Clothes & Accessories

How much did the average German or Austrian know about the Holocaust?

During the Holocaust, how much did the average German or Austrian actually know about what was going on? They obviously must have known to some degree, but they still didn’t know all about what was happening.

It is fact, that the Holocaust respectively the extermination of the European Jews was striktly hold secret by the Nazis. That is one reason for, that Extermination camps were erected, which should be destingiushed from Concentration camps (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extermination_camp ). The murder and genocide was ongoing in camps, all located in Poland, which are in detail Auschwitz II, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzek and Majdanek.

I`m pretty sure that an average German or Austrian was not aware about the Holocaust and its “unbelievable” dimension. That shall not mean a denegation of the Holocaust or, as the Jewish people call it “Shoa”. They could have knwon as much as an average British for example.

The question must be a different one. Why they allowed to discriminate a group of people, because of the discrimination people were aware. What happened later on was out of imaginativness of an average people as well as “too late”.

Truth is also, at the end of war there were some rumors (not available for all parts of society), that there is “something unbelievable” ongoing, which eventually some tried to block out unconsiously or classified as allied propaganda, but there was no knowledge about and the conditions of war had its impact as well. But again, the Nazis held strictly secret all in context with the extermination of the European Jews. Interesting is the story of Kurt Gerstein (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Gerstein) who was involved in the Holocaust and tried to convince the Vatican to make it public in the hope, the Germans will resist when aware about, but did not succeed to convince the Vatican. Also the Allies never reported by their German broadcastings during war about the Holocaust as long as was ongoing.

The lesson out of history should not to point a finger at Germans or Austrians, the lesson should be not to accept any violation of human rights without any compromise to avoid any “too late”.

Edit:
some answerers seem to refer with the term “Holocaust” also to the time of discrimination and humiliation 1933 – 1940. The definition of Holocaust in my answer is the physical extermination beginning 1941/1942. In my answer I would like to change the word “unbelievable” into “unthinkable”.

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