Although Jews did not predominate among those arrested, beaten, or sent to concentration camps in the beginning years of the new regime, their humiliation and exclusion from German society began almost immediately and worsened as time wore on. Not all of the measures the Nazi state took against the Jews were immediately visible to the entire German population, but many of them were carried out in full view of the public and showed clearly the kind of status the Jewish population was going to have during the Third Reich. Furthermore, the propaganda found in the daily newspapers and public speeches by Nazi politicians made it unmistakably clear that the Jews were to be regarded as Germany’s true enemies.
Anti-Jewish measures that were widely visible to the public began with a one-day boycott of Jewish-owned stores on April 1, 1933, continued throughout the 1930s, especially with the passing of the Nuremberg Laws, and culminated in the “night of broken glass” (Kristallnacht) in November 1938. That nationwide pogrom marked a turning point in Jewish persecution as Jewish shops, facilities, and people were for the first time, aside from the boycotts, the targets of widespread, barbaric violence.
Although Kristallnacht was a one-time event, it marked an important threshold, and the pace of anti-Semitic measures accelerated. While regulations restricting Jews’ freedom and increasing their social isolation proceeded apace in the following years, perhaps the most important measure to exclude the Jews from German social life came in September 1941. From that time onward, Jews aged six and older had to wear a yellow Star of David placed visibly on the outside of their clothing whenever they went out in public. Those who failed to comply were punished.
Already in the 1930s, non-Jewish Germans were discouraged from associating with Jews and could be punished if they did.1 Now they could even be sent to a concentration camp, and the penalties for not complying became stiffer. Although these measures increased the social isolation of the Jewish population, many Germans continued their contacts with Jewish friends and colleagues.2 With the introduction of the “Jewish star,” many people were astonished to see how many Jews were still living in Germany. “This quarter— Lindenstrasse–Richard Wagner St.–Engelbert St.,” said one Cologne respondent, “was a purely Jewish quarter. The poor devils had to wear the Star of David. One saw for the first time how many there were, [people] whom I as a child would have never seen.”3 Another, who lived in Berlin at the time, said, “When the Jews were forced to wear the yellow star, only then did it occur to us at all how many there were.”4
The reactions of the German population to the introduction of the Jewish star were varied. Many Germans, as documented in our interviews as well as numerous memoirs written by Jews, were ashamed of the measure and displayed solidarity and empathy with the Jews. The diary of the Dresden professor Victor Klemperer, for example, includes detailed descriptions of how some people he hadn’t known previously turned to him offering words of consolation and how others offered their seats in streetcars to him. His experience was far from uncommon, since many Jews who lived in Berlin and elsewhere at the time made similar reports.5
Other Germans, however, were less willing to associate with Jews. For example, one of the Krefeld interviewees who said that he had seen people wearing the Jewish star on several occasions explained, “I didn’t know them. We knew they were Jews. However, we weren’t allowed to speak to them. We weren’t allowed to have any ties to them.”6 But if many Germans showed restraint and avoided contact with the star-wearing Jews, they did not always do this because they were anti-Semites. Indeed, in the interviews we conducted, negative reactions to the introduction of the Jewish star were common.7
What we heard in these interviews corresponds closely with contemporary reports by foreign newspaper correspondents, autobiographies, and other sources compiled by David Bankier in his book The Germans and the Final Solution.8 They also correspond with the findings of a representative survey of the German population conducted in 1949 by the Allensbach Institute in which the respondents were asked whether they had seen the Jewish star and how they had responded to the requirement to wear it. In a subsequent, in-depth analysis that we conducted of the original Allensbach data, we found that older people disapproved of the star much more than younger people, and that Catholics and women were more opposed to the measure than Protestants and men, as were people from urban than rural areas and midsize towns.9 It also made a difference if the respondents had previously maintained friendly contacts with Jews. In general, therefore, the pattern we found in this regard closely resembles that of Nazi supporters described in chapter 11. Those groups who were least supportive of National Socialism were least positively disposed to the introduction of the Jewish star.
The extent to which non-Jewish Germans sustained their initial disapproval of the star, however, is uncertain. In his diary, for example, Klemperer noted that the initial acts of solidarity with Jews over this measure dwindled as indifference for the measure grew and occasionally included hatred toward Jews, especially on the part of children and young people.10 Remarks made in our interviews suggest that at least some of those who were at first bothered by this measure ultimately came to terms with the situation in the long run. “For a couple of days, one swallowed hard,” as a respondent put it, and then one accepted it. After all, “there wasn’t any changing it.”11
The introduction of the Jewish star was the prelude to the deportation and murder of Germany’s Jews. A month after it was introduced, Jewish emigration was prohibited and the deportations to the east began. If the introduction of the star made clear to Germans how many Jews were still in the Reich, this labeling also helped make Germans aware of their disappearance. The stars became “thinner and thinner,” said one respondent, meaning that fewer and fewer Jews appeared in the streets. Another stressed the sudden appearance and then disappearance of the stars in the cityscape: “When the Jews at some point in the war were forced to wear their Stars of David, one noticed how many Jews were in Germany and how much [they] . . . were restricted in their way of life, and then how they grew fewer in number.”12
When the deportations to the east began in October 1941, Jews were usually informed of the date of their transports in advance, by either the local Jewish community or the Gestapo. Sometimes even the transport destinations were announced. In November 1941, for example, Cologne Jews selected for deportation were handed a leaflet by the local Jewish community leadership telling them that another transport was to leave on December 8 heading for Minsk. They were also told how to prepare for their “journey,” and what they could bring with them. As part of the deception, people who were elderly, single, and infirm were directed to report to the welfare department of the Jewish community so that they could be placed in a home for the elderly.13
In the early deportations, similar information was also provided in other cities. Thus, given the circumstances, it is no wonder that Jews as well as non-Jews who learned about these deportations did not necessarily perceive them to be transports leading to death. The conditions under which Jews headed for the trains, therefore, appeared rather peaceful at first.14 Those selected for deportation usually walked or took streetcars to the collecting points or the train stations where the transports to the east originated. Sometimes they did so without police or Gestapo escort. Once they had arrived at the train station, they sometimes boarded normal passenger cars. Other times they were loaded onto freight or cattle cars. For smaller transports that left Berlin for the Theresienstadt ghetto, railway cars were attached to normal trains bound for Prague.15
The situation changed, however, once Jews gained awareness of the true intent of the transports. Soon the Gestapo started showing up unannounced at people’s homes and forcing them to the deportation trains. In Berlin, the city with the largest Jewish population, forcible deportations were the rule from October 1942 onward.16 Occasionally this led to spectacular scenes with streets being cordoned off, houses combed by the Gestapo, SS, and regular police, and large numbers of Jews being rounded up, loaded onto trucks, and taken to the collection points.
