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I couldn’t read the whole thing, but as a Jew whose relatives and culture was murdered by the Germans, I found it did not adequately address the reality that ma

by ihm 6y ago

I couldn’t read the whole thing, but as a Jew whose relatives and culture was murdered by the Germans, I found it did not adequately address the reality that many Germans knew about the camps (to say nothing of the progroms and humiliations that preceded them) and that the people who perpetrated the Holocaust were in large part incorporated unreformed into German society after the war. The speech reads > Yet with every day something became clearer, and this must be stated on behalf of all of us today: the 8th of May was a day of liberation. It liberated all of us from the inhumanity and tyranny of the National-Socialist regime. Maybe this rang true to many Germans of 1985, I can’t know. But the historical fact is (just to take an example) the post war German government was staffed with individuals who served at high positions in the Nazi regime and surely believed in, or at least we’re comfortable with, the Nazi cause. I’m sure in the private sector there were even more unreformed Nazis. It also seems to suggest that the German people couldn’t know what atrocities were being committed, which it was well known what was going on. Both the camps and the progroms and public humiliations visited upon Jews and others. EDIT: I take the criticism of some of the commenters below that not all Germans knew the full extent of the mass murder. So the whole speech rings hollow to me, and it’s purpose mostly seems to be to assuage the guilt of an entire population responsible for truly horrific acts. Which, yeah, the Germans would need that in order to be able to move forward, but the comments here are definitely not understanding the speech in that critical light.

