in the history of modern German and Nazi society with that of a German specialist in public opinion and sociological research. Ever since we wrote the first grant proposal in 1991 seeking the funds necessary to begin our research,3 we have worked closely together on every stage of the project, sometimes in Germany, sometimes in the United States, and sometimes in other countries as well.
During the time we have worked on this project, a new conception of the Nazi dictatorship has been developing in the international scholarly community to which our evidence lends powerful support. If this new understanding of how Nazi society functioned gains wider acceptance, which we believe it should, it will have policy import as well as scholarly significance.
Until recently, scholarship on Nazi society in particular and twentieth-century dictatorial societies in general was heavily influenced by the theorists of the “totalitarian school” that emerged during the early years of the Cold War in the 1950s. Basing their argumentation more on logic and anecdote than on systematic empirical evidence, leading exponents of this school like the political philosopher Hannah Arendt and the political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski viewed the dictatorial regimes and not the people who lived under them to be the problem and construed terror and coercion to be the essential features of Nazi, Soviet, and other dictatorial societies.4 Many scholars followed their lead and wrote historical accounts emphasizing the supposed omnipotence of secret police agencies like the Nazi Gestapo and the Soviet KGB and the fear that allegedly blanketed the entire populations of these “totalitarian” societies.5 Eventually a paradigm developed based on logic that seemed inescapable.
Although this paradigm remains influential among policymakers and the lay public, it no longer reigns supreme in the scholarly community. Because of the pioneering efforts of a number of historians from several countries who have systematically worked through previously neglected or unavailable archival materials (e.g., Gestapo and police case files, court and party records, mood and morale reports, and other documentary evidence), a fundamentally new view of the Nazi dictatorship is emerging that stresses complicity and consent more than coercion and compulsion.6 We are now beginning to understand, for example, that the Gestapo was far more limited in its resources and powers than was once thought, and that to be effective it had to concentrate on policing targeted enemies like Jews and communists while leaving most of the German population considerable latitude to go about their private lives. They were able to do this because Hitler and his ideology had widespread support from the German population.
This is not to argue that the Nazi regime was not oppressive. Neither is it to argue that the German citizenry always agreed with the Nazi regime’s most abhorrent policies and acts, above all with the wholesale slaughter of European Jewry. Still, the interview and survey evidence that our study has been built on adds to and buttresses the new view of Nazi society that archival investigation in the past decade or so has begun to create. As Ian Kershaw concludes on the final page of his recent biography of Adolf Hitler, “The previously unprobed depths of inhumanity probed by the Nazi regime could draw upon wide-ranging complicity at all levels of society.”7 Shocking as it may seem, dictatorships can be quite popular.8
Thus, by simply asking the German people themselves in an organized and social-scientific way about their experiences and their level of understanding and knowledge about the mundane as well as historic events that they lived through personally, we are able to demonstrate that the Third Reich was not a living hell for all who lived in it, as many scholars have argued in the past. Even though it brought enormous pain, suffering, and death to many—especially if they were Jewish—it had the strong support of millions of common German citizens for most of its existence, and most Germans did not have to be compelled to remain loyal to Hitler and his regime. Far from living in a state of constant fear and discontent, most Germans led happy and even normal lives in Nazi Germany. As one man we interviewed for this book told us in the comfort of his home in Michigan in May 2001, “To us, it was the most exciting time of our lives. . . . You see, when the Nazis came to power, I was five years old. I grew up in this. So it was a normal way of life for me.”9
In some ways, therefore, there were two Nazi societies, one for most Germans and another for Jews and a relatively limited number of others who either opposed the Nazi regime on ideological or moral grounds or belonged to minority groups that the Nazis acted against ruthlessly.10 One of the great tragedies in the history of modern German society is that great numbers of those who lived in that other Nazi society had been proud, patriotic Germans who were consequently dumbfounded when Hitler and the Nazi regime turned them into outcasts. In the words of another man who had also emigrated to America after the war but happened to be Jewish, “It came to us German Jews as a tremendous shock that this anti-Semitic policy was introduced. It took us a long time to grasp this new direction. It was unthinkable, because we were so utterly German—more German than some of the Germans themselves.”11
The greatest tragedy of all was the Holocaust, which ultimately destroyed the lives of millions of Jews across the continent of Europe. This unspeakable crime against humanity could not have been possible without the indifference and complicity of a large part of the German population. That few Germans protested meaningfully against the Holocaust has been well documented.12 Still, the extent to which the German population shared Hitler’s hatred of the Jews and avidly supported his anti-Semitic measures remains a hotly contested issue.13 Our evidence, based especially on the testimony of the Jewish participants in our surveys and interviews, will qualify, though not completely contradict, the views of scholars like Daniel Jonah Goldhagen who allege that anti-Semitic views were widely shared among the mainstream German population.