The impressions among our interviewees who witnessed the deportations were mixed. Those who witnessed the early deportations often had been told in advance about them by the deportees or had seen people wearing Jewish stars heading for the collection points. One Krefeld interviewee, for example, realized one morning on the way to work that a group of women and children, all marked by the Jewish star and carrying baggage, was heading to the train station.17 Others, like an interviewee from Berlin, saw Jews who were guarded by people in uniform “being taken out of buildings” and then being “loaded on a truck, and driven off.”18
A native of Cologne who reported something similar had only vague ideas at the time of what was happening to Jews:
A big bus drove up. It was right in the inner city, on the Ring [road]. The [Jews] came out with bag and baggage, with suitcases, and other belongings and [got] in the bus. I didn’t hear them scream or cry. Their faces were sad . . . I just looked and was very astonished. I was somehow depressed. The entire building was emptied. I believe that the SA or something like that was standing there. Then they were driven off, driven away. And we didn’t even know where they were going. We thought to a [concentration] camp.19
In other cases, the use of force was highly visible, especially when entire streets were blocked and searched. A Berlin respondent, Ruth Hildebrand, whose interview is also in this book, reports:
I also saw the Jews being picked up. Nobody was allowed to go out into the streets as they were all cordoned off from one corner to the next, and there were trucks waiting there [to take the Jews away]. Nobody dared to say anything. We were all standing out on the balcony; that is, all of us women, since our men were not there.20
In every city, the starting point on the road to death was the train station. Whenever it was possible, officials tried to shield the transports from public view by organizing them in the early morning hours or later in the evening, when fewer people were in the streets. But at train stations with large numbers of people coming and going, both in the morning as well as in the evening, it often was impossible to keep them hidden from the public. As a result, many people witnessed what took place. But they did not necessarily know at the time that the transports were to lead to the imminent annihilation of the Jews. To some, they appeared almost “normal.” As one person reported, for example, Jews were still carrying suitcases and backpacks:
I experienced that once here at the train station in Krefeld, in ’42, in the autumn. It was a coincidence. There was a train [full of] Jews. It was outside the main hall, somewhat in front of the train station. I saw it at a distance of twenty to thirty meters, but one couldn’t go over there. The area was cordoned off. I thought to myself, “Aha, they are being forced to leave.”21
The events did not strike this interviewee as especially dire: “They had baggage, backpacks, and so on. . . [There was] no screaming, nothing. [It was] as if they had to take a trip. But one did have the impression that they had to go.” But, for another Krefeld interviewee, the situation appeared far more ominous, especially since the baggage that Jews were carrying was left behind:
My mother saw them transported from the freight station. The baggage that individuals were allowed to carry was loaded separately in a freight car. When the train pulled out, the freight car stayed there. It didn’t go with them. [My mother] was shocked. It was awful. If the baggage stayed there, one could imagine [that something bad was going to happen to them].. . . Whether they would come back or be murdered, one didn’t know at the time.22
As the deportations continued, suspicions about the fate of the deported Jews mounted. Since few people heard anything from them after they had been taken away and ever more information about the murder of Jews in the east filtered back into Germany, more and more Jews began evading the transports and fled underground. Although Jews went underground throughout Germany, the greatest number of Jews who went “illegal” was in Berlin, where it is estimated that five thousand Jews lived in hiding during the war. Most of them went underground at the time of the “factory action” in early 1943, when all Jews remaining in Germany and working in industry were to be arrested in one sweep. Some four thousand of the eleven thousand potential victims in Berlin managed to elude the sweep.23 Although it had been prepared in great secrecy, information about it leaked out, and many Jews went underground after being warned by people working in offices involved in the action or by being otherwise informed. Others fled once they noticed the operation unfolding.
Until recently, there was little systematic research about the experiences of the Jews who fled into hiding or the help they received in the process, which was often crucial for their survival.24 For example, the Jews who went into hiding needed to find accommodations. And, because they always had to worry about being discovered, they often had to move repeatedly from one hideout to another. Also they had to find food, and, at a time when foodstuffs were rationed, this was only possible with ration cards. Thus Jews who had gone underground often had to rely on non-Jews who would offer them their own precious cards or would purchase foodstuffs on their behalf.
One of the people whose interview we have included in this volume, Stefan Reuter, met a Jewish woman who later became his wife after she went underground in February 1942. She had done this after receiving a message from the police ordering her to appear with her suitcase at a certain police station at a given time. Like Reuter, she was a communist and was involved in political activities against the regime. Most, but not all, of the help she received over the ensuing three years of the war, which enabled her to survive, came from communists. Yet one of the persons who put her up for a while turned out to be an opera singer who was also a member of the Nazi Party.
The number of assistants who were needed to enable a Jew to survive underground is hard to say. Some sources suggest a rather high figure. Some Jews who survived in hiding have spoken of between fifteen and twenty helpers, but that is not necessarily the upper limit. Herbert A. Strauss, later the founder of Berlin’s Center for Research into Anti-Semitism, once tried to put together a detailed list of all the people, Jewish and non-Jewish, who helped him survive in hiding. For a period of seven months, he came up with over fifty people. For all of Germany, some estimates put the number of helpers in the tens of thousands.25
The circle of helpers usually overlapped, as a number of small groups of people would time and again provide shelter for Jews in hiding. Communists, who could rely on their connections from their earlier political work, and people from church communities usually occupied key positions in the networks supporting Jews. Hence, in light of the overlapping circles of helpers, it is almost impossible to estimate the number of helpers based on the number of surviving Jews.
