1. Among the most important works on this issue are Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: An Investigation into the Suppression of Information about Hitler’s “Final Solution” (London, 1980); David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism (London, 1992); Hans Mommsen, “Was haben die Deutschen von Völkermord an den Juden gewusst?” in Walter H. Pehle, ed., Der Judenpogrom 1938: Von der “Reichskristallnacht” zum Völkermord (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), 176–200; Lutz Niethammer, “Juden und Russen im Gedächtnis der Deutschen,” in Walter H. Pehle, ed., Der historische Ort des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), 114–134; and Volker Ullrich, “‘Wir haben nichts gewusst’: Ein deutsches Trauma,” 1999 4 (1991): 11–46.
2. The scholarly literature dealing with these questions is enormous. Among the most important recent works treating these questions and the Third Reich and the Holocaust generally are Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York, 2004); Klaus Hildebrand, Das Dritte Reich (Oldenbourg, 2003); Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London, 2000); Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis (New York, 2000); Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 2001); Norbert Frei, National Socialist Rule in Germany: The Führer State, 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1993); Christopher R. Browning and Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln, Neb., 2004); Omer Bartov, Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003); Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation (Princeton, 2003); David Bankier, ed., Probing the Depths of German Antisemistism: German Society and the Persecution of the Jews, 1933-1941 (Oxford, 2000); Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in the Third Reich (New York, 1998); Peter Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung: Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung (Munich, 1998); and Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York, 1997).
3. The authors are particularly grateful to the following institutions for funding the research project on which this book is based: the National Endowment for the Humanities (Collaborative Research Program), the National Science Foundation (Law and Social Sciences Program), and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Transcoop Program).
4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951); Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, Mass., 1956). 5. See, for example, Edward Crankshaw, Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny (London,
5. See, for example, Edward Crankshaw, Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny (London, 1956); Jacques Delarue, The Gestapo: A History of Horror, trans. Mervyn Savill (New York, 1962); and Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (New York, 1973).
6. See, especially, Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1990); Gellately, Backing Hitler; Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Gerhard Paul, “Allwissend, allmächtig, allgegenwärtig? Gestapo, Gesellschaft, und Widerstand,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 41 (1993): 984–999; Mallmann and Paul, Herrschaft und Alltag: Eine Industrierevier im Dritten Reich (Bonn, 1991); Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York, 1999); Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann, Politische Denunziation im NS-Regime oder die kleine Macht der “Volksgenossen” (Bonn, 1995); Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria, 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1983); and Kershaw, The Hitler Myth: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987).
7. Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945, p. 841.
8. See, for example, the essays on social control in France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands under dictatorial regimes of the twentieth century in Clive Emsley, Eric A. Johnson, and Pieter Spierenburg, eds., Social Control in Europe, 1800–2000 (Columbus, Ohio, 2004). The authors of these essays all reject Hannah Arendt’s views on totalitarianism.
9. Hubert Lutz, interview by authors, May 29, 2001, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Hubert Lutz was born in 1928 and grew up in Cologne as the son of a Nazi Party functionary.
10. For an intriguing discussion of the point about two Germanys and how most average Germans found much in Nazi Germany to their liking, see Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–1945 (Chicago, 1955), pp. 52–53ff. Mayer was an American scholar who spent a year in Germany in the early 1950s interviewing ten common citizens in a small town about their views of the Third Reich.
11. Thomas Green, interview by authors, July 27, 1995, New York City. Thomas Green was born in 1921 and grew up in Mannheim as the son of a Jewish businessman. In October 1940 he was deported to the Gurs concentration camp in France. Although Green’s full interview, like many interviews, could not be included in the pages of this book, a transcript is available from the authors.
12. The only significant open protest against the Holocaust in Germany took place in Berlin in late February and early March 1943. See Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (New York, 1996).
13. Much of this controversy continues to surround Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s international best-seller, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996). See, for example, Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (New York, 1998).
14. Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (New York, 1995). For a recent study of attempts to prosecute Nazi perpetrators in eastern and western Germany after World War II, see Annette Weinke, Die Verfolgung von NS-Tätern im geteilten Deutschland: Vergangenheitsbewältigung 1949–1969 (Paderborn, 2002).
15. Johnson, Nazi Terror.
1. Rosa Hirsch, for example, who survived the Holocaust by going into hiding in Berlin, relates on the last page of her interview narrative, “When the bombs were falling in Berlin, I was happy even though they could have hit me just the same as anybody else. I didn’t care at that point. I rather felt, ‘Let them destroy it.’ If they would have wiped out all of Germany, I wouldn’t have cared.” Similar comments were made by survivors we spoke with whose interviews, for reasons of space, could not be included in this book. A good example is Irving Rose, whom we interviewed in New York City on July 20, 1995. Born in 1921 and raised in Dresden as the son of an owner of a chain of inexpensive department stores before emigrating to the United States in March 1938, he retains little love for the beautiful city he once called home: “Dresden was considered like the Paris of Germany and it was destroyed, part of it was destroyed. I couldn’t care less. . . . As far as I am concerned, they could have destroyed the whole thing. . . . As far as I am concerned, they could have made Germany into a potato field.”
2. As mentioned in the introductory chapter, Green’s interview, which took place in New York on July 27, 1995, is one of many interviews we originally conducted but were not able to publish in this book because of space limitations. In his autobiographical examination of what life was like for Jews in Nazi Germany, like himself, the eminent historian Peter Gay explains that this, more or less, applied to him as well when he was a child in Berlin: “There are three ways of becoming a Jew: by birth, by conversion, by decree. Brushed by only a breath of the first, I was forcibly enlisted in the third group after January 30, 1933.” Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (New Haven, 1998), p. 48.