Of equal and perhaps even greater significance for our study, however, is the question of whether the German population was aware of the mass murder of the Jews of Europe while it was being carried out. Certainly the Nazis took pains to keep this a secret both from the German population and the world in general. Otherwise, powerful opposition might have mounted from many quarters to bring their murderous policy to a halt: more Jews might have gone into hiding or might have refused to go to the deportation trains; non-Jews in Germany and outside of Germany might have gathered in open protest or might have swelled the ranks of the limited resistance movements; more pressure might have been placed on Allied governments to bomb the concentration camps; and so on.
But how successful were the Nazis in keeping the Holocaust a secret? Certainly they were successful at least in keeping up the pretense among the German population that the Holocaust was a secret both during the war and for decades after it was over. At Nuremberg and in subsequent war crimes trials and investigations, large numbers of Nazis leaders and functionaries, from Albert Speer to garden-variety Gestapo officers, avoided death sentences and often any punishment at all because it could not be proven that they had known about the mass murder that they had helped carry out.14 For many years after the war, the words “we didn’t know about it” became a national German refrain.
Now the immediate danger of being punished for Nazi crimes has diminished and Germany and its population have long since been welcomed back into the family of civilized nations. Most Germans who lived through the Third Reich have either died or are nearing the end of their lives. Consequently far more people are willing to say what they really knew back then about the Holocaust. Maybe they would have done this sooner had they been asked under the right circumstances. Now at last we have asked them, and hence the title of this book of oral history about the World War II generation in Germany is What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany.
Finding out what the non-Jewish and Jewish populations of Nazi Germany knew and experienced has not been an easy task, either intellectually or emotionally. Just talking with our interviewees has been traumatic, since many of them have related very painful stories. But, precisely because the issues involved are so sensitive, it was of crucial importance for us to conduct the research for this book in a rigorous fashion. Completing this project has taken us more than a decade.
If the main purpose of our book had been readability, it would have been published several years ago. Rather, it is the product of a truly massive research effort combining oral history and systematic survey techniques to provide convincing evidence that can help answer some of the most central questions about Nazi society.
When we began our research in 1993, we knew what kinds of questions we wanted to ask, but we did not know if people would be willing to answer them. In the end, however, the response we received from both Jews and non-Jews was truly gratifying. We received a positive response rate of nearly 50 percent in the written surveys, and a large proportion of the people we surveyed indicated that they would be willing to speak with us at length in subsequent face-to-face interviews about their views and experiences. By the time we had more or less completed our surveys and interviews in 2001, more than three thousand people had answered our written surveys and we had conducted in-depth interviews with nearly two hundred. We have spent the past three years analyzing the survey results, editing the interviews, and writing the book.
To ensure that the views and experiences of the people we surveyed and interviewed reflect those of the majority of Jews and non-Jews who had lived in Nazi Germany, we decided to conduct our surveys with large and representative samples of the populations of several different German cities and to conduct two additional surveys with separate groups of German Jewish Holocaust survivors. The first survey we conducted was in the city of Cologne in the spring and summer of 1993.
Following standard survey research design, we began our surveying effort with a pilot study. We drew up a sample questionnaire and sent it to about three hundred Cologne residents born in or before 1928 who were randomly selected from a list of people provided to us by the Cologne Statistical Bureau. Although people born in 1928, who are the youngest people we contacted, were teenagers when the Third Reich ended in 1945, which some might consider too young to know or experience very much, they represent a small fraction of the people we surveyed. Most of the people we surveyed in the pretest and in the subsequent larger surveys had already reached adulthood during the years of the Third Reich. In the larger surveys we conducted, the median birth year of the people we surveyed was between 1920 and 1922, depending on the city.
After we concluded our pilot survey, we analyzed the results carefully and made changes in the questionnaire to promote clarity. A year later, in the fall of 1994, we mounted the first of our major survey efforts with over three thousand randomly selected residents of the cities of Cologne and Krefeld. We chose these cities because they were near our base of operations at the time, at the University of Cologne, and because one of us (Johnson) was also working on a related project dealing with the police and court records of those and other Rhineland communities in the Third Reich.15 The response rate we received in these surveys mirrored that of the pilot study survey, although it was slightly lower (closer to 50 percent than 60 percent) partially because we decided to send only two reminders to those who had not answered the survey, instead of three (which would have been prohibitively expensive).
We were satisfied with the response to our Cologne and Krefeld surveys, but we still had two important concerns. First, few of the respondents were Jewish, since there are few Jews living in any German city. Second, even though about half of the people who answered the Cologne and Krefeld surveys had lived in other communities during the Third Reich and thus had only moved to Cologne or Krefeld after 1945, we feared that the results we received might not be representative enough of other German communities. Consequently, in the years following our Cologne and Krefeld surveys, we took steps to remedy these potential problems by conducting two subsequent surveys with large random samples of the populations of Dresden (1995) and Berlin (1999), and with two additional surveys specifically targeted to German Jewish survivors.
