Monday, 25 January 2016

German people and the Holocaust

‘The German people were fully aware of the Holocaust and did nothing
to prevent it’. How valid is this view of the Final Solution and the German
population?
- The knowledge of the Holocaust by 1943 was widespread.
- The difficulties for historians are as follows:
* What does knowledge mean? How much did people know?

* How much did people believe?

* How did information spread?

- Richard J Evans states that the Holocaust was an open secret by 1943. This means
that anyone who wanted to know could know, but no one wanted to know.
- How can we interpret this? Richard J Evans suggests that this was an immense moral
problem for Germans and they preferred to ignore it, knowing they could not do
anything about it anyway.
- As the war became more of a disaster for Germany, many Germans focused on their
own problems and the question of survival, food, housing and the hazards of
bombing. After the war they came to see it as a German tragedy.
- It may well be fair to say they did nothing to prevent the Holocaust, but it implies that
there was something they could have done.
- Ian Kershaw argues that the German people in the last two years of the war were
stuck with the regime. His argument in the book The End is that there were no
alternatives to Hitler by 1944, and that the fear of the approaching Red Army made
dissent unthinkable.
- Large parts of the population might have been unwilling to acknowledge the Holocaust
because they were connected to it or benefitted from it.

* Housing: People who had been bombed out in cities like Hamburg took apartments
and clothes from the city’s Jewish population.

* Industry: Massive companies like Krupp and IG Farben used slave labour and profited
from the Holocaust, meaning that thousands of workers were potentially implicated in
the crimes.

* Personal guilt: Millions of Germans had actively been involved if not directly in the
Holocaust then in anti Semitic actions and had anti Semitic attitudes.

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 Monday, 25 January 2016
- Announcements by the Allies: In 1943 it was announced by Britain and America that
they would only accept unconditional surrender and that the regime would be put on
trial for its crimes after the war. This meant that many Germans felt more desperate to
defend the regime no matter what.
- On the other hand there were moments of defiance both within Germany and across
occupied Europe during the war.

* Rosenstrass Protests

* The rescue of Denmark’s Jews

* The bomb plot (which was in part motivated by Henning Von Tresckow’s disgust at the
treatment of Poles, Russians and Jews).