In class, we talked about how Germany wasn't by any means homogeneously in support of the Nazi party coming to power, but how the country quickly got behind their ideologies and tactics. Even if the Nazi party did help to bring about a period of great prosperity from the pit of depression and war, I still don't see how a fairly educated and worldly citizenry let themselves be a party to the evils their country would commit. I always come back to the same question of how much did the German people know about the atrocities going on during the Nazis' reign? I hope they didn't know that much, or they would have tried to stop it, but maybe they were just afraid of becoming a victim of the fascist state as well. The Nazi security apparatus made sure to crush any dissenters that were discovered, in one way or another. A good example of the German people failing to act is the lack of resistance or revolt to the Nazi war campaign, even though so many Germans were against it. It's just hard for me to believe that most of the population didn't have a fairly good idea of what was happening in the concentration camps, especially towards the end of the war, when the brakes came off the "final solution," and Hitler wasn't trying to hide his true intentions anymore.
I lived for a brief period in Germany, and the seeming lack of public regret or acknowledgement for the things that happened under the Nazi regime always bothered me. I'm sure the German people wanted to move on as fast as possible after the war, and the Cold War facilitated that to an extent, but references to that period are conspicuously absent throughout the country. I realize the same could be said about our country and some of its former institutions, but I feel discussion and study about them are more open and available. I worked with my counterparts in the German army, and they were great soldiers and good guys. I found it interesting that they, more than anyone else, were open to talking about the days of the Nazi regime. It was mainly from a military standpoint, and how much the Nazi war machine revolutionized modern warfare, but I still found it refreshing that they didn't shy away about talking about any aspect of that time period.
I've read varying opinions on how much the German public knew, and about how the Nazi era was dealt with after the war. I'm hoping that a little more light can be shed on it for my own curiosity during the time we spend on it in class.
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I'm with you in that I would hope the German people did not know a whole lot about what was going on in the country. Although I believe it's harder for us to use hindsight and try to balance out what the average German was going through during the war. Even if they did know what was going on, like you said the SS had no problem crushing resistance and making examples out of people. I feel like in some ways people probably felt "It's either them or me." And since I'm not a German, nor have I been to Germany, I think it's harder for me to get inside the heads of German people and understand how they think as a people and a nation. The holocaust is one of the great tragedies of history in my opinion, but looking back it probably would have taken someone with a pretty strong moral code and backbone to stand up against what was going on and denounce death camps. I just hope that as situations arise in our time and on into the future we will find the backbone and the courage to step out and speak against and stop genocidal activity.
ReplyDeleteHistorians are still debating what the 'average' German knew and when. If anything, i think that the current research on this period increasingly shows the diversity of the Nazi experience. Exactly who you were (rural vs urban, man vs woman, Aryan vs non-Aryan, skilled vs unskilled worker, etc) truly affected how the regime treated you and how you viewed the regime. Given this high level of diversity, it is difficult to make accurate assessments about who knew what and when. As I said in class, knowing in 1934 was very different than knowing in 1939 which was still different from knowing in 1943 in terms of an individual's ability to actually do anything with or about that knowledge.
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