3. The historian Peter Gay’s family also received such help and support. As Gay writes, “My father found his closest friends in business and in sports, and his professional associates and the soccer players and sprinters he knew and liked were nearly all gentiles. And without the help of some of them, we would probably have ended up in the gas chambers.” Gay, My German Question, p. 49.
4. In recent years, much of this controversy has centered around Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s provocative argument that Germany was long imbued with what he calls “a unique eliminationist antisemitism.” See Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996). For prominent examples of the criticism his book has aroused, see Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (New York, 1998); and the new afterword in Christopher R. Browning’s acclaimed study, Ordinary Men: Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992; New York, 1998), pp. 191–223.
5. Peter Gay, for example, devotes an entire chapter of his book about his life as a youth in Berlin to the “mixed signals” that he and his family received. See Gay, My German Question, pp. 57–83. Marion Kaplan makes a similar argument about the mixed messages that many Jews in Nazi Germany received in her recent study, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 1998), pp. 4–5. As she writes, “Jews read these mixed messages with fear and hope. They thought about and prepared for emigration, all the while wishing they would not have to leave their homeland. . . . Thus, as they continued to maintain their families and communities, they clung to the mixed signals from the government as well as from non-Jewish friends and strangers—a lull in antisemitic boycotts here, a friendly greeting there. They hoped the regime would fall or its antisemitic policies would ease.”
6. On documentary evidence dealing with the Holocaust in general, see, for example, Steve Hochstadt, ed., Sources of the Holocaust (New York, 2004).
7. Two important recent studies of Jewish persecution in the Third Reich that make excellent use of survivor memoirs and diaries are Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair; and Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York, 1997). Probably the most acclaimed diary of a Holocaust survivor was kept by Victor Klemperer, a professor of romance languages at the Technical University of Dresden. Originally published in German, it appeared in English translation under the title I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–1945, vol. 1, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York, 1998; vol. 2, 1999). For recent oral histories dealing with Holocaust survivors, see, for example, Mary J. Gallant, Coming of Age in the Holocaust: The Last Survivors Remember (Lanham, Md., 2002); and Joshua M. Greene and Shiva Kumar, eds., Witness: Voices from the Holocaust (New York, 2001).
8. The original list of these survivors was compiled by the National Registry of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
9. Though small, the Krefeld survey is of particular importance because its results can be compared with two existing studies of the persecution of Krefeld’s Jews based on Gestapo records and other archival documents. See Dieter Hangebruch, “Emigriert— Deportiert: Das Schichsal der Juden in Krefeld zwischen 1933 und 1945,” Krefelder Studien 2 (1980):137–412; and Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York, 2000).
10. In 1933 nearly 70 percent of Germany’s Jews worked in business and commerce; over 30 percent lived in the city of Berlin alone; and 70 percent lived in cities with a population of over 100,000 inhabitants. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 11.
11. Of the 507 survivors, 351, or 69 percent, indicated that they had left Germany for other countries by the end of 1939. According to Wolfgang Benz’s estimate, there were roughly 537,000 Jews in Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933. By the end of 1939, according to Saul Friedländer, there were only 190,000 Jews remaining in Germany. Although births and deaths are not accounted for in these figures, a rough calculation for the percentage of Jews who left the country between 1933 and 1939 would be about 65 percent. Benz, ed., Die Juden in Deutschland, 1933–1945 (Munich, 1988), p. 733; Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, p. 317.
12. According to Saul Friedländer, 267 synagogues were destroyed, 7,500 businesses were vandalized, and 91 Jews were killed during the pogrom. Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, p. 276.
13. Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria, 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1983), pp. 262–263.
14. Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (New York, 2000), p. 142.
15. In the preface to the first volume of his new multivolume history of the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans points out that between 1995 and 2000 more than 12,000 new works on the Third Reich were published, “eloquent testimony to the continuing, never-ending outpouring of publications on the subject.” Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York, 2004), p. xvi.
16. In the last chapter of his controversial book on the perpetrators of the Holocaust, Daniel Goldhagen states: “No other country’s antisemitism was at once so widespread as to have been a cultural axiom, was so firmly wedded to racism, had at its foundation such a pernicious image of Jews that deemed them to be a mortal threat to the Volk, and was so deadly in content, producing, even in the nineteenth century, such frequent and explicit calls for the extermination of the Jews, calls which expressed the logic of the racist eliminationist antisemitism that prevailed in Germany.” Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, p. 419.
17. Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent, p. 277.
1. See, for example, Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallmann, eds., Die Gestapo: Mythos und Realität (Darmstadt, 1995); Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1990); Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Society (Oxford, 2001); and Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York, 2000).
2. For a comparison of the persecution of Jews and other groups in Nazi Germany, see Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge, 1991). On Jewish persecution itself, see Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York, 1997); Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 1998); and Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York, 1961).
3. Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942–1945, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York, 1999), p. 134.
4. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair.
5. There were thirty-three survivors from Krefeld who answered the question on the survey about their personal fear of arrest, thus making up 43 percent of the seventy-six survivors in the table who came from Catholic cities. Among the survivors from Krefeld, 27 percent had feared arrest constantly, 46 percent occasionally, and 27 percent had not feared arrest at all. This may indicate that Krefeld was more hospitable toward its Jews, but that is doubtful. Survivors from Krefeld had lower levels of fear probably because nearly all of the Krefeld survivors in the survey had left Germany before the war broke out (91 percent) and all had left the country before 1942. As Table9.1 shows, survivors who were still in Germany after the war broke out had much higher levels of fear than survivors who left the country before this time. If this important factor is controlled for, the Krefeld survivors’ level of fear becomes nearly identical to that of the rest of the survivors who took the survey.
6. An example of this is the town of Bergheim. Lying about fifteen miles west of Cologne, Bergheim had a population of slightly over 18,000 inhabitants in 1939. In the town itself and in the several small villages that were attached to it, there were no Gestapo officers present. Political police work, including the control of the local Jewish population, had to be performed mostly by two regular police officers. See Johnson, Nazi Terror, 65–66.
