How much did they know?

In Germany itself, many people [ particularly in the cities ] were aware of the deportations, and the trains bringing Jews from Western Europe to Poland in 1942-44 did not go unnoticed. German soldiers in Eastern Europe observed mass shootings, and a sizeable number of them participated one way or another in the mass murder.

Soldiers wrote home, and it's know that some of them spoke frankly about the atrocities.

A wide range of German soldiers, officials, and civilians were in some way involved in the Holocaust, from clerks and officials in the government to units of the army, the police, and the SS. Many ministries, including those of armaments, interior, justice, railroads, and foreign affairs, had substantial roles in orchestrating the Holocaust, German physicians participated in medical experiments and the T-4 euthanasia program.
The Wehrmacht participated directly through the massacre of Jews in Russia, Serbia, Poland, and Greece, and it supported the Einsatzgruppen, helped form the ghettos, ran prison camps, occasionally provided concentration camp guards, transported prisoners to camps, had experiments performed on prisoners, and used substantial slave labor.

German police units, all under the control of the Nazis during the war, also directly participated in the Holocaust, for example, Reserve Police Battalion 101, in just over a year, shot 38,000 Jews and deported 45,000 more to the extermination camps.

 

http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Articles/Chaitkin.html

The three families, Rockefeller, Warburg, and Harriman, together with British Crown agencies, jointly sponsored much of the social engineering enterprise we shall describe here. The Rockefeller Foundation made an initial grant of $2.5 million in 1925 to the Psychiatric Institute in Munich, gave it $325,000 for a new building in 1928, and continuously sponsored the institute and its Nazi chief Ru@audin through the Hitler era. The foundation paid for a 1930-35 anthropological survey of the ``eugenically worthwhile population'' by Nazi eugenicists Ru@audin, Verschuer, Eugen Fischer, and others.

 

I guess it also depends how you define atrocity as well. The Heer were involved wholesale, 'ordinary' German soldiers participated in the murder of civilians, from the execution of Jews to the killing and then mutilation of young girls as reprisals for partisan activity.

On the other hand, it's easy for me to criticise from my comfy armchair but would I (or any of us) have done differently? I honestly think if you replaced your average German born in 1926 with someone from my generation (or any other) it wouldn't have been so different. That doesn't justify what happens, but I feel it helps us to understand these things and the better we understand, the better rpepared we can be.

 

Hope so, Stefan. But like we have seen with time many stories claim that the holocaust did not exist and " incredibly many" people tend to believe it. Or is it just the press that makes the people who claim this so "loud"?

 

Kai, after recent arguments with some pretty ordinary British people I am seriously wondering whether people actualy learn anything from history. As I said on another thread, people are all to willing to absolve the Germans of blame or deny anything happened rather than trying to understand how ordinary people came to do what they did and learning from it.

 

Very well put, Stefan. It's all too easy to 'blame the Germans' ( and never let the World forget that what they allowed to happen was disgusting ) but it's quite possible for any of us to turn a blind eye in the hope of a quiet life....

 

Well it seems clear now that many of us believe that some of the Germans knew and others didn't. But what about the allies? I remembe rhaving read somewhere that there were air pictures taken at Auschwitz and that the allies could have bombed the gas chambers but didn't.

 

What would it have achieved? It would have killed alot of inmates and done damage that would probably have been repaired within a week.

 

Apart from the death camps, over 33,000 Jews were killed at Babi Yar in 24 hours by machine guns, 25,000 at Rumbula by Latvian Nazis [Arajs Commando], over 36,000 at Odessa by Romanian forces, 19,000 at the Ninth Fort of Kaunas and 40,000 [up to 100,000 by 1944] at Paneriai by the German SS forces. These, and similar slaughters throughout Europe, murdered around 100,000 Jews per month for five months. By the end of 1943,another 900,000 Jews would be murdered in this manner.

one of the leaders of the Jewish council urged the Allies to bomb Auschwitz, but they hesitated at killing thousands of inmates as Stefan said.
Their main arguments, then, were "rescue through victory" and "no diversion from the war effort."

I often see posts [especially on neo Nazi boards]] saying that the Allies weren't concerned that the Jews were being killed and cite the non bombing as proof.

Do you think that the Allies should have gone ahead with the bombing?

 

"it's easy for me to criticise from my comfy armchair but would I (or any of us) have done differently? I honestly think if you replaced your average German born in 1926 with someone from my generation (or any other) it wouldn't have been so different."

This is a good point. It illustrates the school of fish mentality that pervades any generation. People today follow what is trendy thinking. I work on college campuses all over US, & I see "no homophobic language" signs up at many campuses, but no menophobic, heterophobic or godophobic language signs as its trendy to dislike male white persons in the new trendy PC left leaning culture we are currently in. Examples are books titles like Stupid White Men, if someone wrote one titled stupid tan, red, or black men, one would be in loads of trouble. & gays can wear shirts that say I can't even think straight, or call women breeders, but if a girl wears a shirt that says "silly faggots, dicks are for chicks, all hell would break loose.

In the 50's rock music was considered N- music. In the late 60's drugs were considered enlightening. & even communism had some hippie followers, all versions of trendy thinking.

A distant cousin to the thread material, but still somewhat related.

[ 08. December 2006, 01:24 AM: Message edited by: chromeboomerang ]

 

The Dam Busters are now castigated due to the deaths of slave labourers whose camp was caught in the deluge so I would say that this is a case of 'damned if you do, damned if you don't'.....

What would have been achieved ? Undoubtedly the deaths of many who were condemned to death, perhaps the escape of others who would in many cases have been quickly rounded up again. And the Germans had an almost inexhaustable supply of labour who would have immediately been put to work rebuilding the place and naturally, many would have died in the process... And what of Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno....? Also, Poland was not the easiest target to bomb, certainly in 1943.

It sounds harsh, but the best option was to defeat Nazism in order to destroy the ideology behind this kind of criminal activity.

 

Maybe it is the fear of killing innocent camp inmates that stopped them doing so. However reading on what the inmates thought about this was that they knew they were already dead and bombing the place would have stopped the killing in the camps at least for a while, even if the number of innocent dead could have been huge.

And BTW, was bombing any target in France stopped by calculation of possible dead civilians? For instance Caen? Just asking!

 

Yes, however chirugical targetting was already possible and done at the time: for instance Buchenwald was bombed in 1944 and the Raf lauched several brilliant operations on several prisons in France and the Gestapo Headquarters at The Hague in Holland etc..
The Raf had the reputation of doing it's best to avoid civilian casualties. The old generation still mentions how accurate some of the bombings were. In Orleans the prison, filled with resistants, was right next to the Marshalling yards and it's still there today.

 

Did they? I must have missed that bit of the city bombing campaign

Kai, I think when it came to attacking Caen and so on it was justified on the basis that it was helping speed up the liberation of the city and the population could take shelter/leave. Sending heavy bombers to flatten a death camp would have killed thousands of prisoners who couldn't take shelter and worked to the detriment of the war effort. As Martin said, the RAF get slated for killing slave labourers already, bombing a prison full of innocent people would have been even worse.

 

There were in fact elite Squadrons equipped with Mosquitos which were in charge of these kind of bombings. I will try to find the details. The Gestapo HeadQuarters at the Haque were completely destroyed after a great Mosquito raid on April 11th 1944 whereas the Parliament remained intact. another example was the attack of the prison at Reims. By smashing one single wall, the Mossies helped hundreds of people to escape. Those resistants were experienced fighters who proved to be very helpful by blowing up trains and bridges before D'Day.

 

I knew about that, however what could they actually have achieved? Take out the gas chambers and they'd just shoot people. Breach the fences and you have large numbers of malnourished inmates staggering around, getting rounded up by police and then shot.

You see what I mean?

Still not sure about the the RAF having a reputation for avoiding civilian casualties, after all, the city bombing campaign was aimed at causing them.

 

The RAF was also noted for taking out prisons and Gestapo HQs just on the assumption that a person with delicate information was there and the Nazis could make them talk, if they knew the person had the information.

It is interesting to compare th world population today, as opposed to WWII, and realize that life is so much more sacred now than then. At least to some populations.

 

The RAF Mosquito attacks on French prisons were indeed brilliant examples of precision low-level bombing, but one must be honest and say that they had a specific purpose, ie the Amiens Raid was to release Resistance prisoners who had knowledge of D-Day. It was also specifically carried out to strengthen the morale of the Resistance, to show that something was being done to help them. Also, wherever possible, casualties among the populations of Occupied countries were avoided for obvious reasons.

So these raids did fit in, however loosely, with the idea of 'winning the war'....

 

I recall in autumn 1944 Himmler gave an order to stop the gassing of people, however Eicmann did continue but Himmler was mad at him. Himmler knew the war was lost and wanted to negotiate about the jews.

 

Very intersting. thank you for all this. I suppose that bombing the camps wasn't the best think to do, but at Buchenwald the allies bombed the SS barracks, not the inmates. Also when I say the Raf had a good reputation about aiming and avoiding civilians, I meant occupied territories (France Belgium, ) not Germany itself.