Nevertheless, we know from our Berlin survey that many Germans helped Jews try to escape the Holocaust, for 15 percent of the survey respondents from that city told us that they had met people, either during or after the war, who helped Jews in hiding during the war years. Although most Jews who went underground did not survive in the end, many did. In Berlin alone, about fourteen hundred of the estimated five thousand Jews who went underground were still alive when the war ended. For the entire Reich, an estimated ten to fifteen thousand Jews went underground, of whom between three and five thousand survived.26
Most Jews who did not emigrate but continued to live in Germany during the war years, however, did not go into hiding and did not survive. Those who did survive often had the support of non-Jewish helpers among the German population who showed compassion for the Jews, often at considerable personal risk. As mentioned in chapter 8, over 60 percent of the Jews we surveyed who remained in Germany during the war years and survived the Holocaust had received what they construed to be significant help and support from the non-Jewish population.
From the surveys we conducted, we know that a large number of people in Germany came to know about Nazi crimes against humanity such as the Gestapo’s use of torture during interrogations and the killing of handicapped and mentally ill persons in the Nazi euthanasia program.27 But how many Germans came to know about the most egregious Nazi crime of all, the murder of the European Jews?
Since the murder of the physically disabled and mentally ill took place on German soil, it was more likely that news of the killing would spread among the German public. But this cannot be said about the murder of Jews. The conditions surrounding this crime were different. Most significantly, the murder of Jews took place in occupied territory in the east, where the spread of information could be better controlled. Those first affected by this campaign of mass murder were Polish and Russian Jews. In time, Jews from other occupied countries—Belgium, France, Serbia, Hungary, and so on—were also sent to their death in occupied Poland.
Jews were massacred as early as 1939, both during and after the invasion of Poland. Yet the mass murder operations at this point in the war were not fully systematic. The systematic destruction started in 1941 with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. As the German troops moved eastward, they were followed by four Einsatzgruppen—special task forces made up of personnel from the Gestapo, SD, Waffen-SS, and the Order Police—who carried out mass shootings of eastern European Jews. Within months after the launching of the Russian campaign, German Jews were drawn into the process of destruction as well. The first transport of Jews from the Reich to the east took place in October 1941. At almost the same time, daily transports of up to a thousand people began heading to the Litzmannstadt ghetto (Lodz). A second wave of deportations to Riga, Kovno, and Minsk followed a bit later. Starting in mid-July 1942, transports of German Jews to Auschwitz got under way.
In the early phase of the murder of the Jews, when the Einsatzgruppen were conducting mass shootings in open fields and forests, the German army sometimes assisted by setting up cordons or providing additional shooters. Under these circumstances, German soldiers, just like local Polish and Soviet citizens, often saw what happened and thus represented a potential source of information about the killing. This changed in the course of 1942, as the murder was increasingly confined to the extermination camps, where the personnel were sworn to secrecy under threat of death.
Although the questions of how many people knew about the murder of Jews and how they came to know it have often been raised, they have never been answered sufficiently. Our survey and oral history evidence offer detailed information about the answers to these questions for the first time.
In our written surveys we sought to determine not only if the German population came to know about the mass murder of Jews during the war years, but also how and when they received their information. In the face-to-face interviews we conducted with a large sample of the written survey respondents, we asked people to elaborate on the answers they had given in the written surveys. Several examples of the detailed descriptions many gave about how and when they learned of the mass murder are provided in this book, especially in Chapters 6–7.
In the first question we asked about the issue of mass murder in our mail surveys in Cologne, Krefeld, and Dresden, we asked the respondents to tell us if they had already become aware about the “mass murder of the Jews before the end of the war.” Depending on the nature and believability of the information they received, the respondents would have different levels of awareness about the mass murder, and consequently we did not simply ask them if they had been “aware” of the mass murder. Rather, we asked them if they had either “suspected” that it was taking place, “heard” that it was taking place, “known” that it was taking place, or not been aware of it at all.
In the subsequent Berlin survey, which we conducted after the Cologne, Krefeld, and Dresden surveys, we refined this question and asked it in a slightly different fashion. Here we did not ask the respondents simply if they had been aware or not about the “mass murder of the Jews”rather, we asked them two separate questions that differentiated between their having become aware or not about two different specific types of mass murder, namely mass murder in concentration camps and mass shootings. Furthermore, in the Berlin survey we did not ask them if they had “suspected, heard, or known” about these different types of mass murder. Instead, we asked them to specify the exact year and month when they “had heard or become aware of” the mass murder or to answer that they “didn’t know anymore” or that they had “first become aware after the end of the war.”
Table 13.1 Level of Knowledge of the Mass Murder of Jews (Prior to the End of the War) among German Respondents by City
| Cologne (%) | Krefeld (%) | Dresden (%) | Berlin (%) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Suspected | 11 | 10 | 13 | * |
| Heard or Knew About | 27 | 27 | 29 | 28 |
| Didn’t Know About | 62 | 63 | 58 | 72 |
| N of cases | 802 | 362 | 602 | 923 |
*Not asked in Berlin Survey.
Independently of how and where we asked the question about the respondents’ awareness of the mass murder, however, we received answers that were remarkably consistent among the four cities. They show that information about the mass murder of Jews was indeed widespread throughout Germany. Thus, as one observes in Table13.1, between 27 percent and 29 percent in each of the four cities had received information about the mass murder before the end of the war and many others had “suspected” that it had been taking place. Stated another way, an average of about 60 percent of the respondents said that they had “not been aware” of the mass murder before the war’s end.
Although these numbers can only be seen as general estimates,28. our confidence in them is bolstered by the fact that they jibe with both a subsequent nationwide telephone survey that we conducted in 2000 and with the results of five other national surveys conducted in the past by the Allensbach Institute and other German research institutes that generally escaped scholarly notice in the past.29. These five other surveys indicated that about one-third of the German population knew in some form or another about the mass murder.30. As will be shown later, the somewhat lower percentages we observed in our surveys result primarily from slight differences in the composition of the age-groups that were surveyed in our own and these other surveys.
