The German People Did Not Know

The claim is among the most thoroughly refuted in the historical literature. The killing of European Jewry was an open secret in wartime Germany. Soldiers on leave from the Eastern Front talked about the shootings; deportation transports of German Jews left visibly from German railway stations; the regime’s own propaganda referred to the killing in plain language; Hitler’s speeches openly discussed the destruction of European Jewry; the BBC German-language broadcasts and the underground Catholic and Protestant networks circulated specific information about the operations. The post-war German claim of universal ignorance was a self-protective fiction that has not survived the documentary record. The leading recent works on the question, by Bernward Dörner, Frank Bajohr, Peter Longerich and others, have documented the wide diffusion of knowledge across German society between 1941 and 1945.

The deportations from German cities

The deportation of German Jews to the East began in October 1941 and continued in repeated transports through 1942 and 1943. The deportations were not concealed from German civilians. They were conducted in plain view: the Jewish populations of Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Cologne, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Leipzig, Dresden and dozens of smaller cities were assembled at designated collection points, marched through the streets to the railway stations, loaded onto trains, and dispatched to the East. The collection-point process took place over hours or days at each location; neighbours, passers-by, railway workers, civil servants and police officers all witnessed it. Photographs of the deportations exist, taken by amateurs and by the regional Gestapo offices, and survive in numerous local archives.

The deportations resulted in the disappearance of the Jewish population from German cities, a fact that German civilians could not have failed to notice. Apartments were emptied; businesses were closed; the synagogues that had not been destroyed in 1938 were converted to other uses; the Jewish schools, the Jewish hospitals, the Jewish cultural institutions ceased to exist. The auctions of the property of the deported Jews, organised by the local finance offices and held in church halls and community centres across Germany, drew large numbers of buyers. Götz Aly’s Hitler’s Beneficiaries (2007) documented the auctions and the wide German civilian participation in them; the buyers knew where the property had come from.

The soldiers on leave

Approximately 18 million German men served in the Wehrmacht across the war, with millions on the Eastern Front in the period of the killing operations. Wehrmacht personnel were given regular leave (typically two to four weeks per year), during which they returned to their families in Germany. The soldiers had seen the killings, in many cases participated in them, and talked about them at home. The German army postal service (Feldpost) carried over 30 billion letters between the front and Germany during the war, with substantial numbers describing the killings. The Sicherheitsdienst’s own reports on civilian morale (the SD-Berichte aus dem Reich) recorded the spread of knowledge through soldier-civilian contacts.

The Feldpost letters surviving in private collections and in the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte in Stuttgart contain numerous explicit descriptions of the killing operations. Walter Manoschek’s “Es gibt nur eines für das Judentum: Vernichtung”: Das Judenbild in deutschen Soldatenbriefen 1939 bis 1944 (1995) collected and analysed approximately 100,000 such letters; the proportion containing references to the killing of Jews is substantial, and the letters’ tone is generally one of casual acknowledgement rather than horror. The Wehrmacht troops on leave knew; their families knew; their letters home documented their knowing.

The SD reports on rumours

The SD-Berichte aus dem Reich, the Sicherheitsdienst’s regular reports on civilian opinion across Germany, recorded the spread of knowledge about the killing in remarkably explicit terms. The SD compiled the reports from informants across the country and distributed them to senior officials including Himmler, Bormann and (selectively) Hitler. The reports across 1942 and 1943 record the public circulation of stories about mass shootings in the East, about gassings of Jews in Polish camps, about the disappearance of deported populations. The reports identify these stories as widespread, identify their sources (returning soldiers, BBC broadcasts, foreign worker contacts), and discuss the regime’s options for responding. The reports are now published in the multi-volume edition by Heinz Boberach. They show a regime fully aware that the operation was not secret.

The Allied broadcasts

The BBC German Service broadcast specific information about the killing of Jews from 1941 onwards. Thomas Mann’s broadcasts on the BBC from California in 1941 to 1945 explicitly named the operations. The Vrba-Wetzler Report on Auschwitz, transmitted to the Allies in May 1944, was broadcast in summary form on the BBC German Service in June and July 1944. Listening to foreign broadcasts was illegal in Germany but extensively practised; the post-war polling of German civilians indicates that approximately 30 to 40 per cent of the population listened to foreign radio at some point. The information was available to those who chose to seek it.

The post-war polling

The post-war US Office of Strategic Services and US Army surveys of German civilian populations in 1945 to 1946 included direct questions about wartime knowledge of the Jewish killings. The surveys, summarised in Anna J. Merritt and Richard L. Merritt, Public Opinion in Occupied Germany: The OMGUS Surveys 1945 to 1949 (1970), found that approximately 32 per cent of respondents in the US zone admitted to having known specifically about the killing of Jews during the war, with a further 30 per cent admitting to having heard rumours. The proportion was likely higher in reality (post-war respondents had every incentive to deny knowledge). The combined figure of approximately 60 per cent of respondents acknowledging at least rumour-level awareness contradicts the universal-ignorance claim.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it provides a moral cover for the post-war German claim that the wartime population was ignorant of and uninvolved with the killing. The recent historical work has shown the claim to be untenable. The German population of the wartime period knew, in varying degrees and with varying specificity, that the deported Jews were being killed in the East. The knowledge was not universal in detail, but it was widespread in substance. The post-war reconstruction of universal ignorance was a moral evasion; the deniers’ continuation of the claim is the perpetuation of that evasion. Recognising the actual diffusion of wartime knowledge does not require condemning every individual German; it requires accepting that the knowledge existed and that the moral framework of universal innocence is incorrect.

What did the Wehrmacht soldiers’ Feldpost letters say? What did the SD reports on civilian opinion record? What did the post-war US surveys find?

See also

• Adolf Hitler
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Sources

• Bernward Dörner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust: Was niemand wissen wollte, aber jeder wissen konnte, Propyläen, 2007
• Frank Bajohr and Dieter Pohl, Der Holocaust als offenes Geheimnis: Die Deutschen, die NS-Führung und die Alliierten, C. H. Beck, 2006
• Peter Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!”: Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933 bis 1945, Siedler, 2006
• Heinz Boberach (ed.), Meldungen aus dem Reich: Die geheimen Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS 1938 bis 1945, 17 volumes, Pawlak, 1984
• Walter Manoschek (ed.), “Es gibt nur eines für das Judentum: Vernichtung”: Das Judenbild in deutschen Soldatenbriefen 1939 bis 1944, Hamburger Edition, 1995
• Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, Metropolitan Books, 2007
• Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, Oxford University Press, 1998, on the visibility of the deportations
• Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, Oxford University Press, 2001
• Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany, Basic Books, 2005, with the post-war survey data
• Anna J. Merritt and Richard L. Merritt, Public Opinion in Occupied Germany: The OMGUS Surveys 1945 to 1949, University of Illinois Press, 1970
• Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939 to 1945: The Years of Extermination, HarperCollins, 2007
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “What Did Ordinary Germans Know about the Holocaust?”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org