by Dan McMillan
Ley’s remarks sounded the keynotes of an intense anti-Semitic propaganda campaign that began in Germany during the second half of 1941 and continued for at least two years thereafter. Echoing Hitler’s fantasy of a Jewish conspiracy that controlled the Soviet, British, and American governments, the Nazi regime blamed the war on the Jews, who must now suffer dire consequences.20
This propaganda campaign was as massive in scale as it was bloodthirsty in its language. The claim that “the Jews” had caused the war and must perish because of it confronted the German people at every turn, not only in speeches by Hitler and other leading Nazis, but also in thousands of newspapers and periodicals that repeated the messages dictated to them on a daily basis by Hitler’s press chief, Otto Dietrich. Death threats against the Jews also screamed from “wall newspapers,” large posters featuring lurid headlines, eye-catching illustrations, and brief texts in large type. Entitled “Word of the Week,” no fewer than 125,000 of these wall newspapers were posted every week all across Germany from 1937 until the spring of 1943. Prominently displayed in locations as diverse as market squares, bus stops, hospital waiting rooms, and schools, these placards could hardly be avoided, and so every German must have encountered on many occasions the government’s death threats against the Jewish people. From 1940 to early 1943, roughly one-third of these wall newspapers accused the Jews of causing the war or used other radically anti-Semitic language.21
In countless ways this propaganda made it clear that “extermination” and “annihilation” were not vague metaphors for military defeat, but meant complete biological extinction: the Jews intended to exterminate the Germans, so Germans were forced to kill or be killed. For example, in August 1941 the regime began a propaganda initiative organized around the pamphlet Germany Must Perish, published in the United States in early 1941 by a certain Theodore Kaufman. Kaufman, an obscure crank, called for all Germans to be sterilized. German propaganda represented Kaufman’s rant as the policy of the American government. A German pamphlet released in September asked: “Who should die, the Germans or the Jews?” This pamphlet claimed that 20 million Jews lived around the world and suggested that they should be sterilized, rather than 80 million Germans, as Kaufman had proposed. “Then peace would be secured.” In November, every German family received with their ration cards a leaflet about Kaufman which proclaimed that “80 million cultured, industrious, decent German women, men, and children are to be exterminated.” In April 1943 German troops made a grisly find near the Russian city of Smolensk: the mass graves of more than 10,000 Polish officers who had been shot on Stalin’s orders in 1940. Gruesome newsreel footage of exhumed corpses underscored the recurring theme of German propaganda: if Germany were to lose the war, “Jewish Bolsheviks” would exterminate the German people.22
On January 30, 1942, the ninth anniversary of his taking power, Hitler invoked his “prophecy” of January 1939 that a world war would lead to the “annihilation of the Jewish race.” He promised “the disappearance of the Jews from Europe” and “the annihilation of Jewry.” Hinting at the unprecedented nature of the genocide that was by then well underway, Hitler declared: “For the first time, the genuine old-Jewish law will be applied: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!” He further promised his listeners that “the most evil world enemy of all time at least in the last thousand years will be finished off.” In May 1943 Robert Ley gave a speech to armaments workers that was broadcast by radio and also much commented upon in the press. “We swear,” Ley declared, “we will not give up the struggle until the last Jew in Europe is annihilated and is dead.”23
Though it is difficult to know how literally Germans interpreted such threats, there are several reasons why they should have taken them very seriously. The nationwide “Crystal Night” riots of November 1938, in which synagogues were burned in every German town that had one, had shown Germans something of the regime’s capacity for violence toward Jews. Second, Hitler and his minions had proclaimed, on countless occasions since 1933, that the presence of Jews constituted a “Jewish problem,” and that solving this “problem” was one of the regime’s highest priorities. By plunging his nation into a war that would claim the lives of more than 7 million Germans and tens of millions of other people, Hitler had shown that he would never hesitate to pursue the most violent solution available to anything he perceived as a problem. Finally, by constantly blaming the Jews for the war, by portraying Jews everywhere as Germany’s ultimate enemy and as the controlling power behind all other enemies, the regime marked them for death. After all, what does one do to one’s enemies in wartime, if not kill them?