Table 13.2 Percentage of Respondents Who Knew or Heard About the Mass Murder of Jews (Prior to the End of the War) by City and Social Characteristics
| Cologne (%) | Krefeld (%) | Dresden (%) | Berlin (%) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gender | ||||
| Male | 28(312) | 29(146) | 34(235) | 27(496) |
| Female | 27(483) | 26(213) | 26(355) | 30(394) |
| Year of birth | ||||
| 1910 or earlier | 43(84) | 17(35) | 32(69) | 42(38) |
| 1911—16 | 36(142) | 45(53) | 29(106) | 26(112) |
| 1917—22 | 30(222) | 25(132) | 31(163) | 27(276) |
| 1923—28 | 18(343) | 25(137) | 28(248) | 29(473) |
| Education* | ||||
| Low | 27(461) | 24(212) | 31(163) | 28(485) |
| Medium | 31(166) | 34(58) | 27(162) | 24(206) |
| High | 24(95) | 22(45) | 22(27) | 30(94) |
| University | 26(76) | 34(44) | 30(79) | 41(121) |
| Religion | ||||
| Catholic | 29(479) | 31(217) | 31(55) | 31(97) |
| Protestant | 23(247) | 22(116) | 27(480) | 28(662) |
*Low = Volksschule; Medium = Realschule; High=Gymnasium.
Note: N of cases in parentheses.
If the best estimate is that one-third of the entire population surveyed had at least heard something about the mass murder before the end of the war, what can be said about various subgroups of the survey respondents? One might expect, for example, that men found out something about the Holocaust more often than women because so many of them served in the German army or possibly because they were more interested in political matters. One might also expect older people to have been more aware than younger people, who did not yet have such extended social networks.
As can be seen in Table13.2, men were only marginally more likely to have heard or known about the mass murder than women. However, age did account for some greater differences in most of the cities we surveyed.
Among those surveyed in Cologne, the knowledge of the mass murder of Jews more or less steadily increased according to the age of the respondent, until it reached a high of 43 percent among those born in or before 1910. In Krefeld, Dresden, and Berlin, older respondents were also usually better informed about the mass murder than younger respondents, but the relationship between the awareness of the mass murder and age was not completely linear, as it was in Cologne. Thus, in Berlin, only the oldest age-group (those born before 1910) was appreciably more aware than the younger age-groups, and the differences between the age-groups in Dresden were hardly noticeable.
Whatever accounts for these variations among the four cities—whether the different samples we used or other possible methodological reasons—it seems sensible for the purpose of further analysis to consider the four cities as a whole so as to reduce the effect of the fluctuations among the four cities we surveyed. To this end, we added up the responses from these four surveys and supplemented them with responses from a pilot study survey we had conducted in Cologne in 1993. The resulting large number of cases has the advantage of making it possible to differentiate between those born in or before 1904 and those born between 1905 and 1910.
The results provided in Table13.3 show a marked correlation between the age of the respondents and the level of awareness they had about mass murder, with older people being more aware than younger people. Furthermore, this was true among both men and women.
Even though our results show that the differences between men and women were limited, our evidence indicates that men knew somewhat more about the mass murder of Jews than women in each of the age-groups. Since considerably more women took part in our surveys than men, this means that the overall percentage of people who knew about the mass murder of Jews during the time of the Third Reich might have been higher than our initial estimates indicate. But when we controlled for possible distortions caused by the gender imbalance, this did not turn out to be the case. Thus, for the respondents as a whole, we still found that a total of 28 percent had either “known” or “heard” about the mass murder before the end of the war (see the figures in the table under the “total” column), basically the same as we found in each of the four cities we surveyed.
Table 13.3 Percentages of Respondents Who Knew or Heard About the Mass Murder of Jews (Prior to the End of the War) by Year of Birth and Gender
| Year of birth | Male (%) | Female (%) | Total* (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1904 or earlier | 36(11) | 27(22) | 32(33) |
| 1905—1910 | 39(59) | 34(147) | 37(206) |
| 1911—1916 | 34(139) | 32(278) | 33(417) |
| 1917—1922 | 31(350) | 25(471) | 28(821) |
| 1923—1928 | 26(645) | 25(573) | 26(1218) |
| Total | 29(1204) | 27(1491) | 28(2695) |
* Average of the percentages for men and women Basis: cumulated samples of the four city surveys and Cologne pilot survey. Note: N of cases in parentheses.
As mentioned above, however, earlier nationwide surveys produced a somewhat higher result. The reason for the divergence between those surveys and our surveys must lie first and foremost in the long-term aging process among the age-groups of interest to us. In the earlier surveys there would have been more people who reached their adult years before the Third Reich began than in our surveys. When we took this into account and controlled for the age factor, and when we estimated what the percentages would have been for those who were relatively older during the Third Reich than those in our sample, we found that 33 percent, or every third German, would have either “heard” or “known” something about the Holocaust before the war’s end.31. In absolute figures this means that millions of people before the end of the war either possessed concrete information about the mass murder of Jews or heard rumors about it.
Receiving information, however, is not the same as believing it. Although information concerning the mass murder of Jews circulated during the Third Reich, rumors about other issues in Germany’s past had often turned out to be false. Frequently the Propaganda Ministry dismissed negative reporting from abroad as Allied atrocity propaganda, partly by referring to supposed or real evidence to the contrary. Consequently many people must have been suspicious about information they received concerning what was going on elsewhere. Under these circumstances, the credibility of the content and the source of the information were crucial. The less clear and more improbable the information, and the less specific and more dubious the source, the less frequently people believed the information.
In our national telephone survey, we asked about the credibility of the information that participants had received about the mass murder of Jews. Among those who said they had heard something about it, 60 percent said they had completely believed it and 8 percent said that they had believed it in part. Among the rest, 14 percent said they had not believed it at first, and 18 percent said that they had not believed it at all.32. In the face-to-face interviews we conducted, where we also asked some of the respondents about the credibility of the information received, a majority said they had believed the reports they received about the mass murder.
The majority of our survey respondents said they first learned about the mass murder after the war ended, and their response is quite believable. There was nothing to hide from us, since our surveys were carried out anonymously and also in a way to establish trust. Furthermore, although determined opponents of the regime heard about the killing of Jews more frequently than others, a majority of the Nazis’ opponents nevertheless said they had not heard anything either. Thus, among those who said they heard nothing about the murder of the Jews, there were also some people who were clearly critical of the Nazi system or had personal ties to the victims of Nazism. The idea of a systematic mass murder surpassed their imagination of what was possible in the Third Reich. As one Berlin respondent told us, many people were aware of the concentration camps in their vicinity, like Oranienburg, but were not aware that Jews were being systematically murdered.33.
