Did any Nazis oppose the final solution?

[wm]

I don't quite understand; cremation was an acceptable method of disposal of the dead. What did the existence of cremators prove?

During ww1, several people died per day in POW camps or internment camps. For example, in (not that big) Austrian Thalerhof, about 5 per day.
Twenty percent mortality rate wasn't that unusual in Russian or Polish POW camps.

Considering the constant famine-like conditions in the East and in occupied Poland (even the Germans themselves suffered from malnutrition), insufficient or nonexistent healthcare, the existence of even a few cremators in a large KL (Auschwitz-Birkenau, up to 100,000 people) wasn't that strange.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi wm,

So your argument is that the Germans built large capacity crematoria because they were planning that many times the maximum capacity of the camps would die in them?

Hardly a defence, is it?

Cheers,

Sid.

[wm]

The point is knowledge of the crematoria didn't imply knowledge of the Holocaust.

The realization that the crematoria were too big required specialist knowledge common people didn't have.
And you had to know the size of the camps and the area the crematoria served - both were state secret.
And the fact that they were cleverly utilized well beyond their capacity.

Finally, during a world war in the East, remembering that its predecessor, the Russian Civil War, cost 10 million civilian lives, a large crematorium capable to burn hundreds of bodies per day wasn't an indication of anything - it was actually common sense.

[MLW]

Hello wm,

You missed my point. The logistics and maintenance of running the camps was not a secret. It was largely done by civilian firms who did on site work in the camps. The camps also put inmates off-site into the facilities of the companies who supported the camps. Go to Buchenwald, read the exhibits, and the talk to the staff there. They will tell you about the extent of civilian involvement and in the labor and death camp systems. Really, go there. The historians, curators, and archivists experienced and they are Germans. They have researched the topic and what to tell people about it. It is a myth that the camps and the holocaust were a "big" secret.

[wm]

I don't think that is true. The camps were run by prisoners alone. Camp's cooks, butchers, gardeners, electricians, carpenters, doctors, nurses, barbers were all prisoners.

And anyway, what would you see visiting, for example, KL Buchenwald? Neat lawns and sidewalks, nice brick-and-mortar barracks with spit-clean windows?
The prisoners are in factories outside the camp. Some aren't - block leaders and their helpers, cooks, others - but they look good and healthy; they are the aristocracy of the camp.
Sick and injured are in the hospital, but they aren't going to show you them.
Nobody mistreats anybody, the prisoners aren't there, and anyway, it was forbidden in the presence of an outsider; even more, it was forbidden entirely from the end of 1943.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi wm,

You have already posted, "At least nine-tenths of the population do not know that we have killed hundreds of thousands of Jews".

That means that up to 8 million may have known.

It was not a complete secret, even if not everyone knew about it.

Furthermore, supposing that all Germans knew, would it have made any difference? Did most of them care? And, assuming they did care, what mechanisms existed in Nazi Germany to transform this knowledge into action stopping the mass killing of Jews?

Cheers,

Sid.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi wm,

You have already posted a quote that says in March 1943, "At least nine-tenths of the population do not know that we have killed hundreds of thousands of Jews".

That means that up to 8 million Germans may have known within a year of the implementation of the industrialised mass murder of the Jews. How many more may have found out while it continued over the remaining two years of the war?

It was clearly far from a complete secret, even if not everyone knew about it by the end of the war.

Furthermore, supposing that all Germans knew, would it have made any difference? Did most of them care? And, assuming they did care, what mechanisms existed in Nazi Germany to transform this knowledge into action stopping the mass killing of Jews?

Cheers,

Sid.

[wm]

Although the "at least nine-tenths" statement meant "few Germans know what's going on."
"We have killed hundreds of thousands of Jews" was his knowledge; it was impossible for Germans to know exactly that.

Especially that "hundreds of thousands of Jews" was false; at that date, it was millions of Jews.
But it shows that even the leader of the German Underground and a high-ranking member of the Abwehr knew almost nothing.

And the less than nine-tenths knew even less. They heard about this or that atrocity, heard rumors, but nobody had a bird-view of what was going on.

[MLW]

Hello Wm,

I am telling you what the exhibits and staff at Buchenwald and and the Topf & Söhne Museum say based on their years of research. If you went there it would be an eye-opener. You do not have to believe what they have to say. After all, what do they know? Years of research, extensive archives, etc. I guess all that amounts to nil for you.

[LAstryAGAIN]

Kurt Gerstein did

[Larry D.]

No one in this interesting thread has mentioned the Holocaust Museum in WashDC. If resources exist that would enable a researcher to arrive at some reasonable conclusion re "did the average German know and, if so, to what extent did they know", this would be the place to find out. IMHO, the average German didn't want to know and knew the best thing to do was to keep his or her mouth shut. I base this on 70 years of casual off and on research on this subject (I'm 85).

L. deZ.

[MLW]

What was an "average German" in the Third Reich?