snlOAkk 6y ago
The majority of issues with Nazis in government positions and industry had been addressed (partly of course, best effort ...) during the student revolts 1968-197x. There was one case where an activist slapped a politician in the face and many similar things. That generation became teachers from 1975 on, and public education was intensely focused on the history 1933-1945, sometimes to the exclusion of other periods. (I find that U.S. people are much better informed about Roman history than I am.) > Maybe this rang true to many Germans of 1985. It did, the speech was largely preaching to the choir.
Tomte 6y ago
That's interesting, and I can certainly see your point. But back then the speech was considered to be brave, not preaching to the choir. Throughout the sixties and seventies Germans had a tendency to paint themselves the victims. Maybe not as much as the Jews, but still, the Allied Occupation was so terrible, Red Armists raping every woman, woe be us. Weizsäcker drew lots of criticism for articulating the point that the Third Reich wasn't some pretty well-functioning state with just the little side-effect of mass murder. That the Allies shouldn't have been so harsh, why couldn't they just remove the concentration camps and let society go on? He saw the Nazi rule as an imposition on the German people, not in way of exculpation, but as a way to accept the defeat and move on, trying to build a better world. You're right that most Germans knew about the atrocities. Research is very clear on that point. But it wasn't really emotionally accepted, especially in conservative circles. That speech was one little turning point, as was Brandt's fall to his knees (tabloids labelled him a traitor, for something that seems obviously right now). I suppose he could have been more direct. But I suspect he and his people had gauged the public sentiment very well. Say too much, and nobody cares about what you said. Say too little, and you're not doing anything. The speech had a huge impact, and I guess that proves it right, maybe not from an absolute ethical point of view, but from a political and contemporary point of view.
SuoDuanDao 6y ago
>It also seems to suggest that the German people couldn’t know what atrocities were being committed, which it was well known what was going on. On this point, as someone whose grandparents lived through the German side of WW2, I am convinced it's allied propaganda used to justify the collective guilt of the German people. I don't doubt it was well known to the Jewish population in America at the time, but any news of that nature would have been easy to dismiss as the other side's slander to the German on the ground. People today barely know what happened in Abu Graib, and that's with modern communications technology.
- goto11 6y ago
  Why would anyone dismiss it as slander? Eradication of Jews had been the stated goal of the Nazi party from the beginning. Progroms like kristallnacht was used as propaganda for the Nazi party. The Nuremberg laws was a matter of public record.
  - SuoDuanDao 6y ago
    Again, that does not ring true given the conversations I've had with people alive at the time. Jewish people were scapegoated for the destruction of the German economy. Not everyone who accepted that narrative would have believed death was a just response. Any competent propagandist would have left the question of what a proper response was open so people would have imagined that what they thought was proper would happen. The closest modern equivalent I can think of would be Occupy Wall Street. If the leaders of OWS had formed their own political party in the wake of the 2008 bailouts and ridden a wave of public anger into office, they would have probably had the political capital to seize all bankers' assets as stolen goods and hold them to await trial. It would have taken an order of magnitude more political capital to simply start executing them without trial.
    - goto11 6y ago
      > Again, that does not ring true given the conversations I've had with people alive at the time. Have you considered that these people might have an interest in downplaying how much they knew? > The closest modern equivalent I can think of would be Occupy Wall Street. You should be ashamed of yourself for making that comparison.
Koshkin 6y ago
Trivia: A part of the guard at Nuremberg trials in 1946 was staffed with the former Waffen-SS personnel.
coldcode 6y ago
Saying that the German people all knew of what was being done is not historical, nor the experience of my family. When my great grandparents were taken from their home in 1943 along with all the other Jews in town (other than my Grandmother who was married to a non-Jew, and my mother) they had no idea where they were being taken. Of course they all died but no one had any idea until after the war was over and even today we can only speculate exactly where. My grandmother later survived a year in a camp, and my mom hid in a basement for year as a child. No one in their small town had any inkling of what was happening inside Germany other than what the propaganda was telling them, although there were people with hidden radios in town, even the Allies did not say anything useful. To say everyone knew is incorrect; to imagine you could change things if you knew is also wrong. Can we today stop our government from cramming children into cages and then forgetting them? Yet we have modern media and still horrific things are done in our name and we either ignore it or feel helpless to do anything. History is bad enough without changing it just because we have moved beyond, nor is forgetting its lessons and winding up in the same boat again. Guilt belongs to the guilty not the collective; it's up to the collective to ensure it never happens again and keep the guilty from getting away.
- ihm 6y ago
  > To say everyone knew is incorrect; to imagine you could change things if you knew is also wrong. Can we today stop our government from cramming children into cages and then forgetting them? Yet we have modern media and still horrific things are done in our name and we either ignore it or feel helpless to do anything. I agree with this point and take your criticism that I painted with too broad a brush in terms of who could know what.
  - goto11 6y ago
    Careful now. Everybody knew the Jews were persecuted, had their rights and belongings taken away and were rounded up in ghettos and camps, from where they eventually were "evacuated to the East". What civilians could justifiably claim is they didn't know where or how the killing happened. Information about this was kept vague. While the concentration camps where public knowledge, the extermination camps were kept secret. So German civilians could say they didn't know about Babi Yar or Treblinka and the gas chambers - but that is a far cry from saying they didn't know about the persecution and genocide. It should also be noted that the T4 euthanasia program was scaled back due to public protests. This shows not only that people actually knew it happened (even if it was kind-of secret) but also that protest could actually work. The Nazi party actually cared a great deal about public opinion which is why propaganda was so important to them. One of the reasons the extermination camps were kept secret is they feared protests. There were also the Rosenstrasse protests, where (non-Jewish) wives of Jewish men protested against deportation of their men. This actually caused the men to be released. So "we didn't know and couldn't have done anything anyway" is ahistorical. I can understand why people cling to it, but it is a dangerous myth.
barking 6y ago
You need to ask what would you have done before condemning the German people. It's easier to believe the "safe" truth even if you have doubts about it than set yourself up for a knock on the door and a trip to a concentration camp as happened to very many Germans, both before and during the war. Most of us are cowards and wouldn't intervene if someone was being mugged on a public street. How much more courage does it take to stand up to a totalitarian regime.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Could you cite the claim that the broad German population knew about the extermination camps qua extermination camps before spring 1945? Of course the average German would have been familiar with the idea of concentration camps, because Germany had begun to put Communists into such camps already in the 1930s and this was well-publicized. But when the Nazi leadership adopted the Final Solution at the Wannsee Conference in early 1942 and concentration camps became extermination camps, Germany was already under heavy wartime press censorship. The people living around the camps would have known that something was up, but the camps were deliberately constructed to be out of sight and out of mind of the bulk of the German population. This is not to let the German people off the hook. Germans were aware of the 1930s events like Kristallnacht and one can argue that they should have known that apathy in the face of these smaller atrocities would only encourage larger atrocities. But for most of Germany’s population, an awareness of the camps could only have come through this supposition or through rumour and innuendo, and not firm factual knowledge of their existence and operation.