7. In his interview, for example, Helmut Grunewald says that he never wore the star even though he was required to as a so-called Geltungsjude.
8. See the interviews of Benson, Landau, Leib, and Meyer. Although the number of both Germans and Jews who took part in underground resistance activity in the Third Reich was limited, some historians of Jewish resistance estimate that at least two thousand Jews were active in underground resistance activity at some point during the Nazi years. If the size of the Jewish population were controlled for, this would suggest that Jews were proportionately more active in underground resistance activity than non-Jews. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 214.
9. Ana Perez Belmonte, “‘Schwarzhören’ im II. Weltkrieg: Die Ahndung von ‘Rundfunkverbrechen’ im Sondergerichtsbezirk Essen 1933–1945” (M.A. thesis, University of Cologne, 1997). See also the interview of Adam Grolsch, who was a radio operator in the German army on the eastern front.
10. Three percent of the survivors who were over seventeen years old and still living in Germany during the war indicated on the survivor survey that they had taken part in active resistance activity. However, fewer than 2 percent of the non-Jewish participants in the Cologne and Krefeld surveys had done the same. On Jewish resistance generally, see Arnold Paucker, Standhalten und Widerstehen: Der Widerstand deutscher und österreichischer Juden gegen die Nationalsozialistische Diktatur (Essen, 1995); and Konrad Kwiet and Helmut Eschwege, Selbstbehauptung und Widerstand: Deutsche Juden im Kampf um Existenz und Menschenwürde, 1933–1945 (Hamburg, 1984).
11. On the history of Jewish crime rates in earlier periods of German history, see Ludwig Fuld, Das jüdische Verbrecherthum: Eine Studie über den Zusammenhang zwischen Religion und Kriminalität (Leipzig, 1885); and Rudolf Wassermann, Beruf, Konfession, und Verbrechen (Munich, 1907). In a more recent study of crime rates in Imperial Germany, Eric A. Johnson estimates that the Jewish murder rate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was about one-third that of Protestants and one-fifth that of Catholics. Johnson, Urbanization and Crime: Germany, 1871–1918 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 205.
12. Gellately, Gestapo and German Society, p. 163.
13. See, for example, the discussion of the prevalence of spying on the Jews of Krefeld in Johnson, Nazi Terror, pp. 150–152, where the author finds that one-quarter of Gestapo cases started against Jews in the 1930s involved spying in one form or another and that spying against Jews became even more prevalent during the war years.
14. Anna Meier, interview by authors, July 24, 1995, New York.
15. In his analysis of the Gestapo case files for the period 1933 to 1939 involving Jews from the city of Krefeld, Johnson finds that 41 percent of the cases started with civilian denunciations and 32 percent with information coming from official sources like the Gestapo or the Nazi Party. In 27 percent of the cases it was impossible to determine what the exact source of information was that was used to start the cases. These percentages correspond closely with the percentages reported in Table9.3 for the same period (38 percent, 29 percent, and 34 percent respectively). See Johnson, Nazi Terror, p. 150.
16. See, for example, Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann, Politische Denunziation im NS-Regime oder die kleine Macht der “Volksgenossen” (Bonn, 1995), p. 9; and Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Gerhard Paul, “Allwissend, allmächtig, allgegenwärtig? Gestapo, Gesellschaft, und Widerstand,” Zeitschrift für Zeitgeschichte 41(1993): 992.
1.Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: An Investigation into the Suppression of Information about Hitler’s “Final Solution” (London, 1980).
2. See, for example, Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (New York, 1986); Laqueur, Terrible Secret; David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism (Oxford, 1992); and Martin Gilbert, “What Was Known and When,” in Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), pp. 539–552.
3. Despite objections from the British government, the BBC German Service, for example, broadcast numerous news and other programs during the war providing detailed information about the mass murder of the Jews. For a discussion, see Johnson, Nazi Terror, pp. 441–450.
4. Even though Victor Klemperer, like other Jews, was restricted in his movement, had his radio set taken away from him, and would be in grave danger if caught discussing sensitive political events, he considered it his duty to keep a detailed record of what he knew and experienced during the Holocaust. Although his diary entries concerning the murder of the Jews became more frequent and detailed from early 1942 onward, by the fall of 1941 he had already written several times about terrible reports he was receiving from many sources about the deportations to Poland. Thus, on October 25, 1941, he writes: “Ever more shocking reports about deportations of Jews to Poland. They have to leave almost literally naked and penniless. Thousands from Berlin to Lodz. A letter from Lissy Meyerhof about it. And many stories from Kätchen Sara.” And, on November 18, 1941: “The news of the Jewish deportations to Poland and Russia sound catastrophic from several sources. Letter from Lissy Meyerhof to us, from Voss in Cologne to Kätchen Sara, word-of-mouth reports. We hear quite a lot.” Clearly Klemperer had heard “quite a lot” about the murder of the Jews by the end of 1941. In 1942 he heard much more. Some examples follow. On March 16, 1942, for example, he reveals for the first time that he had heard about people being killed in Auschwitz: “In the last few days I heard Auschwitz (or something like that) near Königshütte in Upper Silesia, mentioned as the most dreadful concentration camp. Work in a mine, death within a few days.” And, on July 4, 1942, he writes, “The Jewish community is notified of Jewish deaths in concentration camps and in prison, the corpses and urns handed over to the Jewish cemetery. . . . In all these cases the news always spreads quickly, there are x connections between the six or seven hundred Jews still to be found here.” And, for a last example among many, on August 29, 1942, he discusses how the trustee of his building had been recently taken to the Gestapo office in Dresden for being too friendly with Jews. While he was there he was told by a Gestapo officer that there were “no decent Jews” and that the “whole race was going to be exterminated.” Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–1941, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York, 1998), pp. 440, 444; and Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, pp. 28, 92, 134.