A number of the respondents who first learned about the Holocaust only after the war ended, however, suspected that it might be taking place. Nazi rhetoric had referred to the extermination and annihilation of the Jews for a long time. In the early phase of the Nazi regime, during the 1930s, people may have dismissed this as mere rhetorical flourish, and at the time systematic mass murder was not yet in the planning stage. But in the course of the 1940s, the annihilation of the Jews was mentioned more and more. Hitler’s “prophecy” of January 1939—when he threatened the annihilation of the Jews in the event of a new world war—was most frequently mentioned in public starting in 1940–1941.34.
The repeated citation of this particular speech did not necessarily mean that every German took it as a realistic threat. For many Germans, even if they had heard such speeches, the murder of the Jews was beyond their imagination. And some may have suppressed what they heard because it disturbed them. The radical nature of the language that was used in this matter was also typical in other matters, which is why the Jewish professor Victor Klemperer aptly described the Nazis’ language as a language of “superlatives.”35.
But those who realized how frequently the Nazis threatened the Jews with annihilation must have suspected that this was a potentially deadly threat. In our questionnaires in Cologne, Krefeld, and Dresden, we therefore included “suspected” as a possible answer to the question about whether people had been aware of the mass murder or not. Between 10 percent and 13 percent of those surveyed said they had suspected that the mass murder of Jews was taking place. This percentage boosts the figure for those who had either suspected or clearly received information about the mass murder of Jews to over 40 percent.
Analysis of those who suspected mass murder reveals no great variations among different age-groups. The only exception is the oldest group of respondents, born in 1904 or earlier. Among these people, the percentage who had suspected mass murder was disproportionately high—21 percent, nearly twice as high as the average for all respondents. But closer examination shows that the age factor was only significant among the Cologne and Krefeld respondents.
An explanation for this could lie in the Catholic environment of Cologne and Krefeld. Many Catholics had reservations about National Socialism and may have felt that the Nazis were capable of anything, even mass murder of Jews. The bishop of Cologne, Cardinal Frings, showed the greatest courage among the Catholic hierarchy in protesting what was happening to Jews. On December 12, 1942, he issued a pastoral letter that was read widely in Catholic churches. In it, he emphasized the basic rights of men and stated that they applied also to people who were “not of our blood and do not speak our language.” On August 8, 1943, he persuaded the other members of the episcopate to publish a declaration about the “ten commandments as principal rules for people to live by” (Lebensgesetz der Völker). This declaration asserted that all killing is bad, even if committed for the presumed public good, and specifically mentioned people of “foreign races and descent.”36.
Although vague, these statements could be seen as references to Jews. Nevertheless, they were not distinct and concrete enough to allow more than suspicion that something was happening to Jews. Perhaps more important for the development of suspicion was the Catholic Church’s position vis-à-vis the Nazi euthanasia program. Catholic clergymen protested repeatedly against the euthanasia program, which might have made Catholics more receptive than Protestants to negative reports about the Nazi regime. Indeed, our survey evidence reveals that there was a remarkably strong connection between knowledge about the euthanasia program and knowledge about the mass murder of Jews. Those who said they had heard something about euthanasia were much more likely to have heard about the mass murder of Jews, and this connection was more pronounced in the Catholic cities of Cologne and Krefeld than in the Protestant city of Dresden. Those who learned about the murder of the physically disabled and the mentally ill possibly belonged to social networks where such information circulated. They were also probably more sensitive to and critical of the Nazi system and tried more frequently to get hold of information that might help undermine the Nazi regime.37.
Those who answered that they had found out about the mass murder of Jews were disproportionately respondents who already held strongly negative views of National Socialism. The remaining respondents with varying degrees of affinity for National Socialism differed negligibly from one another in this regard. The disproportionately high degree of knowledge about the murder of Jews among opponents of National Socialism appeared to have two main causes. First, they usually lived in social milieus that were critically predisposed to the Nazis. Second, people with negative attitudes toward National Socialism were more receptive to negative news about the regime and often searched for things that were negative about it. This is to be expected, since what is compatible with people’s views and expectations is more easily incorporated into people’s belief systems. This also applies to supporters of National Socialism, who were more likely to ignore or block out disturbing information about the regime.
In addition to this, our evidence shows that respondents who either resisted the regime themselves or had contact with others who resisted or had become victims of the regime typically were better informed about the mass murder than other respondents. Thus people who came from households that had once supported the Communist Party had the highest level of awareness of the mass murder in comparison with respondents who came from households with other types of political orientation. Likewise, as we found in our Berlin survey (in which we asked specific questions about this), those who came into contact with concentration camp prisoners during the war were more likely to have received information about the mass murder of Jews than those who had not; people who met people who had hidden Jews (either before or after the war) also had a disproportionately high degree of knowledge about the mass murder.
A final observation about people who gained a higher level of knowledge about the mass murder than others relates to the educational backgrounds of our survey respondents. Whereas some might expect that people who were better educated would have become better informed about the Holocaust, our evidence shows that this was not the case. In fact, as the survey evidence under the rubric “education” at the bottom of Table13.2 indicates, there was no correlation between the survey respondents’ level of education and their awareness of the mass murder of Jews. Thus people who had only a primary school education were just as likely to have found out about the mass murder as those who graduated from secondary schools or even universities. This finding indicates that information about the Holocaust spread widely among people from all socioeconomic backgrounds just as it did among people from all communities across the map of Germany. What appeared to matter most in differentiating those who came to know about the mass murder and those who did not was how an individual was politically disposed to the Nazi regime and the personal experiences one had.
Both our survey and interview evidence demonstrate that people became informed about the mass murder of Jews through a wide variety of ways. Several of our interviewees, like Hans Ruprecht from Cologne, for example, provided detailed descriptions of mass shootings of Jews that they witnessed directly or indirectly. One day, while Ruprecht was deployed in the Crimea as a Wehrmacht officer, he received an order to participate in “cleansing measures.” “We have to carry out some ‘cleansing measures’ here,” he was told. “You will not be affected by this. . . . However, we do need to isolate the population from these measures.”
Due to a shortage of personnel, support was needed from the regular troops. They were to cordon off the site of the killing. Soldiers in Ruprecht’s unit who volunteered to take part were deployed. “And then one day, the shooting commenced. The incident lasted about half an hour or an hour until it was over. With that, the whole thing was over and done with.”