by ihm 6y ago

snlOAkk 6y ago

The majority of issues with Nazis in government positions and industry had been addressed (partly of course, best effort ...) during the student revolts 1968-197x. There was one case where an activist slapped a politician in the face and many similar things. That generation became teachers from 1975 on, and public education was intensely focused on the history 1933-1945, sometimes to the exclusion of other periods. (I find that U.S. people are much better informed about Roman history than I am.) > Maybe this rang true to many Germans of 1985. It did, the speech was largely preaching to the choir.

Tomte 6y ago

That's interesting, and I can certainly see your point. But back then the speech was considered to be brave, not preaching to the choir. Throughout the sixties and seventies Germans had a tendency to paint themselves the victims. Maybe not as much as the Jews, but still, the Allied Occupation was so terrible, Red Armists raping every woman, woe be us. Weizsäcker drew lots of criticism for articulating the point that the Third Reich wasn't some pretty well-functioning state with just the little side-effect of mass murder. That the Allies shouldn't have been so harsh, why couldn't they just remove the concentration camps and let society go on? He saw the Nazi rule as an imposition on the German people, not in way of exculpation, but as a way to accept the defeat and move on, trying to build a better world. You're right that most Germans knew about the atrocities. Research is very clear on that point. But it wasn't really emotionally accepted, especially in conservative circles. That speech was one little turning point, as was Brandt's fall to his knees (tabloids labelled him a traitor, for something that seems obviously right now). I suppose he could have been more direct. But I suspect he and his people had gauged the public sentiment very well. Say too much, and nobody cares about what you said. Say too little, and you're not doing anything. The speech had a huge impact, and I guess that proves it right, maybe not from an absolute ethical point of view, but from a political and contemporary point of view.

SuoDuanDao 6y ago

>It also seems to suggest that the German people couldn’t know what atrocities were being committed, which it was well known what was going on. On this point, as someone whose grandparents lived through the German side of WW2, I am convinced it's allied propaganda used to justify the collective guilt of the German people. I don't doubt it was well known to the Jewish population in America at the time, but any news of that nature would have been easy to dismiss as the other side's slander to the German on the ground. People today barely know what happened in Abu Graib, and that's with modern communications technology.

goto11 6y ago
Why would anyone dismiss it as slander? Eradication of Jews had been the stated goal of the Nazi party from the beginning. Progroms like kristallnacht was used as propaganda for the Nazi party. The Nuremberg laws was a matter of public record.
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  Again, that does not ring true given the conversations I've had with people alive at the time. Jewish people were scapegoated for the destruction of the German economy. Not everyone who accepted that narrative would have believed death was a just response. Any competent propagandist would have left the question of what a proper response was open so people would have imagined that what they thought was proper would happen. The closest modern equivalent I can think of would be Occupy Wall Street. If the leaders of OWS had formed their own political party in the wake of the 2008 bailouts and ridden a wave of public anger into office, they would have probably had the political capital to seize all bankers' assets as stolen goods and hold them to await trial. It would have taken an order of magnitude more political capital to simply start executing them without trial.
  - goto11 6y ago
    > Again, that does not ring true given the conversations I've had with people alive at the time. Have you considered that these people might have an interest in downplaying how much they knew? > The closest modern equivalent I can think of would be Occupy Wall Street. You should be ashamed of yourself for making that comparison.