Given how much information was available concerning the Holocaust, and in view of the regime’s constant death threats against the Jews, how could anyone not know about the Holocaust? The diary of Karl Dürkefälden, a worker in Lower Saxony, shows us how easily even a German who lacked government connections could learn about the murders. In February 1942, having read in the local press Hitler’s recent reference to his “prophecy” of the Jews’ annihilation, Dürkefälden noted that he thought such threats should be taken seriously. A few days earlier, he had heard the famed German author Thomas Mann on the BBC. Mann had reported that four hundred young Dutch Jews had been murdered with poison gas. Dürkefälden connected this report with Hitler having publicly threatened the Jewish people with extermination. In July a Dutch truck driver told Dürkefälden about the deportation of Dutch Jews, and a few months later he learned from the BBC that French Jews were being deported. In the fall of 1942 he recorded the accurate news from the BBC that the Germans had gassed Jews in vans. In January 1943, a soldier told him that Jews from France and other countries were being shot and gassed in Poland, and that only a tenth of the Jewish population in the Lithuanian city of Vilna was still alive. In June 1942, his brother-in-law, an engineer who had helped build a bridge near Kiev, described a mass shooting in graphic detail to him. Somewhat inflating the actual numbers, he told of 50,000 Jews buried on one occasion and 80,000 on another. On a later trip home from the front, he told Dürkefälden that no more Jews lived in Ukraine—they “were now all dead.”24
If Dürkefälden demonstrated how much a German could know, receiving information does not automatically mean that someone has knowledge. To truly gain knowledge, a person has to choose to think about the information he or she has encountered. Very many Germans, perhaps most, repressed information they received about the killing. We are all very good at not knowing something we do not want to know, at not thinking about something that troubles us but which we may feel powerless to change. For example, Ursula von Kardorff, an opponent of the regime, confided to her diary in January 1944 the news of a Jewish girl who had poisoned her mother to save her from deportation. “If only one knew what is happening to the Jews who have been deported,” she mused. Yet six months earlier she had written in her diary that someone who had been in the East had told her that Jews were being shot in front of mass graves. Helmuth James von Moltke, a leader of opposition to the Nazi regime, who later would pay for his courage with his life, gives us another example of repressed knowledge. Writing to his wife in October 1942, he told of a lunchtime conversation with a man who had come directly from occupied Poland, and who “told us on good authority about the ‘SS furnace.’ Until then I had not believed it, but he assured me that it was true: in this furnace 6,000 human beings are ‘processed’ daily.” Nonetheless, in March 1943, Moltke gave a different account in a letter he mailed in Sweden to a British agent. He described a camp for 40,000 to 50,000 people in Upper Silesia (where Auschwitz was located), and said that 3,000 to 4,000 people a month (as opposed to the 6,000 daily mentioned in his earlier letter) “are supposedly killed there. But this information reaches me, yes me, who is searching for such facts, in a rather vague, hazy and imprecise form.”25
Given the human capacity for repressing or ignoring unpleasant information, a German who lived during the war and who claims to have known nothing is not necessarily l
ying. Moreover, even the many Germans who did know something probably did not understand the radical scope of the Holocaust: the murder of every Jew in Europe. Only seldom can one find a diary entry comparable to one by Victor Klemperer, in which he concluded that the regime was indeed aiming at “the complete extermination of the Jews.” Klemperer was a former professor of romance languages and an unusually perceptive observer of the regime. Even Karl Dürkefälden, discussed above, who carefully recorded information about the murders, could not discern the policy’s unprecedented nature.26
Although rumors of murder by poison gas were widespread, very few people seem to have formed a picture of the death camps. This should surprise no one. Even today, after all that we have learned about the Holocaust, we find that places like Auschwitz and Treblinka stretch our imagination to its limits. Helmuth James von Moltke, whose militant opposition to the Nazis should have helped him see the depth of their depravity, could not accept a reliable account of the “SS furnace” burning 6,000 bodies a day. Therefore, those Germans who did not ignore the information they received probably knew of mass shootings, but not of death camps. Almost certainly they also recognized (or strongly suspected) that deportation meant death for their Jewish neighbors. How many Germans had this level of knowledge?27