[wm]

There is a story in "With a Yellow Star and a Red Cross" by Arnold Mostowicz (a Polish Jew). They were transferred from Auschwitz to AL Bad Warmbrunn (obviously in Germany), an all-Jewish subcamp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. It was the end of 1944.

There he and four others (selected because they appeared to be the most intelligent of all the transferred prisoners) were taken individually to empty rooms and interrogated (in a friendly manner), one-on-one, by SS men.
All were asked the same questions:
Is that true what they say about Auschwitz? That there are gas chambers there? That Jews are gassed there? What is going on there?

The distance between both camps was about 200 miles; it was only about five months to the end of the war, but the SS men in Bad Warmbrunn (part of a large industrial city, it wasn't some kind end of the world place) knew only some rumors (and probably from listening to the BBC).

[Gorque]

From my notes of Ian Kersahaw's "Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933-1945 2nd Ed.

The vexing questions are how much of the exterminations did the German public know about and at what point, if any, were they aware. Documentary evidence of the Regime does not necessarily equate to the public’s involvement or awareness. “Undoubtedly, however, the generalization of one historian that ‘people were acquainted with the ultimate fate of the deported Jews’ is far too sweeping.” (p 364) Evidence does exist of knowledge of the atrocities and mass shootings in the East, spread by rumor from the retelling of the events by soldiers home on leave or sick/injured. There were also eye-witness accounts and foreign radio broadcasts of sufficient number to oblige Bormann in the autumn of 1942 to issue new propaganda directives to counter the rumors. Details of what was occurring was seldom known, but based upon the above sources, there was a general awareness of what was occurring. From an SD report of December 23, 1942 from Middle Franconia:

One of the strongest causes of unease among circles attached to the Church and in the rural population at the present time is formed by news from Russia in which shooting and extermination of the Jews is spoken about. This communication frequently leaves great anxiety, care, and worry in those sections of the population. According to widely held opinion among the rural population, it is not at all certain now that we will win the war and if the Jews come to Germany again they will exact a dreadful revenge on us.

From a sermon in February 1943; “not right if Jewry was persecuted or exterminated since the Catholic was based upon the same” (p 365) When the Katyn Forest mass graves of Polish Officers were also discovered in April 1943 and exploited by Goebbels for propaganda purposes, the public, per an SD report from Wurzburg, received the news with mixed feelings; the intelligentsia rejected the announcement, disseminated through radio and press, as propaganda. Such reports were generally regarded as exaggerated. “Among those associated with the Churches the view was put forward that it could be a matter of mass graves laid out by Germans for the murdered Polish and Russian Jews.” (p.365)

Similar comments regarding the uncovering of mass graves of Ukrainian victims of the Soviet secret police in Winniza in July 1943 resulted in Hitler directing Bormann that “in public ‘all discussion of the future complete solution (Gesamtlösung)’ had to cease, and it could only be said ‘that Jews had been conscripted en bloc for appropriate deployment of labor’” (p 366) What the above indicates is the Regime’s awareness of the public’s feelings on the subject and that the public “was not ready for frank disclosures on the extermination of the Jews.” (p 366)

Recorded comments of the murder of the Jews are almost completely of the actions of the Einsatzgruppen, as these murders were witnessed by members of the Wehrmacht. The gassings, on the other hand, were carried out in greater secrecy and therefor, less evidence exists of the public’s knowledge of these events.

“Very many, probably most, Germans were opposed to the Jews during the Third Reich, welcomed their exclusion from economy and society, saw them as natural outsiders to the German ‘Nation Community’, a dangerous minority against whom it was legitimate to discriminate. Most would have drawn the line at physical mistreatment.” (p 371) From the Nazi mayor of Kitzingen after Kristallnacht: “You don’t have to have to have anything to do with the Jews. But you have got to leave them in peace.” (p 371)

“The Final Solution would not have been possible without the progressive steps to exclude the Jews from German society, which took place in full view of the public, in their legal met with widespread approval, and resulted in depersonalization and debasement of the figure of the Jew.” (pp 371-372)

This was a very early study Ian Kershaw did and is described as an Alltagsgeschichte.

[wm]

So by December 23, 1942, the Germans heard the news from Russia about the shooting of some Jews. Although by that time, the majority of East European Jews had been gassed in six death camps already.
They didn't hear about Aktion T4 or the Intelligenzaktion. Although both happened very early in 1939 and in Germany, not a thousand kilometers to the East. Or about the millions of Soviet POVs killed before the Holocaust even started.

"The Final Solution would not have been possible without the progressive steps to exclude the Jews from German society, which took place in full view of the public, in their legal met with widespread approval, and resulted in depersonalization and debasement of the figure of the Jew."

The German Jews were like 2.5 percent of all victims of the Holocaust. It didn't matter if they were excluded or not (actually, they weren't.)
The German Jews deported to ghettos in occupied Poland invariably reported that the German population was friendly or indifferent; that only the party members were hostile.