Doctor_Impossible_ t1_jbjfs3r wrote on March 9, 2023 at 2:11 PM

Reply to comment by pangs3798 in Weekly History Questions Thread. by AutoModerator

>Are the German populace aware during WWII that Hitler was murdering millions of Jews on the concentration camps during holocaust?

Yes. The concentration camps were an extensive network of thousands of sites, each one of which took in prisoners far in excess of what it could hold, over the course of the war. Guards, soldiers, and civilians took photographs, sent letters home, and talked with their families about what was going on. The bureaucracy handling the Holocaust itself, dealing with prisoner transfer, administration, cataloguing the belongings of those murdered, etc, was also tens of thousands of people. It was an enormous effort, and everyone in Germany, at some point, witnessed part of what was going on. The Nazis were mostly careful not to expose exactly what was happening, because of their earlier experience murdering people in the Aktion T4 programme, which roused protests, but the Germans knew people were being murdered.

Even if it hadn't been common knowledge and gossiped about everywhere (the first concentration camp, Dachau, opened in 1933), many people uncovered evidence of what was going on in concentration camps relatively early in the war (Witold Pilecki sent out reports in 1940, for instance), and this was sent on to other countries, including the UK, which announced the existence of the camps, and their real purpose, on the BBC world service in 1941.

>if yes, did they support that event?

It's difficult to characterise the German attitude to the Nazi government, but most Germans never actively opposed anything the Nazis did. The vast majority of Germans simply 'went along' with it, even if they privately disagreed. German resistance to Nazi actions was very, very sparse. There is precisely one protest we know about. Antisemitism was practically a national pastime, which served to quell a lot of dissent.

phillipgoodrich t1_jbowa8m wrote on March 10, 2023 at 4:30 PM

Significantly, the Germans of Weimar, after WWII, almost universally professed total ignorance of what was happening in the concentration camps of Germany and Eastern Europe. But....Buchenwald is approximately six miles from Weimar, and in the last two years of the war, as the work forces were rapidly depleted to replenish the military losses, prisoners in shackles were brought to the local factories, standing side-by-side at assembly lines with civilian workers. How those workers could ever claim ignorance is known only to them now, but yes, of course they knew. They all knew.

But as to why it was tolerated, once an extremist group in any country takes control of the military, the civilian sector is rapidly subdued, and understands that the only two responses to authoritarian behavior are tolerance or extermination. That is an extremely powerful motivation, be it in Nazi Germany, Egypt, Iran, China, Russia, or Uganda.