Postwar surveys give at least a rough idea of how many Germans received information about the Holocaust while it was happening and who thought about it seriously enough that many years later they could remember hearing it. Professional polling organizations have conducted five surveys of representative samples of the German population. These surveys took place in 1961, 1988, 1991, 1995, and 1996. Every German questioned was at least fifteen years old when the war ended in 1945.28
In the first three surveys, polltakers interviewed their subjects face to face and asked them this question: “When did you hear, for the first time, something about the extermination. I don’t mean details, but rather just generally: that it was happening?” The 1995 survey, conducted over the phone, asked a more general question that is not so useful for our purposes: “When did you learn of the crimes of the Nazis?” This question thus did not refer directly to the Holocaust. The 1996 survey, likewise done over the phone, referred to the murder of the Jewish people and then asked, “Did you yourself learn something, did you, back then, hear something from others about it, or did you first learn of it after the war?”29
Despite the problem with the 1995 survey question, these five polls produced remarkably consistent results across a space of thirty-five years: about one-third of the respondents said they had heard about mass murder of Jews (or, in 1995, “Nazi crimes”) before World War II ended. A phone survey conducted by academic researchers in 2000 likewise suggested that about one-third had heard about the killing, as did a carefully constructed mail survey taken in the 1990s. If anything, this fraction understates the extent of Germans’ knowledge, because some respondents may have forgotten, while many others surely lied when they said that they had not known.30
People lie in surveys, concealing actions that might invite criticism, and overstating their tendency to engage in virtuous behavior. In surveys taken from the 1970s to the 1990s, for instance, Americans consistently underreported racist attitudes, use of illicit drugs and alcohol, smoking, abortion, energy consumption, and criminal acts. In turn, they consistently over-reported socially desirable behaviors such as voting and going to church. That said, one cannot simply assume that a large fraction of the survey respondents were unwilling to admit that they had known about the Holocaust while it was happening. One early postwar survey showed that Germans honestly reported their earlier membership in the Nazi Party, while a good half of respondents to a poll in the 1980s admitted their enthusiastic support for Nazism during at least some years of the Third Reich. Comparing the answers to the polls on knowledge of the Holocaust from different groups of respondents, one can argue that a significant number lied when they denied having known, though the evidence for this conclusion is far from dramatic. In any case, a third of the population or somewhat less still translates to 20 million or 25 million adult Germans who had substantial knowledge of the murders; nearly all of the rest could have known if they had chosen to think about the information they received.31
How did the German people react to this terrible knowledge? The most reasonable conclusion is that they were coldly indifferent to the fate of the Jewish people. Given how much information was available about the Holocaust during the war, the postwar surveys, which prove knowledge for only a third of the population, suggest that most Germans deliberately avoided thinking about the information they received, deciding to turn a blind eye and never processing the information into actual knowledge. As for those who thought about it enough to recognize that Jews were being murdered in great numbers, they, too, demonstrated their indifference, not only by not commenting negatively on the murders, but by not talking about the killing at all. Agents of the Nazi Party and German government reported constantly on public opinion and the main topics of discussion among the people, eavesdropping on conversations in bars or train stations and taking informal soundings from those whom they trusted. Amid the immense volume of these reports on public opinion, there is almost total silence about the Jews during the war years.32