Although the soldiers who had cordoned off the killing site did not necessarily witness the killing of Jews, they became aware of what was happening. As Ruprecht explained, “Many of those [who took part] didn’t see anything at all. They did indeed hear shooting, and possibly also screams or something . . . but the men who went to do the cordoning basically knew what it was all about.” Another interviewee, Albert Emmerich (whose interview, like Ruprecht’s, appears in chapter7), was stationed as a policeman in Ukraine when he found out about the mass murder of Jews. After being transferred to his region, he fell into conversation with a younger comrade who had been stationed there for some time already and wanted to show the new arrival something: “It was a gravel pit. He took me there. Gravel pits always sit deep in the ground. Then he said, ‘Look at that. There are three mass graves. Those are Jews. There are three hundred Jews lying in each grave.’” Then the younger policeman described his participation in the events:
We had to shoot the people. They were forced to undress, no matter whether they were old or young, or whether they were babies or women with babies in their arms. They all got a shot in the back of the neck. None of us received a submachine gun. They got a shot at the nape of the neck with simple revolvers and were forced to undress beforehand. Then the next three hundred were ready. They had to dig their own mass grave again and then their turn came later. A few days later, they had to stand on the edge of their grave, and then they were shot. . . . They were all lying there in blood and we had to go down there and wade in the blood up to our ankles and give them the mercy shots.
Adam Grolsch, born in 1920 and raised in Krefeld, directly witnessed a massacre in which thousands were murdered. He was stationed in Pinsk at the time as a radio operator in the Wehrmacht. One morning, he was startled by an enormous racket and wondered what was going on:
I then set out with a friend, and with my own eyes saw how the people there had been slaughtered; in two days, 25,000 men, women, and children, and in the most beastly way. I saw how they had to undress in front of the tank traps and many other things. And the absolute worst thing I saw was how this man took a screaming baby and beat it headfirst against a wall until it was dead.
In some of the massacres, as in this one, most of the people who did the shooting came from a variety of non-German ethnic groups such as Russians, Cossacks, Lithuanians, and Latvians.38. These were the so-called Hilfswillige (voluntary helpers), or Hiwis for short, who acted on orders from the Germans. Deployed at first temporarily and then as needed for all kinds of support jobs, the Hiwis became a standard institutional feature of the German occupation on the eastern front. Over time, their areas of responsibility expanded and many became formally employed in the military, police, and the SS, and many eventually became active in antipartisan activities, which very frequently, but not always, served as a cover for terror and mass killing operations.
Many of the so-called Hiwis did not have to be coerced to take part in the tasks that the Germans ordered them to perform. Their willingness to kill stemmed not just from a readiness to follow orders, but often from an existing hatred of Jews that the German occupiers exploited. The willing participation of non-German ethnic minorities in many of the pogroms and massacres of Jews gave many Germans the sense that it was not they who were responsible for the murders they witnessed, but the bloodthirsty foreigners. One of our interviewees, Walter Sanders of Krefeld, for example, described several massacres he had witnessed, including one in which foreign SS personnel were throwing Jews into an abandoned mine and another in which Jews on forced marches were being shot and beaten to death. Sanders explained that a Wehrmacht officer had made protests against these actions.
explained that a Wehrmacht officer had made protests against these actions. While several of the people we interviewed said they had become aware of the mass murder of Jews by directly or indirectly witnessing shooting operations and other kinds of pogroms and massacres, others had become aware of the mass murder by hearing about the killing of Jews in extermination camps. Even when the information they received about this was only vague, it was often enough to raise their suspicions. Thus, as one interviewee related,
Nobody knew in detail what had [happened] to the Jews. With the Jews, that became known to me only in the military, didn’t it? There was one fellow with us who had connections to the SS. And once he said, “There are concentration camps with the Jews . . .” But he never said anything specific. He had a wonderful cigarette case. He was always saying, “This is from a Jew, from a Jew.” But he never wanted to come straight out with it. He never talked about it. Later when the information about murdering Jews became known, I just remembered that.39.
Another man found out from his uncle that “horrible things” were happening in the camps in Poland. Although he did not know the details, he could not help but suspect murder. Still, the form in which it was taking place—by starvation or some other means—remained unclear to him:
In 1944, I think, I heard about it for the first time. I was at home with my mother. Her brother, my uncle, came over. He had been drafted to watch concentration camps, in Poland somehow. He was on leave, and I was on leave. . . . They forced him to go there as a guard. And the SS, which was responsible for it, was rarely seen in the camp. The [guards] didn’t go inside. He told my mother, “There are horrible things happening there.” He didn’t say anything to me about the terrible things. He didn’t say anything about it again. He probably meant the burning . . .
What did you think? That people were being killed?
Yes.40.
With other interviewees, additional bits of information they received over time hardened their impression that systematic murder was taking place. One woman, for example, said she had heard about the trains to Auschwitz from her husband. Soldiers had told him that they accompanied trains there and rode back afterward on empty trains. “That they were gassed, that came later. That they met their deaths there somehow, that seeped out slowly. But one didn’t hear anything specific.”41.
In another case, the father of an interviewee, a policeman who accompanied trains to Poland, reported something similar:
My father. . . was brought to the police. That was around ’43 or ’44 or so, and he had to escort such a transport, and they had to get off the train. . . The SS then took it over. And after twelve days, the train came back empty and was then back in Germany.
So he didn’t escort it to the end?
No. . . They got off, and the SS took over and probably took the Jews to Auschwitz. And then he also said, “There probably isn’t a single one of them still alive.”42.
For some time, stories also circulated about Jews being electrocuted. Since researchers have rejected the idea that this form of killing was ever used, we expect that gas vans were sometimes mistakenly equated with such methods.43. Many such vans were used until the large-scale gassing facilities were developed at Auschwitz and other camps.
One interviewee, for example, who lived at the time near Lublin—the administrative center of the region where the extermination camps Belzec and Sobibor were located—told us that he had heard about the electrocution of Jews from an aunt:
In 1941, I went to my aunt’s place, where the camp was. It came out that the [inmates] were killed by electrocution. . . . That was a [small] experimental camp. It was also guarded by the Waffen-SS. The people were then buried, but the current had not been effective enough. There was some life still left in them. There were young SS men there who couldn’t take it and wouldn’t join in. A lot of SS men ran off. Those who were captured were shot. Then a steel chimney was brought in, 110 meters high. And the first cremation facility was made. Then I was at my aunt’s, and she had the window open and I said, “It smells so strange.” . . . My aunt said, “People are being burned, Jews and Poles who were in prison. They are being burned, but the camp is supposed to be shut.” An SS man who had slipped away and came through later told them about it. That’s how I knew.44.
Later in his interview the same man spoke specifically about events at Auschwitz-Birkenau that he heard about through his father, who knew a Polish inmate there by the name of Janek. Poles and Russians had been detained in Auschwitz before it became a death camp for Jews, and there were still many Poles there after Jews started arriving.
They nabbed him and brought him to Birkenau. And he got out of Birkenau after half a year. And then he came to my father and told my father everything. . . . That’s how we knew that Birkenau was the biggest extermination camp.
[He] also told you about the crematoriums, everything?
Yes, everything.
Also about the gassings?
Things really got started at the end of ’42. And that was what Janek could already report. Janek didn’t lie to us.
You and your father, however, believed it back then as well?
My father saw what they were doing with the Jews. They loaded up the Jews near our place. In 1941, it was a hard winter. They picked up all of the Jews from our very small town. They froze to death in the railway cars.
You could see that?
My father was standing watch there. They unloaded them afterward as corpses.
For some Germans, the information they received resembled unsubstantiated rumors that they did not believe at first. But their perceptions changed once they got more concrete information. As one interviewee related, “After all, one can talk a lot.” But he did finally recognize the truth when the Jewish woman who would later become his wife was selected for deportation, and he “heard in communist circles that numbers of Jews were being gassed.”45.
Others clung to the belief that the rumors did not reflect the truth until the very end. Some who heard about the extermination camps did not want to believe in systematic mass murder. One woman who lived in Stuttgart and had a Jewish mother wrote in her private memoirs about visiting a Jewish lawyer who acted as a middleman between the Jewish community and the Gestapo. She was trying to free her mother, who had recently been deported to Auschwitz. The lawyer responded bluntly, “You can file a petition, but you will not see your mother again. Auschwitz is an extermination camp.” When she received notification of her mother’s death a few months later—“died of sepsis and phlegm in Auschwitz”—she considered this plausible. “Later, I found out that it was just one of many death notices issued on that day. What Auschwitz meant and how our mother died is something we found out only after 1945.”46 Other people we interviewed heard about the gassing of Jews, some in the form of rumors, others in the form of concrete information from reliable sources. Hiltrud Kühnel, for example, whose interview appears in chapter6, heard about this from local clergymen who spoke to her and other members of her family in their home in Frankfurt. Walter Sanders from Krefeld also men- tioned that it got around that people were being gassed: “It wasn’t for nothing that it was said in those years, ‘Take care, otherwise you’ll go up the chimney.’ That was a familiar figure of speech. It circulated everywhere in Germany.”
Gassing was not limited to the extermination camps. As mentioned earlier, the concentration camps were preceded by gas vans that claimed the lives of around 700,000 Jews.47. One Berlin woman of mixed Jewish and non-Jewish background, whose mother had faced the threat of deportation, reported that in 1942–1943 rumors were spreading about the gas vans:
Gas was already spoken about, but nobody knew exactly [how]. Then people told the Jewish people that it was said [the SS was using] trucks in which the occupants were gassed by the exhaust fumes. And that later turned out to be true.48.
Adam Grolsch, who had witnessed the Jewish massacre in Pinsk, also witnessed two or three gas vans while he was in Rivne, Ukraine, but their function occurred to him only later: “They were parked in Rivne, and nobody knew what they were. . . . That is to say, they were mobile gas chambers for smaller operations. My attention was drawn to it by the BBC.”
Finally, while some people insisted that the mass murder of Jews was something that “everyone knew about,” others maintained just as insistently that hardly anyone could have known about the Holocaust during the Third Reich. Although the reality lay between these two opposing contentions, people were able to hold completely different viewpoints. This can happen because societies are not homogeneous but are made up of interlocking social networks that allow information to diffuse in some circles while not in others. Thus what might seem self-evident and be taken for granted in one social network need not be in another.49. This must have been the case in the Third Reich, where people had to be cautious when speaking about sensitive matters because of the risk of punishment. Under such circumstances, information often remained within the inner circle of people who trusted one another.
The importance of social contacts in spreading information about the Holocaust becomes all the more apparent when one considers the survey evidence. In the surveys, just as in the interviews, the most frequently named sources of information the respondents received about the mass murder of Jews came from close social contacts. The evidence for this is presented in Table13.4.
In the written surveys, people who answered that they had found out about the mass murder were then asked to specify how they found out, and they were provided with the list of possible sources of information contained in the table. As the table shows, there were many sources, but the most important ones were people the respondents knew personally, such as family members and friends as well as neighbors, work colleagues, and fellow soldiers. Only a small minority, between 3 and 6 percent of the respondents, directly witnessed the events.50.
Other than information received from personal contacts, the next largest source of information about the Holocaust came from foreign radio broadcasts (between 14 and 29 percent, depending on the city in question). Not surprisingly, the Dresden respondents were the least likely to hear about the mass murder from foreign radio broadcasts, probably because, as seen in Table12.4, they were the least likely to listen to foreign radio broadcasts. What is surprising is that even more respondents, in all the cities surveyed, had not heard about the mass murder from such broadcasts, given that nearly half listened to foreign radio during the war years. What might explain this?
Certainly it is not because foreign radio stations did not broadcast reports about the Holocaust. On the contrary, foreign radio stations frequently reported on this during the the war. In fact, the British Broadcasting Service (BBC) started broadcasting news about mass shootings of Jews to the German population and in the German language as early as the fall of 1941. By the end of 1942, the BBC’s German Service often broadcast lengthy, and sometimes daily, reports on the deportations and the mass murders being carried out in the concentration camps. At the same time, similar reports, which were of special interest to communists, came from Soviet radio, even though they were more difficult to receive than the BBC reports.51.
Probably the most important reason why fewer people heard about the Holocaust from the BBC and other foreign radio stations than one might expect is that most people listened to foreign broadcasts occasionally and selectively. About half of the German population listened to foreign radio broadcasts at some point, but many only after the fall of Stalingrad. Many people were interested in hearing about the war and the German army’s progress, but probably fewer people wanted to hear about the atrocities being committed against Jews. In its own research on the issue, the BBC wondered why many Germans had apparently not received information about the masacres in the east from their reporting and believed that a major reason for this was the German population’s infrequent listening habits.52.
