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I don't think this question is really about Nazism. I think it's about the role of the German people in the Holocaust. One driving force in how Germans think ab

I don't think this question is really about Nazism. I think it's about the role of the German people in the Holocaust. One driving force in how Germans think about it is the 'clean hands Wehrmacht' idea - simply, that the really evil, anti-semetic and genocidal aspects of the Nazis were carried out by a small minority of fanatics, and the larger body of German society was unaware, unenthusiastic, and largely uninvolved. In this account, the Germans were among the victims of Nazism - it's a view really typified by the Reichstag Dome - where you can literally walk over, and look down on, the Bundestag. This dome was inaugurated as an expression of the idea that the german people should 'never again' be under the state. Obviously, this kind of stuff is very comforting when you have to go to visit Grandfather Klaus, because he was (after all) a victim, rather than a perpetrator - and you can buy your good german products made by good german companies, and if they have a somewhat dark and disturbing past, you can remind yourself that they too were victims, in a sense. Except, of course, it's not true. The Nazis were hugely popular with german voters. Anti-Semitism was, if anything, more popular still. The Holocaust largely consisted of massacres by normal german soldiers, and the Germans had explicitly genocidal aims in major policies (e.g. operation Barbarossa + 'lebensraum'). I don't think denialist arguments need to be taken into consideration when thinking of the holocaust. They are obviously ridiculous. What does need to be taken into consideration is the way in which Germans, and German culture, aimed to shield itself from its own pathological underbelly, while keeping hold of the economic spoils. After the war, everybody who was anybody had been a Nazi. Many companies were literally founded by the Nazis (VW) or got their big breaks under the Nazis (addidas, for instance). Everybody who was in the film industry cut their teeth on propaganda films for the Nazis. One of the most awful consequences of this is the fact that, after the Allies left, most of the Nazis who had escaped execution in the Nuremburg trials were released, and those who had not been caught yet, were generally not prosecuted. If you read through the list of administrative personnel in a concentration camp, the majority usually escaped prosecution, or received short sentences (I recommend checking out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treblinka_trials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treblinka_trials - three years! For operating a gas chamber! And remember, it takes many more than ten people to run a camp. Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belzec_trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belzec_trial - Of eight people they actually brought to trial, only one was sent to prison! Here you can actually see the 'clean hands wehrmacht' logic - they were all 'acting under duress!'). The West German unwillingness to find and prosecute the greatest criminals in history is the kind of thing any nation should be ashamed of, except instead, we just hear a lot of pretentious nonsense about 'remembrance culture'. The reality is, forget the average Wehrmacht soldier - if you were an SS officer employed at a concentration camp, and you avoided the soviets, and you didn't get hanged by the Allies, your chances of avoiding serious legal consequences were very good.

himinlomax 6y ago
> The Nazis were hugely popular with german voters They were not that popular with voters, just popular enough. After that there were no more votes. But that's a nitpick. In any case, there's nothing diminishing the importance of antisemitism in my argument. Rounding up the Jews in the first place clearly was a massive crime and done in plain sight, and with the complicity of the population. It's the ensuing extermination that I argue was hidden, lest it would have been too unpalatable for too many people.
- pasabagi 6y ago
  >too unpalatable for too many people And this is, I think, totally wrong. The soldiers in the Wehrmacht and SS are a representative section of the German population at the time. They are a far larger percentage of the population than you'd need for a representative poll. And, despite having no real consequences for refusal (no German soldier was never executed or severely punished for refusing to kill jews) most not only took part in the holocaust, but went above and beyond what was required of them, piling on cruelty above and beyond what their orders demanded. I don't think Germans are the only ones to blame, that said. German soldiers were helped in the pogroms in Poland by ordinary citizens, for instance, many of whom took active parts in torturing and murdering their neighbors. I would imagine the only reason why this was not also common in Germany proper is that there were simply far less jews there, and most of them were already incarcerated by this point in the war. I also think a lot of your argument rests on a dubious idea of what constitutes 'knowledge of the Holocaust'. If we're talking about specific knowledge of how operations at Auschwitz worked, I would imagine all the Nazis not directly involved (perhaps even Hitler!) would be 'innocent'. Knowledge of the camps existence was, on the other hand, commonplace[1]. Knowledge of the extermination program was explicit amongst superior officers, but equally, not at all uncommon amongst ordinary people, many of whom took a part in the project (doctors, for instance, with the euthanasia program). The link has some interesting reading about how the extermination policy did in polls - it was more popular than the CDU is today, for instance. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_for_the_Holocaust#German_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_for_the_Holocau...
  - 6y ago

himinlomax 6y ago

> The Nazis were hugely popular with german voters They were not that popular with voters, just popular enough. After that there were no more votes. But that's a nitpick. In any case, there's nothing diminishing the importance of antisemitism in my argument. Rounding up the Jews in the first place clearly was a massive crime and done in plain sight, and with the complicity of the population. It's the ensuing extermination that I argue was hidden, lest it would have been too unpalatable for too many people.

pasabagi 6y ago
>too unpalatable for too many people And this is, I think, totally wrong. The soldiers in the Wehrmacht and SS are a representative section of the German population at the time. They are a far larger percentage of the population than you'd need for a representative poll. And, despite having no real consequences for refusal (no German soldier was never executed or severely punished for refusing to kill jews) most not only took part in the holocaust, but went above and beyond what was required of them, piling on cruelty above and beyond what their orders demanded. I don't think Germans are the only ones to blame, that said. German soldiers were helped in the pogroms in Poland by ordinary citizens, for instance, many of whom took active parts in torturing and murdering their neighbors. I would imagine the only reason why this was not also common in Germany proper is that there were simply far less jews there, and most of them were already incarcerated by this point in the war. I also think a lot of your argument rests on a dubious idea of what constitutes 'knowledge of the Holocaust'. If we're talking about specific knowledge of how operations at Auschwitz worked, I would imagine all the Nazis not directly involved (perhaps even Hitler!) would be 'innocent'. Knowledge of the camps existence was, on the other hand, commonplace[1]. Knowledge of the extermination program was explicit amongst superior officers, but equally, not at all uncommon amongst ordinary people, many of whom took a part in the project (doctors, for instance, with the euthanasia program). The link has some interesting reading about how the extermination policy did in polls - it was more popular than the CDU is today, for instance. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_for_the_Holocaust#German_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_for_the_Holocau...
- 6y ago