Fear of the dreaded secret police (Gestapo) must account for the silence of some Germans. Postwar memoirs and testimony suggest that fear of the Gestapo was pervasive; in a mail survey from the 1990s, over a quarter of the respondents remembered having personally known someone who had been arrested or interrogated for political reasons, which also suggests that nearly everyone else must have at least heard rumors. By aggressively pursuing even the slightest signs of dissent from anti-Semitic policy, the Gestapo had made it abundantly clear that criticizing the persecution of the Jews would not be tolerated. Yet fear can hardly account for all of the silence, and probably not even for most of it. After all, since Nazi leaders loudly and frequently boasted that they were exterminating the Jewish people, it is difficult to see that Germans would regard the topic as taboo, as long as they did not openly criticize the regime. Since the government routinely blamed Jews for the suffering and privations Germans endured because of the war, Germans could have discussed the killing and blamed the victims for their own suffering, to insulate themselves from accusations of disloyalty to the regime. What is more, Germans frequently criticized other government policies in unvarnished terms. In Bavaria, for example, farmers openly rejected the continuation of the war and characterized the regime’s economic policy as a “swindle,” as deliberate exploitation for the benefit of Nazi Party bosses, who were seen as parasitic drones. Industrial workers in Bavaria likewise called Nazi economic policy a “swindle,” frequently complained of government corruption, and sharply criticized the Nazi Party leadership. Since fear of punishment cannot explain most Germans’ silence about the murders, the more likely explanation is that they did not care.33
Michael Müller-Claudius’s wartime survey of sixty-one Nazi Party members provides further evidence of German indifference toward the fate of Europe’s Jews. Müller-Claudius was a psychologist and carried out his poll in the fall of 1942. Without telling his subjects that he was conducting a survey, Müller-Claudius asked them their opinion of the regime’s Jewish policy. He prefaced his questions by stating that “the Jewish problem still hasn’t been cleared up,” and “we hear nothing at all about what sort of solution is imagined.” Müller-Claudius found that forty-two of these Nazis (69 percent of the sample) gave responses that he classified as “indifference of conscience.” Typical was one man who stated, “To be frank, I’ve heard some very unpleasant things, but are they true? How much can you believe of rumors, anyway? Nobody can test them, so it’s best to keep out of it.” Another advised Müller-Claudius to “have a cigarette instead. I’m busy 12 hours a day, and can’t be concerned with that as well. I need to keep all my thoughts on my work, and the rest of the time for relaxation.” Of the rest of his sample,
three people expressed open approval of the extermination program, while only three revealed what Müller-Claudius termed a “clear detachment from anti-Semitism.” Finally, thirteen showed some moral qualms, despite their patently anti-Semitic attitudes. These Nazis argued that the Jewish people should be given their own country; they agreed that the Jews had to be expelled from Germany, but said that they should not be killed.34
If tens of millions of adult Germans knew a good deal about the Holocaust while it was happening, could they have done anything to stop it? Put another way, if they had felt outrage, rather than indifference, at this monstrous crime, could their moral indignation have changed the course of history?
Hitler was obsessed with his own popularity and sometimes changed course when he was confronted with widespread dissent and unrest. The regime backtracked as a result of public opinion, for example, in its attacks on religious schooling and Catholic organizations, and in the “euthanasia” program to kill the frail and the disabled. However, as new research by Nathan Stoltzfus has shown, dissent that erupted into mass unrest could be most effective when it was rooted in the long-established traditions of family life and religious practice. Protest against the murder of the Jews could not rely on these advantages, however, except when it concerned German Jews who were married to Gentiles. What is more, given how aggressively the regime had intimidated and punished Germans who criticized the Jews’ persecution during the 1930s or showed them sympathy, it is easy to see why few Germans would have felt safe openly criticizing the killing. Finally, even massive unrest may not have been able to help the Jews, because in contrast to the euthanasia program, murdering the Jews of Europe was one of Adolf Hitler’s highest priorities. Indeed, after it dawned upon him that he would lose the war against his military enemies, winning his war against the defenseless Jews may well have been his most important goal.35