Even if many people had heard foreign radio broadcasts about the murder of Jews, it was by no means guaranteed that the reports were trusted. As one person explained:
We only found out about that via the BBC. And because we knew the power of propaganda, we also knew what was suspected of the BBC, that it also understood its craft and must have made a lot of smears. One believed it only in part. There were horrible things reported there, things one could not believe, for example, the mass shootings in the Ukraine, where German soldiers were involved. When we heard that, we didn’t believe it, because the Wehrmacht was always something different from the Nazis. We always believed that the Wehrmacht stood as a contrast to the Nazis.53.
Table 13.4 Source of Knowledge Among Respondents Who Knew or Heard About the Mass Murder of Jews (Prior to the End of the War) by City*
| Cologne (%) | Krefeld (%) | Dresden (%) | Berlin (%) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Saw it happen myself | 4 | 5 | 6 | 3 |
| Family member | 20 | 20 | 20 | 26 |
| Friend, coworker, or neighbor | 24 | 23 | 23 | 19 |
| In the army from fellow soldier or superior | 19 | 24 | 15 | 17 |
| Foreign radio broadcast | 26 | 29 | 14 | 15 |
| Leaflets and fliers dropped by allied planes | } 5 | } 9 | 6 | 6 |
| Other | 4 | 2 | ||
| N of cases | 296 | 127 | 197 | 161 |
*Multiple responses possible
Whether one believed the reports depended not only on the credibility of the broadcaster but also on one’s own experiences with the Nazi regime. The more one knew about the regime’s brutality, the more one trusted the foreign reports. For example, one interviewee first found out from other Germans about the brutal conditions experienced by concentration camp prisoners in underground production facilities. Her impressions of the regime’s misdeeds were then reinforced by the BBC:
Actually, I didn’t believe it 100 percent. I thought that it couldn’t be true, that nobody could be that brutal. I didn’t completely believe it at first. It was unimaginable for me. But since the same thing came from other sources and also from foreign radio stations as well—sometimes we listened to Radio Moscow and Radio London, who always made those German broadcasts, above all London—and since they had also confirmed it, and with rather exact information, we then said, “That has to be true.” We had always doubted it a bit and said that nobody can really be that cruel. But since we knew how cruelly they had treated my cousin, we then said, “Then it must really be true.”54.
If fewer people than one might expect heard about the mass murder of Jews from foreign broadcasts, these broadcasts were, nonetheless, heard and often believed by many Germans. Beyond this, many Germans who received information about the mass murder from other people no doubt heard it from people who themselves had heard it on the radio. Indeed, other than the sources of information about the Holocaust already mentioned, all other sources were of secondary importance at best.
Flyers and leaflets dropped by Allied airplanes during the war informed only a small minority of Germans. This is no accident. Few Germans ever got hold of such fliers, since they were quickly collected by Nazi supporters and members of the Hitler Youth. In addition, the murder of Jews was never a major topic of Allied military propaganda. The Allied military command was primarily interested in projecting military superiority. Finally, when such fliers and leaflets mentioned the massacres in Poland and Russia, they usually described the victims in universal terms, without specifically naming Jews.
Hence, even though Jewish organizations had pushed early on to make the persecution and murder of the Jews a key issue, the Allied military leadership regarded it as more important to wear down the German military and to make this the topic of the leaflets in order to undermine German morale.55. As one person said, “They dropped fliers, but there was nothing about the poor Jews in them. There were always only matters pertaining to the war and things connected with the war. One should have said more. . . . [The Allies] probably failed here.”56.
A final issue to consider is when the German population became informed about the mass murder of Jews. Almost half of those who found out something about it did not provide a specific year and even fewer named a specific month. This is understandable, since the longer an event recedes into the past, the harder it becomes to assign a specific date to it. Furthermore, the respondents went through very turbulent times—whether on the front or at home—when it is difficult to separate events from one another and to remember exact dates.
Nevertheless, a total of 532 respondents in the four cities did provide the year in which they had first found out about the mass murder. While this was usually in the last years of the war, a considerable number of respondents had found out earlier than this: 14 percent had found out by the end of 1941, 25 percent by the end of 1942, 47 percent by the end of 1943, and 74 percent by the end of 1944.
These figures apply to all of the survey respondents, many of whom were young teenagers during the war years and were less interested in, and more often shielded from, disturbing information than the adult population. News about the mass murder of Jews came considerably earlier to those born before 1919, who were in their twenties or older when Jews were being put to death. Among the 159 respondents born before 1919 who gave a specific year when they first received information about the mass murder, 20 percent had become informed by the end of 1941, 30 percent by the end of 1942, 55 percent by the end of 1943, and 76 percent by the end of 1944.57.
Although much of the persecution Jews suffered in Nazi Germany was fueled by propaganda and long-term indoctrination, the reaction of much of the German citizenry was ambivalent. Many Germans reacted negatively to the anti-Jewish propaganda and persecution. With regard to some extreme measures—such as publicly labeling Jews by forcing them to wear the Jewish star—a majority appears to have reacted negatively. Many Germans, however, were quick to accept the new situation and concerned themselves only with their own private lives and tended not to think about what was happening to the Jews. Thus it was only a very small minority—though still in the thousands— who helped Jews hide after the deportations had begun, and, even though many might have felt some pity when viewing Jews wearing the Jewish star, they preferred to keep to themselves.
Despite the regime’s efforts to keep the mass murder of Jews a secret from the German population and from the outside world, news of the atrocities reached a large portion of the German public by the end of the war. A substantial minority of about one-third of the population became aware of the mass murder of Jews while it was still taking place, and most believed this information, especially because it came from persons they trusted.
What they got as information, however, was not always clear-cut enough for them to infer that systematic mass murder was taking place. Many people only got bits and pieces of information and were not aware that there was a master plan for extermination. But as much as the atrocities became a recurrent story, great numbers of Germans must have perceived a systematic pattern in it. Beyond this, their perceptions were reinforced by the frequent public utterances of Nazi leaders that the Jews were to be “annihilated” and “exterminated,” even though such phraseology had an old history in Germany and had often been used when no mass murder of Jews had yet been envisioned. It is also evident that many Germans did not want to know about what was being done to the Jews. Either it did not interest them or they wanted to suppress it from their consciousness. All too often, they were too involved in their own lives and worries, and they became blind to the sufferings of the Jews and deceived themselves about their fate.