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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 the
by 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 agoCareful 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.
- greedo 6y agoIf you haven't already, you should read Daniel Goldhagen's book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners."