Did any Nazis oppose the final solution?

[steve248]

British interrogators of German POWs had very good idea of what was known and what was not known to German servicemen as a % of the German population as a whole. In a report dated 1944 (it was late in that year) entitled "Atrocities as seen through German Eyes" it came up with six paragraphs:
1. The wholesale slaughter of Russians and Jews which appears to have been fairly widely known.
2. The details of what went on in concentration camps appears to have been less well known, but the fact of the existence of the camps and of the fact that the treatment there was brutal, was undoubtedly common knowledge.
3. The comparatively large proportion of statements to the effect that the German's mistake was not in committing the atrocities, but in committing them openly or before final victory was assured.
4. The manner in which even those who disapproved of the atrocities they describe, take it as axiomatic that they themselves could not be expected to interfere or protest to the extent of seriously endangering their own positions.
5. The fairly common expectation of similar treatment of Germans in revenge or of acceptance of such treatment as being just.
6. The lack of appreciation of personal responsibility.

This appraisal was based on information from every rank among those captured. The view in 6. above was prevalent among a number of captured German generals.

[Gorque]

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.)

Victor Klemperer's diaries I Will Bear Witness details his progressive exclusion from Germany society beginning with the onset of the Nazi regime until the Dresden bombings of mid February 1945.

[Obi44]

The Germans didn't know about the final solution, it was a state secret known only to few, so they couldn't oppose it. They heard about this or that atrocity but atrocities were a staple of war. It wasn't like the ww1 lacked them.

This mass extermination, with all its attendant circumstances, did not, as I know, fail to affect those who took a part in it. With very few exceptions, nearly all of those detailed to do this monstrous work - this - service and who, like myself have given sufficient thought to the matter, have bear deeply marked by these events.
Many of the men involved approached me as I went my rounds through the extermination buildings and poured out their anxieties and - impressions to me, in the hope that I could allay them.
Again and again, during these confidential conversations, I was asked: is it necessary that we do all this? Is it necessary that hundreds of thousands of women and children be destroyed?
And I, who in my innermost being had on countless occasions asked myself exactly this question, could only fob them off and attempt to console them by repeating that it was done on Hitler's order. I had to tell them that this extermination of Jewry had to be so that Germany and our posterity might be freed forever from their relentless adversaries.
There was no doubt in the mind of any of us that Hitler's order had to be obeyed regardless, and that it was the duty of the SS to carry it out. Nevertheless, we were all tormented by secret doubts.
Rudolf Höss in KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS

The idea that German citizens did not have much or any knowledge on the Final Solution has been widely discredited by historians.

[wm]

It's preferable to discredit theories with facts, not with nebulous historians.

[Obi44]

It's preferable to discredit theories with facts, not with nebulous historians.

It's preferable not to discredit historians by labeling them "nebulous" simply for reporting the facts as they interpret them.

[steve248]

wm, it is not recorded whether Frau Anna Schmidt, of Schmidtstr 26, Berlin, knew where her Jewish neighbours were taken in 1942. But she had a good idea that they would not be coming back.
Whilst I made up the first sentence, the second sentence would have been widely known.
How did they know their Jewish neighbours would not be coming back? Incessant Goebbels' propaganda that the Jews were being resettled and would not be coming back.
Whether the population as a whole could read between the lines and realize the Jews would not be coming back because they were dead was probably a widespread belief.
But how you could categorize this as a "fact" is a consensus of what has been written by
social historians rather than holocaust historians.

[wm]

Yes, the Germans knew; Goebbels told them all about it and why in that "The Jews are guilty" article.
Many were aware that the Jews wouldn't come back; Judenfrei Germany was one of Nazi goals from day one.
And the Germans had no problem with that; all they knew was the Jews were guilty and Judenfrei Germany was a better place.

Still, it was almost twenty times more probable that a German knew a German sent to a concentration camp (and presumably killed there) than a deported Jew.

As I've said, deportations (of people deemed unreliable) to the interior, deportations to camps were part of the scenery all over the world. Disregarding the genocidal Soviets, everybody was doing it - from the Poles and British to the Americans.
So why should the Germans have cared that, in this case, Jews were deported?

A Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto wrote:

For long, long months, we tormented ourselves in the midst of our suffering with the questions:
Does the world know about our suffering? And if it knows, why is it silent?
...
Having posed the questions, we answered them ourselves:
...
Why should the world be shaken by our suffering when rivers of blood are spilled daily on every battlefield?
In what respect is our Jewish blood more precious than that of the Russian, Chinese, English soldiers?

It seems some people want the Germans to stage an anti-Nazi uprising because, among those rivers of blood, a minor human right was infracted.

[Obi44]

Yes, the Germans knew; Goebbels told them all about it and why in that "The Jews are guilty" article.
Many were aware that the Jews wouldn't come back; Judenfrei Germany was one of Nazi goals from day one.
And the Germans had no problem with that; all they knew was the Jews were guilty and Judenfrei Germany was a better place.

Still, it was almost twenty times more probable that a German knew a German sent to a concentration camp (and presumably killed there) than a deported Jew.

As I've said, deportations (of people deemed unreliable) to the interior, deportations to camps were part of the scenery all over the world. Disregarding the genocidal Soviets, everybody was doing it - from the Poles and British to the Americans.
So why should the Germans have cared that, in this case, Jews were deported?

A Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto wrote:

For long, long months, we tormented ourselves in the midst of our suffering with the questions:
Does the world know about our suffering? And if it knows, why is it silent?
...
Having posed the questions, we answered them ourselves:
...
Why should the world be shaken by our suffering when rivers of blood are spilled daily on every battlefield?
In what respect is our Jewish blood more precious than that of the Russian, Chinese, English soldiers?

It seems some people want the Germans to stage an anti-Nazi uprising because, among those rivers of blood, a minor human right was infracted.

Quite disturbing to see you concede your point only to state that the suffering of the Jews was a "minor human right" being "infracted."

[wm]

Of course, it was just a metaphor. No such a right existed at that time. In times of war, suspicious people were going to be administratively deported or interned in any country in the world, without exception.
And the Jews were deported to occupied Poland and months later sent to ovens. That shows their fate wasn't determined during their deportations, only later.

It seems you didn't understand what the Jew wrote. To Germans concerning themselves about some folks being deported would be like fiddling while Rome burns.

BTW Polish Jews were quite disappointed with the German Jews; they noticed too many German nationalists or even Nazis among them for comfort.

[steve248]

wm, how could any German Jew be described as a 'Nazi' when the Nazis had spent the years since 1933 proscribing and persecuting them? I can agree with 'German nationalist' because many believed in this, but not in the sense of Nazi nationalism.

[wm]

Our nationality isn't defined by our blood or genes. The culture we accept and desire defines it. That's the only morally acceptable definition.

Martin Gilbert wrote, “Tens of thousands of German Jews were not Jews at all in their own eyes.”
They wanted to be Germans and actually were Germans. How many of them were Nazis? Who knows.

[LineDoggie]

As I've said, deportations (of people deemed unreliable) to the interior, deportations to camps were part of the scenery all over the world. Disregarding the genocidal Soviets, everybody was doing it - from the Poles and British to the Americans.

Except

In the Nisei/Issei cases they were only those from Hawaii and the WEST Coast. A Japanese American in NYC, or Philly wasn't touched as the order only affected the west coast military areas

[wm]

Although I agree that in the US, individual rights are/were protected well, and everywhere else the protection is illusionary, the sole point is deportations weren't anything unusual.

In Germany, millions of Germans were deported to concentration camps, and millions of Poles and East Europeans were deported to Germany as forced laborers.
Among all those mass deportations, the why-they-didn't-do-something-for-the-Jews crowd merely demonstrates its ignorance and favoritism. That Jewish suffering was more precious than that of the Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian people.

[Gorque]

Among all those mass deportations, the why-they-didn't-do-something-for-the-Jews crowd merely demonstrates its ignorance and favoritism. That Jewish suffering was more precious than that of the Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian people.

I hate to nit-pick, however, how many of those non-Jewish nationalities were sent straight to a Vernichtungslager?

[wm]

The German Jews weren't sent straight to a Vernichtungslager, so the question is moot.