Koshkin 6y ago

Trivia: A part of the guard at Nuremberg trials in 1946 was staffed with the former Waffen-SS personnel.

coldcode 6y ago

Saying that the German people all knew of what was being done is not historical, nor the experience of my family. When my great grandparents were taken from their home in 1943 along with all the other Jews in town (other than my Grandmother who was married to a non-Jew, and my mother) they had no idea where they were being taken. Of course they all died but no one had any idea until after the war was over and even today we can only speculate exactly where. My grandmother later survived a year in a camp, and my mom hid in a basement for year as a child. No one in their small town had any inkling of what was happening inside Germany other than what the propaganda was telling them, although there were people with hidden radios in town, even the Allies did not say anything useful. To say everyone knew is incorrect; to imagine you could change things if you knew is also wrong. Can we today stop our government from cramming children into cages and then forgetting them? Yet we have modern media and still horrific things are done in our name and we either ignore it or feel helpless to do anything. History is bad enough without changing it just because we have moved beyond, nor is forgetting its lessons and winding up in the same boat again. Guilt belongs to the guilty not the collective; it's up to the collective to ensure it never happens again and keep the guilty from getting away.

ihm 6y ago
> To say everyone knew is incorrect; to imagine you could change things if you knew is also wrong. Can we today stop our government from cramming children into cages and then forgetting them? Yet we have modern media and still horrific things are done in our name and we either ignore it or feel helpless to do anything. I agree with this point and take your criticism that I painted with too broad a brush in terms of who could know what.
- goto11 6y ago
  Careful now. Everybody knew the Jews were persecuted, had their rights and belongings taken away and were rounded up in ghettos and camps, from where they eventually were "evacuated to the East". What civilians could justifiably claim is they didn't know where or how the killing happened. Information about this was kept vague. While the concentration camps where public knowledge, the extermination camps were kept secret. So German civilians could say they didn't know about Babi Yar or Treblinka and the gas chambers - but that is a far cry from saying they didn't know about the persecution and genocide. It should also be noted that the T4 euthanasia program was scaled back due to public protests. This shows not only that people actually knew it happened (even if it was kind-of secret) but also that protest could actually work. The Nazi party actually cared a great deal about public opinion which is why propaganda was so important to them. One of the reasons the extermination camps were kept secret is they feared protests. There were also the Rosenstrasse protests, where (non-Jewish) wives of Jewish men protested against deportation of their men. This actually caused the men to be released. So "we didn't know and couldn't have done anything anyway" is ahistorical. I can understand why people cling to it, but it is a dangerous myth.

barking 6y ago

You need to ask what would you have done before condemning the German people. It's easier to believe the "safe" truth even if you have doubts about it than set yourself up for a knock on the door and a trip to a concentration camp as happened to very many Germans, both before and during the war. Most of us are cowards and wouldn't intervene if someone was being mugged on a public street. How much more courage does it take to stand up to a totalitarian regime.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

Could you cite the claim that the broad German population knew about the extermination camps qua extermination camps before spring 1945? Of course the average German would have been familiar with the idea of concentration camps, because Germany had begun to put Communists into such camps already in the 1930s and this was well-publicized. But when the Nazi leadership adopted the Final Solution at the Wannsee Conference in early 1942 and concentration camps became extermination camps, Germany was already under heavy wartime press censorship. The people living around the camps would have known that something was up, but the camps were deliberately constructed to be out of sight and out of mind of the bulk of the German population. This is not to let the German people off the hook. Germans were aware of the 1930s events like Kristallnacht and one can argue that they should have known that apathy in the face of these smaller atrocities would only encourage larger atrocities. But for most of Germany’s population, an awareness of the camps could only have come through this supposition or through rumour and innuendo, and not firm factual knowledge of their existence and operation.