April 20, 2009
The Final Solution and ordinary Germans
This month’s issue of The Atlantic contains a very good piece by the magazine’s literary editor, Benjamin Schwarz, about the attitudes and opinions of ordinary Germans towards Jews and toward the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazi regime.
Schwartz gives the reader a panoramic view of recent books that discuss the topic. His news peg is the publication last month of Richard J. Evans’ newest tome, “The Third Reich at War,” which is the third installment of Evans’ trilogy of Nazi history that began with “The Coming of the Third Reich,” and “The Third Reich in Power.”
What’s so significant about this recent scholarship is that it paints a very different picture of what ordinary Germans knew about The Final Solution compared what was said in the decades after the war. Here’s Schwartz discussing the consensus of the research:
[D]espite their authors’ different aims and methods, and despite their contending interpretations of a host of questions, they all agree that, contrary to claims made after the war, the German people had wide-ranging and often detailed knowledge of the murder of the Jews.
None of the authors uses that conclusion to render easy moral judgments, nor to argue that the population fervently embraced the regime’s lethal anti-Semitism (pace Daniel Goldhagen’s now largely discredited Hitler’s Willing Executioners). But both indirectly and explicitly, these books make clear that just as the Final Solution itself is now understood to inform so many aspects of Nazi Germany, so too the Germans’ knowledge of the murder of the Jews influenced and altered the history of the Third Reich and the war it started.
So, perhaps this is something many people had suspected anyway. How could the Germans not know about the murders? What’s more interesting to me is taking a look at the German response to this knowledge. While interesting, this aspect also is, as Schwartz notes, all too predictable:
Nazi rule had penetrated and altered popular attitudes, so by 1939 most Germans believed that Jews should be segregated or removed from the “folk community.” But the anti-Semitism of most Germans stopped far short of genocide—only a small minority overtly approved of the Nazis’ war against the Jews. Of course, an even smaller number publicly condemned Nazi policy and were prepared to help the Jews: whatever their private feelings, most Germans responded outwardly with indifference, and with an attitude nicely characterized by [historian David] Bankier as knowing “enough to know that it was better not to know more.” Although certainly not a commendable stance, it’s hardly surprising.
Indeed. There just aren’t many examples in history of people standing up to genocide. It’s what makes hindsight condemnation unfair in some respects. After all, what would we do if we were ordinary Germans during the war?
But, at a certain point, you realize that the roots of the Holocaust were sowed decades before the war and that that was the time when ordinary Germans should have acted heroically rather than allow their country to descend into a haven for organized murder.
And perhaps that is why history has been harsh to ordinary Germans. The Holocaust did not start with Hitler and the Nazis: it began with the ordinary anti-Semitism of ordinary Germans.
Buy The Third Reich at War >>>
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