5. Gilbert, “What Was Known and When,” p. 541.
6. Knowledge about mass murders committed in concentration camps appears to have been considerably more widespread than knowledge about mass shootings. Of the fifty-six survivors in the survey who were still in Germany after the end of 1941, only eighteen (32 percent) had heard before the end of the war about mass shootings of Jews, but forty (71 percent) had heard about mass murder in concentration camps. Among the entire survivor population participating in the survey, there was considerably more knowledge about the mass murders committed in the concentration camps than about the mass shootings. While 325 (64 percent) of the survivors indicated that they had heard before the end of the war about mass murders in concentration camps, only 128 (25 percent) marked down that they had heard about mass shootings.
1. For a thorough discussion of the rise of the Nazi Party, see Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York, 2004); for a detailed analysis of the elections and the factors that determined the voting results, see especially Jürgen W. Falter, Hitlers Wähler (Munich, 1991).
2. U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale (Washington, 1947); Helen Peak, “Observations on the Characteristics and Distribution of German Nazis,” Psychological Monographs 6 (1945); H. L. Ansbacher, “Attitudes of German Prisoners of War: A Study of the Dynamics of National Socialist Followership,” Psychological Monographs, 1948.
3. The SD reports have been reprinted in Heinz Boberach, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich: Die geheimen Lageberichte der SS, 1938–1945 (Herrsching, 1984). They are discussed in Marlis G. Steinert, Hitlers Krieg und die Deutschen: Stimmung und Haltung der deutschen Bevölkerung im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Düsseldorf, 1970). The reports of the SPD in exile are printed in Deutschland: Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Salzhausen, Frankfurt/M, 1980). They are discussed in Bernd Stöver, Volksgemeinschaft im Dritten Reich: Die Konsensbereitschaft der Deutschen aus der Sicht der sozialistischen Exilberichte (Düsseldorf, 1993). For Bavaria, including various other reports, see Ian Kershaw, Der Hitler Mythos: Volksmeinung und Propaganda im Dritten Reich (Stuttgart, 1980); and Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria, 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1984). For a comprehensive attempt to use the different sources and depict a total picture with regard to anti-Semitism, see David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism (Oxford, 1992).
4. See, for example, the classic study by Lutz Niethammer, Die Jahre weiß man nicht, wo man die heute hinsetzen soll: Faschismuserfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet (Berlin, 1983). In this period several history workshops (Geschichtswerkstätten), often made up of laypersons, began to take an interest in oral history research, as did students in schools whose interest was promoted by various student competitions. See, for example, D. Galinski, U. Herbert, and U. Lachauer, eds., Nazis und Nachbarn: Schüler erforschen den Alltag im Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg, 1982). For pioneering studies on Nazi perpetrators, see Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killings and the Psychology of Genocide (New York, 2000); Tom Segev: Soldiers of Evil: The Commandants of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York, 1988).
5. See Elisabeth Noelle and Erich-Peter Neumann, Jahrbuch der öffentlichen Meinung, 1947–1955 (Allensbach/Bodensee, 1956), pp. 127, 133. Other questions, usually limited to one or two, were asked on this period from time to time by the Allensbach Institute or other institutes.
6. For selected findings, see E. Noelle-Neumann and R. Köcher, Die verletzte Nation: Über den Versuch der Deutschen, ihren Charakter zu ändern (Stuttgart, 1987), pp. 390ff. The text was originally published as an article in Die Zeit, May 10, 1985.
7. Classic examples are the industrialist Oscar Schindler (well-known from the Spielberg movie) or Wilm Hosenfeld, a military officer (portrayed in Roman Polanski’s movie The Pianist). On Hosenfeld, see the recently published compilations of his diaries and letters: Wilm Hosenfeld: “Ich versuchte jeden zu retten”: Das Leben eines deutschen Offiziers in Briefen und Tagebüchern (Stuttgart, 2004).
8. In our Dresden survey we used a slightly different version of the question on support of Nazi ideals compared with surveys in the other cities. We provided an additional response category for respondents who had supported the ideals for some time but later rejected them during the Third Reich. A clear majority indicated a shift from support to rejection in this time period.
9. The data have been kindly provided to us for secondary analysis by the Allensbach Institut für Demoskopie. Thanks to its director, Elisabeth Noelle, for doing so.
10. The basic discussion on this topic is found in Philip E. Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in David A. Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York, 1964), pp. 206–261. For levels of knowledge in the population today, see M. X. Delli Carpini and S. Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters (New Haven, 1996); W. Russel Neuman, The Paradox of Mass Politics: Knowledge and Opinion in the American Electorate (Cambridge, 1986).
11. It is unlikely that those who answered indecisively or could not remember were seeking refuge in neutral categories, refusing to admit their former Nazi sympathies in an interview. Further analysis showed that these people, when asked other questions about the present, were generally less interested in politics than the others were. Their behavior in answering the questions is consistent with their present attitudes toward politics and thus probably reflects their earlier orientation as well. If one assumes that those who lacked an interest in politics chose the path of least resistance and were more likely to be seen as fellow travelers than opponents, those disinterested in politics represented a latent potential for accepting the Nazi regime.
12.We did this by weighting our data according to age-groups as well as gender, under the assumption that those participating in our survey and belonging to each age-group do not fundamentally differ from members of their age-group who have already died. The estimate is inevitably tentative in that older age-groups were not available in sufficient numbers for questioning. We were therefore forced to equate those who were forty or older with the population in the preceding age-group.
13. In Cologne and Krefeld respondents who came to these cities after the war were more likely to rank among the Protestants. And because Protestants were more receptive to National Socialism, this entailed a slight blurring of local differences on the level of all of those surveyed. In Dresden and Berlin, the effect of this influx is less pronounced because these cities were predominantly Protestant, as were those who came to those cities after the war.
14. Karl Mannheim, “Das Problem der Generationen,” in Karl Mannheim, ed., Wissensoziologie, 2d ed. (Neuwied, 1970), pp. 509–555.
15. On the bourgeois reaction to the perceived danger, see Clemens Vollnhals, ed., Sachsen in der NS Zeit (Leipzig, 2000).
16. Compare Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, 1988); George L. Mosse, Die Geschichte des Rassismus in Europa (Frankfurt, 1990). Racist, anti-Semitic traditions—partly combined with supposed or real competition— may have made certain professions requiring higher education more receptive to National Socialism. Lawyers’ and doctors’ susceptibility for National Socialism, for example, may have been based on the fact that Jews were disproportionately represented in these professions.
17. Ian Kershaw, The Hitler Myth (Oxford, 1980); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1914–1949 (Munich, 2003).
18. Interview Krefeld 3280.
19. Interview Cologne 289.
20. Interview Krefeld 3369.
21. Interview Cologne 289.
22. Interview Krefeld 3131.
23. Interview Cologne 4001.
24. Interview Dresden 332.
25. Interview Berlin 672.
26. Interview Berlin 804.
27. Interview Dresden 1152.
28. Interview Krefeld 3314.
29. Interview Krefeld 3735.
30. Compare Berndt Jürgen Wendt, Deutschland 1933–1945: Das Dritte Reich (Hannover, 1995).
31. Interview Dresden 1152.
32. Interview Krefeld 3699.
33. Interview Dresden 469.
34. Interview Dresden 229.
35. See G. R. Boynton and Gerhard Loewenberg, “The Development of Public Support for Parliament in Germany, 1951–1959,” British Journal of Political Science, April 1973, 169–189; Boynton and Loewenberg, “The Decay of Support for the Monarchy and the Hitler Regime in the Federal Republic of Germany,” British Journal of Political Science, October 1974, 453–488; Kendall L. Baker, Rusell J. Dalton, and Kai Hildebrandt, Germany Transformed (Cambridge, 1981).
36. Interview Krefeld 3488.
37. Interview Cologne 1304.
38. Interview Krefeld 3699.
39. Ansbacher, “Attitudes of German Prisoners,” pp. 12. 24; Peak, “Observations,” p. 34.
40. Data here not presented can be found in Karl-Heinz Reuband, “Das NSRegime zwischen Akzeptanz und Ablehnung: Eine retrospektive Analyse von Bevölkerungseinstellungen im Dritten Reich” in Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 2006.
41. For the 1948 figures, see Noelle and Neumann, Jahrbuch, p. 133f. Regarding the subsequent development, see David Conradt, “Changing German Political Culture,” in Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, eds., The Civic Culture Revisited (Boston, 1980), pp. 212–272; Jürgen W. Falter, Kai Arzheimer, and Harald Schoen, “Rechtsextreme Orientierungen und Wahlverhalten,” in Wilfried Schubarth and Richard Stöss, eds., Rechtsextremismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Eine Bilanz (Opladen, 2001), pp. 220–246.
42. This is also confirmed by the postwar surveys that asked respondents to provide the most decisive factor for the popularity of National Socialism. In a nationwide survey conducted by the Allensbach Institute in June 1950, it was asked, in an open-ended question, without any possible responses provided, “What, in your opinion is the most important reason for the National Socialists coming to power in 1933?” In first place with 32 percent was the economic situation (unemployment, etc.). This was followed by 28 percent who made positive statements regarding the National Socialist program and the personage of Adolf Hitler. This includes, inter alia, his perceived determination to improve the population’s situation. In third place with 23 percent was the failure of democracy in the Weimar Republic. See Noelle und Neumann, Jahrbuch, 134. Although the respondents were not necessarily eligible to vote in 1933, their statements at least reflect the predominant orientations.
43. On elections, see Falter, Wähler; on Nazi Party membership, see W. Brustein, The Social Origins of the Nazi Party, 1925–1933 (New Haven, 1996).
1. Ludwig Eiber, “Verfolgung,” in Wolfgang Benz, ed., Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus, 4th ed. (Munich, 2001), p. 285.
2. Interview Dresden 1067.
3. Bernd Dörner, “Heimtücke”: Das Gesetz als Waffe. Kontrolle, Abschreckung, und Verfolgung in Deutschland, 1933–1945 (Paderborn, 1998), p. 9.
4. For the strong leftist political base in Saxony, see Clemens Vollnhals, “Der ges-paltene Freistaat: Der Aufstieg der NSDAP in Sachsen,” in Clemens Vollnhals, ed., Sachsen in der NS Zeit (Leipzig, 2000), 9–40; and Verband der Verfolgten des Nazi-Regimes—Bund der Antifaschisten, eds., Unsere Heimat unterm Hakenkreuz (Pirna, 2003).
5. It is important to keep the year of a given event in perspective because we have determined that these figures are based on responses from people who for the most part became adults in the late 1930s and early 1940s and only then began to think much about their political environment. Most people who were old enough to describe the time when the Nazis came to power died long ago. But even when this fact is taken into consideration and the findings are broken up by age, a similar tendency still emerges.
6. For the case of Cologne, it can be shown that 58 percent of the cases dealt with by “special courts” (Sondergerichte) from 1933 to 1945 traced back to denunciations and 7 percent to anonymous accusations. The proportion attributable to the Gestapo or other National Socialist organizations amounts to 28 percent. Among Gestapo cases in Krefeld, the proportion of cases initiated by the Gestapo was higher than the proportion of denunciations in the early phase of Nazi society; from 1940 onward, however, it dropped to only half the proportion initiated by private denunciations. See Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York, 1999), p. 365.