The survey results from Dresden and Berlin turned out to be very similar to those of Cologne and Krefeld, which added measurably to our ability to generalize our findings. They also boost our confidence in our findings for three reasons. One is that the residents of Dresden and Berlin are predominantly Protestant, whereas those of Cologne and Krefeld are largely Catholic. Another is that Dresden and Berlin lie in the east of Germany geographically, Cologne and Krefeld in the west. The final reason is that Hitler and his Nazi Party received far lower voter support in Weimar elections from the Catholic-dominated cities of Cologne and Krefeld than from the Protestant-leaning cities like Dresden.
The two surveys that we administered to Jewish survivors took place in 1995 and 1996. Although we employed a questionnaire that was almost identical to that used in the German cities, it was written in English instead of German because most survivors have lived for the past fifty years in the United States, Great Britain, Israel, or some other non–German speaking country. The first of the two surveys, the longer one, was mailed with the gracious help of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum research staff, which wrote a letter endorsing our study for inclusion with the survey and safeguards our list of Jewish survivors. The second and smaller survivor study was conducted with the surviving Jewish population of the city of Krefeld. The addresses of the Krefeld survivors were provided to us by one of the survivors.
After we had completed our written survey, we could feel that we had truly questioned a rather representative sample of Jews and non-Jews who had lived in the Third Reich. The only significant caveat is that they represent a somewhat younger population than had been the average in Germany between 1933 and 1945. Still, most of the people we surveyed had reached adulthood before the Third Reich ended, and, because our sample is so large, it is possible to control for the possible distortions caused by this age factor.
The Jewish survivors and the non-Jewish Germans we canvassed included men and women from all corners of Germany and from all walks of life, people who had lived in nearly every large German city during the Third Reich as well as others from numerous small towns and medium-size cities. Their educational, socioeconomic, and religious backgrounds reflect both the Jewish and non-Jewish populations who experienced Nazism firsthand. Finally, they are varied in their political backgrounds and present affiliations, not dissimilar to the way they and their families had been in the Third Reich.
The nearly two hundred people we interviewed at length also originated from all over Germany and came from all types of educational, socioeconomic, religious, and political backgrounds. Except for a handful, all of them had taken our written surveys. The interviews we conducted with them were carried out over the entire span of our survey effort. After we completed our original pretest of the written survey in Cologne in 1993, we selected twenty of the respondents for subsequent face-to-face interviews. We conducted the balance of the non-Jewish interviews between 1995 and 2001, after we completed our main surveys in the relevant cities. Most of the Jewish survivor interviews were conducted in the United States, especially in the New York/New Jersey area in the summer of 1995. We also conducted several interviews in other localities in the United States, Germany, and other countries; a research assistant even conducted an interview in Chile in 2002.
As with our written surveys, we took pains in our interviews to ensure that the answers we received were reliable and valid. We were especially mindful of the so-called interviewer effect, in which the responses of the interviewees are influenced by the personality and values of the interviewer. To control for this, we conducted only a third of the interviews ourselves and trained a few others from different personal and disciplinary backgrounds to conduct the rest. The largest number of interviews were conducted by four people, two women and two men. The two women, Ana Perez Belmonte and Christiane Wever, were advanced history students at the University of Cologne who had worked for several years as our research assistants and were knowledgeable about the historical issues involved. The two men, Christian Knopf and Michael Riesenkönig, were graduate students in psychology at Cologne but had not worked on our project previously and knew somewhat less than the two women about the history of the Third Reich and the Holocaust.* In our view, whatever disadvantages their lack of advanced historical training might have caused were offset by their relative independence from us and by the fresh insights they had as trained psychologists. Furthermore, in the course of their graduate training, both of them had already gained considerable experience in conducting interviews related to other issues.
At the beginning of each interview we told the interviewee that our questions would focus on three main issues. First we asked them to describe their everyday lives in the Third Reich; second, we asked them to discuss any specific experiences they or people known to them had with Nazi terror; third, we asked them to tell us about any experiences they might have had during the Holocaust and what they had come to know, if anything, before the end of the war about the mass murder of Jews.
The interviews were all recorded on audiotape. The shortest interviews lasted for about an hour. The longer ones lasted for many hours; some stretched over a few days. We always tried to give the interviewees a choice of possible interview venues. Locations included university office buildings, restaurants, and even hotel rooms and suites. Most invited us to their homes. Although the interviews always centered on the questions enumerated above, they proceeded in a conversational manner and sometimes moved in quite unexpected directions. In the end, therefore, the interviewees were given the chance to tell us the stories that they wanted to tell us about their lives, although our questions encouraged them to concentrate on the issues of everyday life, terror, and mass murder.
