POLL: The Holocaust - Responsibility

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Morgoroth,

You wrote:
I am aware that it is a very difficult matter when judging how much the average Germans knew. But there were many towns near concentration camps in Germany they lived around the camps and had direct view into them, yet they hesitated to act. Not that I blame them for it.

I respond:

There was only one camp inside Germany proper, Dachau, outside Munich. It was a very small camp and specialized in killing Catholic priests and religious (though it killed Jews and others also). Malthausen (sp?) was in Austria, but otherwise, most of the camps were in occupied Poland, especially the big ones like Auschwitz. It seems that the Nazis generally wanted to keep this ugly business away from the eyes of the German people.

My guess as to why Dacau was located in Catholic Germany and specialized in Catholic religious was the Nazis wanted to rub Catholic noses into it. The Catholics in Germany had provided the major resistance to the rise of Hitler in the Weimar Republic and Hitler hated the Catholic Church almost as much as he hated Jews. I am currently reading a book called "Christ in Dachau" written by a priest who survived. One interesting thing he wrote is that the Nazis reserved the worst treatment for Jews and Catholic priests, much worse than other groups received. Gassing was too good for Jews and priests, since it was a quick, and relatively painless, death. The preferred method of execution was starvation.

We will probably never know just how much the average German knew. My best guess is he/she knew that something nefarious was up, but probably did not have any idea about the scale on which it was being done.

 

There were quite a number of concentrations camps in Germany, like the infameous camp Bergen Belsen, after all the Nazis set them up right after they took power to crack down on prominent communists or social democrats and other prominent politicians, as well as minorities like homosexuals, gypsies and the whatever else the Nasis hated.

The death camps, however, were indeed located in the East. Insofar your conclusion is likely right on target - they indeed wanted it kept secret from the Germans after the killing of handicapped people had to be stopped after it became public. IIRC there is even a protocol from the Wannsee conference making that point.

And just one more thing: Before the war, my grandma worked as a cook for a jewish family. One day they were gone over night and when she went to the authorities and asked for their whereabouts she received an implicit threat: That she as a mother with children should know better than to get herself in trouble. After all, it was added, she looked pretty jewish with her black curly hair. After that she didn't ask anymore.

Everyone knew a concentration camp was a terrible place, and sure as hell no one wanted to get there - and the people who were released very much helped to spread the terror. That was calculated by the Nazis.

But no one really wanted to believe that Germans were doing something as unspeakable as to 'eradicate' people in there.

That is very much like the American refusal to face that Abu Ghraib and Gitmo are despicable things and that they are wrong and have to stop. After all, Americans are doing it and as they are the good guys - it can't be THAT bad, it's just 'abuse' after all.

Well, it is THAT bad. Not THAT bad, but THAT bad.

 

Wow, I touched off quite a ruckus mentioning that book. While I am not as steeped in primary sourework as many of you seem to be, I do think that the following points are accurate:

1: Anti-Semitism was around in pretty well ALL of Europe for a long time before Hitler came along.

2: That Anti-Semitism FREQUENTLY exploded into violence, again all over Europe. The Crusaders sometimes took little side trips to kill off Jews, and Russia does not have a sterling record in their policies regarding Jewry.

3: At the time of the Holocaust, Anti-Semitism was alive and well in not only Europe but also North America.

4: Despite that fact that I believe many people honestly entered the war for the sake of stopping the Holocaust, the primary reasons for many states entering the war were economic and political; if the Western powers had cared about the fate of Jewry and the other targetted groups, they would have intervened in the 30s when Hitler was stripping them of nearly all their rights.

Those are points I believe to be incontrovertible (sic). Now comes some opinions:

I don't believe that Germans were any more or less anti-Semitic than many other Europeans. Conversely, I really don't buy the idea that they "had no idea" and that the Holocaust was perpetrated by only a select few people. That sounds to me like a cop-out. The fact remains that organized, mechanical slaughter of people DID occur in Germany (though it certainly isn't limited to there . . .)

Logically speaking, though, blaming the Germans living NOW for the actions of their fathers is non-sensical, Biblical quotes about the seventh generation notwithstanding.