7. Compare Karl-Heinz Reuband, “Denunziation im Dritten Reich: Die Bedeutung von Systemunterstützung und Gelegenheitsstrukturen,” in I. Marszolek and O. Stieglitz, eds., Denunziation im 20. Jahrhundert: Zwischen Komparatistik und Interdisziplinarität, special issue of Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 26, no. 2–3 (2001): 219–234.
8. Interview Cologne 4002.
9. A similar pattern is found among the respondents themselves, though a somewhat lower percentage of these people appear to have been punished. Thus of the combined total of thirty respondents in the Cologne and Krefeld surveys who were either arrested or interrogated, twenty reported on what the result of their cases had been. While nine (45 percent) of these people were soon let go after their initial arrest or interrogation, one was sent to a concentration camp, two were placed in “protective custody,” one was sent to jail, and the remaining seven reported other outcomes. Of course, no one completing the survey died in a concentration camp or was executed!
10. On Lichtenberg, see Ernst Klee, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat: Die Vernichtung leben-sunwerten Lebens, 10th ed. (Frankfurt, 2001), p. 357.
11. Compare Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 2001), pp. 51ff.; Sybil Milton, “Die Konzentrationslager der dreißiger Jahre im Bild der in- und ausländischen Presse,” in Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth, and C. Dieckmann, eds., Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager (Frankfurt/Main, 2002), 1:135–147.
12. Compare Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth, and C. Diekmann, “Die nationalsozialis-tischen Konzentrationslager: Geschichte, Erinnerung, Forschung,” in Die nationalsozial-istischen Konzentrationslager, p. 26. Work camps, known as “work education camps,” in which “work-shy” individuals and those who violated compulsory work programs were interned, existed in addition to concentration camps. There were more than 200 such camps with a capacity of almost 40,000 detainees. See Gabriele Lofti, KZ der Gestapo: Arbeitserziehungslager im Dritten Reich (Stuttgart, 2000).
13. Interview Krefeld 3488.
14. Interview Dresden 299.
15. Compare Herbert, Orth, and Diekmann, “Konzentrationslager,” p. 26. On the development of the concentration camp system, see also Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager: Eine politische Organisationsgeschichte (Hamburg, 1999).
16. Peter Hoffmann, Staufenberg und der 20 Juli 1944 (Munich, 1998), p. 50.
17. Interview Krefeld 3735.
18. Interview Berlin 804.
19. For an overview of such arguments and critiques, see, for example, Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallmann, eds., Die Gestapo: Mythos und Realität (Darmstadt, 1995).
20. Those who disseminated anti-Nazi fliers, helped persecuted individuals, or participated openly in resistance against National Socialism feared the Gestapo significantly more often than those who acted in conformity with the system. The highest percentage (85 percent) is found among those who had reasons for fearing the Gestapo (respondents who participated in active resistance in illegal organizations such as parties or unions).
21. Among the regular listeners, half began doing so in 1941; among the occasional listeners, two-thirds started listening to foreign broadcasting in 1941. The increasing distrust of German information sources concerning the war promoted this development. Further figures with regard to listening, based on other surveys, are found in Karl-Heinz Reuband, “Schwarzhören im Dritten Reich: Verbreitung, Erscheinungsformen, und Kommunikationsmuster beim Umgang mit verbotenen Sendern,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 41 (2001): 262f. Unfortunately the results are not always differentiated according to an exact point in time. However, one finds additional evidence here that listening to foreign broadcasts began for the most part during the war.
22. Interview Berlin 715A.
23. They totaled about 2 million people and thus constituted the largest system of political control in Nazi Germany. Among their tasks was to record the political orientation of household members in their files. See Detlev Schmiechen-Ackermann, “Der Blockwart,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 48 (2000), 575.
24. Interview Berlin 958.
1. See the article reprinted in Günther B. Ginzel, ed., “Das durfte keiner wissen!” Hilfe für Verfolgte im Rheinland von 1933 bis 1945 (Cologne, 1995), pp. 265f.
2. See Konrad Kwiet, “Nach dem Pogrom: Die Stufen der Ausgrenzung,” in Wolfgang Benz, ed., Die Juden in Deutschland, 1933–1945: Leben unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft (Munich, 1993), pp. 615ff., 621; regarding the repeated reminder to not have contact with Jews, see Karl-Heinz Reuband, “‘Jud Süß’ und der ‘Ewige Jude’ als Prototypen antisemitischer Film-Propaganda im Dritten Reich. Enstehungsbedingungen, Zuschauerstrukturen, und Wirkungspotentiale,” in Michael Andel and Detlef Brandes, eds., Propaganda, (Selbst)-Zensur, Sensation: Grenzen von Presse- und Wissenschaftsfreiheit in Deutschland und Tschechien seit 1871 (Essen, 2005), pp. 89–148.
3. Interview Cologne 4003.
4. Interview Berlin 958.
5. See Victor Klemperer, I will Bear Witness, vol. 2 (London, 1999), especially his diary entries for September 23 and 25, 1991; October 4, 1941; November 1, 8, 24, 1941; December 30, 1941; January 17, 1942; February 18, 1942. See also Inge Deutschkron, Ich trug den gelben Stern (Munich, 1985); David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism (Oxford, 1992), chap. 7.
6. Interview Krefeld 3975.
7.We did not ask about this in a systematic way. Such reactions developed in the context of the interviews.
8. Bankier, Final Solution, chap. 7.
9. The figures are presented in Elisabeth Noelle and Erich Peter Neumann, Jahrbuch der öffentlichen Meinung, 1947–1955 (Allensbach, 1956), p. 130. For a secondary analysis on the basis of a copy of the original data set, see Karl-Heinz Reuband, “Reaktionen der Deutschen auf die Einführung des Judensterns,” unpublished ms., Düsseldorf 2004.
