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>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 popul

>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...

himinlomax 6y ago
I'm well aware of the crimes of the Wehrmacht, and I implied as much when I mentioned how they executed rural Jewish populations in Soviet territory. As I said earlier, there is a big difference between what people can be made to do in the heat of the action compared to when people have time to think. There's intense peer pressure and training that stresses compliance. They had been under fire recently, which made them more willing to kill. There's the escalation of engagement, where you've been killing people for a while already, so murdering civilians is, in a way, merely an extension. > I would imagine all the Nazis not directly involved (perhaps even Hitler!) would be 'innocent'. I'm not arguing in terms of guilt or innocence; it's a rather pointless exercise. But if I really must, then the Germans were certainly guilty of persecuting, despoiling and rounding up the Jews in concentration camps. As such, they were ultimately guilty for the extermination that this made possible.
- pasabagi 6y ago
  > As such, they were ultimately guilty for the extermination that this made possible. The wording here is kind of insane. The germans did the extermination. They didn't make it possible for some other group to do it. Just because not everybody involved can literally be throwing the cans of gas through the trapdoor does not mean that all the masses people in all strata of society directly involved in its planning and execution were not culpable. Doctors who sent their patients to the gas chambers did not do so 'under fire'. I think arguments like yours would hold much more weight if they hadn't tacitly legitimized the holocaust in the post-war era, by not prosecuting even the worst and most awful monsters of the system. If the German people were truly shocked and horrified about what had happened, then surely they would have made a bigger effort to make sure that the people who had done these shocking and awful things were recognized as the criminals they were, rather than just saying they were 'under duress', if they even bothered to bring them to trial. The real thing that bothers me about the German reaction to the Holocaust is not the guilt or innocence of specific parties. It is this idea - 'under duress', under which the Germans have fashioned themselves this whole idea that they were unwittingly involved in monstrous acts, or terrified into submission by a small group of crazy people, so they don't have to confront the actual horror of what they did. If the Germans had been half so serious about dismantling the Nazi state as they were about dismantling the DDR, you can bet there would be no VW today, there would be no 'under duress', there would be no smooth transition from the Nazi party to west-german beamter (there certainly was no such transition for east german beamters). The whole German state would have had to be re-built from scratch, and it would have been better for it.

himinlomax 6y ago

I'm well aware of the crimes of the Wehrmacht, and I implied as much when I mentioned how they executed rural Jewish populations in Soviet territory. As I said earlier, there is a big difference between what people can be made to do in the heat of the action compared to when people have time to think. There's intense peer pressure and training that stresses compliance. They had been under fire recently, which made them more willing to kill. There's the escalation of engagement, where you've been killing people for a while already, so murdering civilians is, in a way, merely an extension. > I would imagine all the Nazis not directly involved (perhaps even Hitler!) would be 'innocent'. I'm not arguing in terms of guilt or innocence; it's a rather pointless exercise. But if I really must, then the Germans were certainly guilty of persecuting, despoiling and rounding up the Jews in concentration camps. As such, they were ultimately guilty for the extermination that this made possible.

pasabagi 6y ago
> As such, they were ultimately guilty for the extermination that this made possible. The wording here is kind of insane. The germans did the extermination. They didn't make it possible for some other group to do it. Just because not everybody involved can literally be throwing the cans of gas through the trapdoor does not mean that all the masses people in all strata of society directly involved in its planning and execution were not culpable. Doctors who sent their patients to the gas chambers did not do so 'under fire'. I think arguments like yours would hold much more weight if they hadn't tacitly legitimized the holocaust in the post-war era, by not prosecuting even the worst and most awful monsters of the system. If the German people were truly shocked and horrified about what had happened, then surely they would have made a bigger effort to make sure that the people who had done these shocking and awful things were recognized as the criminals they were, rather than just saying they were 'under duress', if they even bothered to bring them to trial. The real thing that bothers me about the German reaction to the Holocaust is not the guilt or innocence of specific parties. It is this idea - 'under duress', under which the Germans have fashioned themselves this whole idea that they were unwittingly involved in monstrous acts, or terrified into submission by a small group of crazy people, so they don't have to confront the actual horror of what they did. If the Germans had been half so serious about dismantling the Nazi state as they were about dismantling the DDR, you can bet there would be no VW today, there would be no 'under duress', there would be no smooth transition from the Nazi party to west-german beamter (there certainly was no such transition for east german beamters). The whole German state would have had to be re-built from scratch, and it would have been better for it.