Unfortunately we can publish only a fraction of the interviews we conducted, and each interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. We elected to change the names of all of the interviewees to safeguard their anonymity, even though some of them might have preferred to have their real names published. Nevertheless, the forty interviews we have selected for this volume (twenty with Jews and twenty with non-Jews) are, we believe, reasonably representative of the entire body of interviews that we conducted originally. They reflect the range of opinions and experiences that we encountered in our written surveys with thousands of people.
The book is divided into four parts, each subdivided into several chapters, followed by a brief conclusion chapter summarizing our major findings and arguments. Parts 1-2 contain the forty interview narratives, with one part each for Jews and non-Jews. Parts 3-4 analyze the Jewish and non-Jewish questionnaires and draw on the interview material for supportive illustrations. Most of these references pertain to the forty interviews included here, but we also quote some statements made by people whose interviews we did not publish. Relatively more of these are found in the chapters in Part 4 dealing with the non-Jewish population, because we interviewed more non-Jews than Jews, and we didn’t want to lose their voices entirely. Additionally, in the latter group, many of these interviews also contain important commentary and evidence that pertains to our analysis.
Although the focus throughout the book is on average people, their experiences and observations tell us much about an extraordinary period in human history. Many of them, especially Germans who were not Jewish, lived mundane, even quite normal lives under the Nazi dictatorship. But many became involved or participated in truly horrifying events.
Among the Jews we interviewed are several who managed to escape the Holocaust by emigrating during the 1930s to such countries as the United States, Great Britain, and China, and several who emigrated to countries in western and eastern Europe that eventually fell under Nazi occupation and ended up deporting their Jews to ghettos and concentration camps. Of the Jews we interviewed who did not leave Germany before the war began, nearly all eventually wound up in concentration camps, even though a few tried to avoid this by going into hiding once it became clear that deportation to the east was usually tantamount to a death sentence. One woman survived by jumping off a train taking her and other Jews to Auschwitz and another woman survived by working in a massage parlor run by an SS man in Berlin. More typically, however, the deported Jews who survived somehow eluded selection to the gas chambers and endured years of backbreaking forced labor, chronic malnutrition, widespread disease, and barbaric mistreatment.
Compared with these experiences, those of the non-Jewish Germans we interviewed and surveyed were usually rather mild. Although most of them violated the ubiquitous laws of the Third Reich at one point or another by listening to foreign radio broadcasts, telling jokes critical of Hitler and other Nazi leaders, spreading news about the mass murder of Jews, or involving themselves in other kinds of outlawed activities, few of them were caught or punished and most tell us that they did not fear being arrested. Instead of living their lives in fear and dread, most tell us that they in fact supported Hitler and many aspects of Nazi ideology. Still, a significant minority abhorred the Nazi regime and a handful took part in underground resistance activity.
Among the people we interviewed, most had not been members of or functionaries in the Nazi Party. But some were, and others were the children of such people. Many, however, had belonged to the Hitler Youth or other party organizations, and several had been soldiers during the war or the wives and daughters of soldiers. A few were policemen, concentration camp guards, and members of army units that slaughtered Jews; others had special experiences during the Holocaust.
As will become evident in the pages of this book, large numbers of Jews and non-Jews in Nazi Germany eventually came to know quite a lot about the Holocaust during the course of World War II. Since they were the primary victims of it, Jews generally tried harder to find out about it and usually did, but not always before they were deported to the places where it was being carried out. Since people of their background were the prime perpetrators of it, non-Jews did not necessarily seek out news about the mass murder. Nevertheless, after Auschwitz began to gas its first Jewish victims in mid-1942, it became ever harder for them to remain uninformed as news of it came from so many quarters. Some witnessed it happening or even participated directly in it, and, not infrequently, described it to others. Some heard about it second or third hand—from soldiers on leave from the eastern front, foreign news broadcasts, well-informed friends, relatives, and clergymen, and occasionally Gestapo officers and Nazi Party officials. Sometimes the news reached them soon after the murders commenced in 1941 and 1942. Other times it came to them late in the war after most of the Jews had been killed. Sometimes it was passed along in the form of rumors that were whispered under people’s breath. Other times it was discussed openly with specific information provided about the concentration camps and the mass shootings and gassings. Not everyone came to know, but a great many did. If people wanted to know, very often they could find out.
*Four other people should also be recognized here as they carried out many of the interviews in Dresden and Berlin. They also had extensive training in either history or the social sciences. The are Falk Schützenmeister, Iris Hildebrandt, Katja Bögner and Ute Strewe.