10. Klemperer, Witness, diary entry for February 18, 1942.
11. Interview Krefeld 3596.
12. Interview Cologne 958.
13. Reprinted in Ginzel, Wissen, pp. 285f.
14. For a fuller discussion of the deportations in Cologne, see Dieter Corbach, Sechs Uhr ab Messe Köln-Deutz: Deportationen, 1938–1945 (Cologne, 2001); for Frankfurt, W. Wippermann, Das Leben in Frankfurt zur NS-Zeit, vol. 1, Die Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung: Darstellung Dokumente und didaktische Hinweise (Frankfurt, 1986); for Berlin, Beate Meyer, “Deportation,” in Beate Meyer and Hermann Simon, eds., Juden in Berlin, 1938–1945 (Berlin, 2000), pp. 171–178.
15.Wolf Gruner, Judenverfolgung in Berlin, 1933–1945 (Berlin, 1996), p. 13.
16. Compare Kurt Schilde, Versteckt im Tiergarten: Auf der Flucht vor den Nachbarn. Gedenkbuch für die im Bezirk in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus Untergetauchten (Berlin, 1995), p. 28; Hans Safrian, Eichmann und seine Gehilfen (Frankfurt/M, 1995).
17. Interview Krefeld 3145.
18. Interview Berlin 1008.
19. Interview Cologne 207.
20. Interview Berlin 672.
21. Interview Krefeld 3699.
22. Interview Krefeld 3238.
23. In Berlin alone there were, at the end of 1942, about two hundred firms employing more than fifteen thousand Jews. See Wolf Gruner, “Die Fabrik-Aktion und die Ereignisse in der Berliner Rosenstrasse: Fakten und Fiktionen um den 27. Februar 1943,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung (2002), p. 146.
24. See Eva Fogelman, Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (New York, 1994). For Germany, see especially Beate Kosmala and Claudia Schoppmann, eds., Überleben im Untergrund: Hilfe für Juden in Deutschland, 1941–1945 (Berlin, 2002); Wolfgang Benz, ed., Überleben im Dritten Reich: Juden im Untergrund und ihre Helfer (Munich, 2003).
25. For a summary by Herbert A. Strauss, Über dem Abgrund: Eine jüdische Jugend in Deutschland, 1918–1943 (Berlin, 1999), p. 299. Konrad Kwiet, for example, estimates the number for Germany as a whole at 20,000–25,000 Germans who helped Jews hide. See Kwiet, “Rassenpolitik und Völkermord,” in W. Benz, H. Graml, and H. Weiss, eds., Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus (Munich, 2001), p. 61. With about 10,000–15,000 and the helpers who were frequently named, one would have to place the figure somewhat higher.
26. See Walter Laqueur, Geboren in Deutschland: Der Exodus der jüdischen Jugend nach 1933 (Munich, 2000), p. 79.
27. Approximately 100,000 people were killed under the Nazi euthanasia program, a kind of precursor to the murder of the Jewish population. Of the respondents in our Cologne and Krefeld surveys, 37 percent say they either knew or heard about the killing and an additional 11 percent say that they had suspected it. In the Dresden survey, 39 percent say they knew or heard and another 11 percent suspected. We did not ask about this in the Berlin survey.
28. Thus some people who responded that they had been aware of the mass murder based their answers on less information than others. In addition to this, some people may have been confused when they gave their answers. In subsequent questions we asked about how and exactly when they had come to know about the mass murder. A few respondents said that they had first become aware after the war ended, even though they had previously answered that they became aware before the war ended.
29. In our nationwide telephone survey we asked the question as it had been asked in the surveys by the Allensbach Institute and found that 28 percent of the respondents had known something about the mass murder before the war’s end. The exact question we asked in the telephone survey was: “When did you first hear something about the mass destruction of the Jews?”
30. In 1961, the Allensbach Institute conducted the first of these surveys among people age 30 and older, and 32 percent answered yes. The respective figure was 34 percent in a survey of people age 60 and older conducted by the same institute in 1988. In 1995, a survey completed by FORSA based on respondents age 64 and older came up with a figure of 35 percent, and a survey by the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen based on respondents age 65 and older came up with a figure of 32 percent. In a survey taken in 1991, the Allensbach Institute arrived at a figure of 40 percent, but this must be considered an aberration because of the sampling techniques employed. For a fuller discussion of these surveys, see Karl-Heinz Reuband, “Gerüchte und Kenntnisse vom Holocaust in der deutschen Gesellschaft vor Ende des Krieges: Eine Bestandaufnahme auf der Basis von Bevölkerungsumfragen,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 9(2000): 196–233.
31.Weighing based on official statistics of the Census Bureau from 1938.
32. A further discussion is found in Karl-Heinz Reuband, “Zwischen Ignoranz, Wissen, und Nicht-Glauben-Wollen: Gerüchte über den Holocaust und ihre Diffusionsbedingungen in der Bevölkerung,” in B. Kosmala and C. Schoppmann, eds., Überleben im Untergrund: Hilfe für Juden in Deutschland, 1941–1945 (Berlin, 2002), pp. 33–62.
33. Interview Berlin 995.
34. See Reuband, “Jud Süß.”
35. Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook (New Brunswick, 2000).
36.Wilhelm Corsten, ed., Kölner Aktenstücke: Zur Lage der katholischen Kirche in Deutschland, 1933–1945 (Cologne, 1949), pp. 269, 303.
37. Breakdowns of the Cologne-Krefeld study by religious denomination show that there is much to say for the thesis of a pronounced sensitivity to the misdeeds of the Nazi regime among Catholics. In both Krefeld and Cologne, Catholics more frequently than Protestants said they learned something about the mass murder of Jews, regardless of whether the Catholic respondents had lived in either city before 1945.
38. Locals often outnumbered the German personnel involved in killing Jews, which in no way reduces the culpability of the Germans. See Dieter Pohl, Holocaust: Die Ursachen—das Geschehen—die Folgen (Freiburg, 2004), p. 133; on participation and cooperation, see also Robert Wistrich, Hitler und der Holocaust (Berlin, 2003), pp. 215ff.
39. Interview Cologne 696.
40. Interview Krefeld 3735.
41. Interview Berlin 672.
42. Interview Dresden 299.
43. Christopher Browning, Die Entfesselung der “Endlösung”: Nationalsozialistische Jugendpolitik, 1939–1942 (Munich, 2003), p. 595 on metal covering.
44. Interview Cologne 894.
45. Interview Berlin 1008.
46. Interview Berlin 772. Written memoir.
47. An estimated 5–6 million Jews were killed: 700,000 were killed in mobile gas vans, 1.3 million were shot, and 3 million were killed in the camps; the others died in ghettos due to starvation, illness, and other reasons. See Sybille Steinbacher, Auschwitz (Munich, 2004), p. 106. See also Raul Hilberg, Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden (Frankfurt, 1990), p. 1298.
48. Interview Cologne 472.
49. On the construction of “reality,” see Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, N.Y., 1967). On the dissemination of information, see Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovation (New York, 1995). On the structure of social networks, see M. Granovetter, “The Strength of the Weak: A Network Theory Revisited,” in Peter V. Marsden and Nan Lin, eds., Social Structure and Network Analysis (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1982), pp. 105–130.
50. In our Berlin survey, we also asked respondents if they knew anyone personally who had directly witnessed the murder of the Jews, and only 3 percent answered that they had.
51. Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York, 1999), pp. 441–450; p. 585 n. 34ff.; R. G. Reuth, Eine Biographie (Munich, 2000), p. 526. See also Jean Seaton, “The BBC and the Holocaust,” Journal of Communication (1987): 53–80; and Jeremy D. Harris, “Broadcasting the Massacres,” Yad Vashem Studies 25 (1996): 65–98.
52. BBC; Survey of the European Audiences, October 23, 1942, p. 6. National Archives, RG 208. (Stock 350, Row 73, Comp. 27, Entry 367, Box 255).
53. Interview Krefeld 3596.
54. Interview Dresden 1129.
55. Compare Martin F. Herz, “Psychological Lessons from Leaflet Propaganda in World War II,” in Daniel Katz and Darwin Cartwright, eds., Public Opinion and Propaganda (New York, 1954), p. 547; Wistrich, Hitler, pp. 262ff. In regard to the content of the fliers, see Reuband, “Gerüchte,” pp. 199ff.
56. Interview Cologne 4003.
57. Seven percent of the respondents mentioned 1939 and earlier, 10 percent mentioned 1940. Whether the respondents were thinking of mass killings in Poland or Jews killed in Kristallnacht or in the early concentration camps is not known. Systematic mass murder began in 1941.
1. Some people might consider that the best question to base our estimate on would be the question we asked about how the respondents first became aware of the mass murder of the Jews for we asked this question of all of the survey respondents in each of the four cities and because its answer requires less of a value judgment on the part of the respondents than did the question about whether they had known of, heard of, or suspected the mass murder. In the question dealing with their source of information, we gave the respondents a list of possible sources from which they might have “found out something” (etwas erfahren) about the mass murder before the end of the war and asked them to specify which source or sources, if any, from which they had first received information. Alternatively, had the respondents not received any information about the mass murder of the Jews before the end of the war, they were asked to make this clear to us by crossing off the last possible answer to the question, which stated: “I only first found out something after the war” (Habe erst noch dem Krieg etwas erfahren). When the answers the respondents gave to this question were tabulated (and when those who said that they had first found out about the mass murder while they were prisoners of war were controlled for), it turns out that 46 percent of the survey population in the four cities born before 1919 identified at least one source of information they had received about the mass murder while the war was still going on. While this figure of 46 percent, therefore, applies to the respondents who had reached adulthood before the war began, among the entire survey population the figure was 42 percent.
2. In large cities like ours the response rate in professionally done face-to face-surveys (such as the ALLBUS) in Germany is about 45 percent.
3.We did a test with different cover letters, either stressing the study as one on old age and living conditions or on the Third Reich. An identical questionnaire, containing several questions on other topics than the Third Reich, was included in both samples.
4.We had up to three reminders in our mailings and could group the results according to time of response.
5. There is no indication that the other available nationwide surveys on that topic have a disproportionate number of missing answers; see Reuband, “Gerüchte.”
6. The subsequent question on the year when they had heard confirmed this. In Cologne-Krefeld, for example, 28 percent of those with suspicions mentioned a year. Whether they thought of the year when they started their suspicions or had different interpretations remains unclear. Further questions reduced the number of knowl-edgeables among them even more.
7. In Cologne-Krefeld, e.g., 25 percent of those who had “heard” something wrote that they had heard about it only after the end of the war. We also constructed a consistency check variable based on four questions about knowledge and suspicion, and the overall percentage rate—measured by predominant tendencies—remained the same.
8. Even among those who were deported late—in 1944—(these are just three respondents), there are none who could clearly be seen as being informed before deportation.
9. See Christoph Rass, “Menschenmaterial”: Deutsche Soldaten an der Ostfront, (Paderborn 2003), pp. 92, 26, 100. In his study, 11 percent were born between 1921 and 1926, 68 percent between 1911 and 1920, 19 percent between 1901 and 1910, and 2 percent before 1900.