Transcription
[Music] Thank you. [Music] While something like the Holocaust isn't exactly unprecedented in history, with mass genocide popping up an unnerving number of times the world over throughout humans humaning, perhaps no other instance of this has shocked the modern world more than the Nazis systematically murdering somewhere in the ballpark of five or six million Jewish people, along with another five or six million people of other backgrounds. Such as the blesser talked about Romani genocide in this one; the Nazis murdered upwards of a million Romani, which was about half the entire Romani population of Europe at the time. That any civilized people could allow something like this to go on seems unthinkable to our modern selves. So the question becomes: how much did the general public actually know about what was going on at the time it was happening?
It turns out, contrary to what is often stated, quite a lot actually, both on the global scale and even within Germany itself. Evidence pointing to at least the idea that it was happening being relatively common knowledge, as we'll get into shortly. But also paradoxically, by accounts from many people directly after the war, they didn't really know at all. So, which is true? To really get to the bottom of this, we must discuss events leading up to the Holocaust and how much of these the German people and wider world knew about to begin with.
When Hitler and his cohorts first came to power in 1933, some of the first things that they did were to suspend the civil liberties of the German people, such as now allowing imprisonment of citizens without trial. It's always a good sign that you've chosen your lead as well. More pertinent to the topic at hand, doubling down on the ominous tone of the new regime, within a few months the Nazis had established their first concentration camp in Dachau. The main purpose of this new facility was to hold political dissidents, among other undesirables. You see, the existing prison systems were deemed insufficient to be able to house the number that needed to be rounded up. Commenting words about how prisoners will be treated, their SS official Johann Erasmus free hair Von Maison ponakau gave this speech to members of the SS at Dachau shortly after it opened: "You all know what the Führer has called us to do. We have not come here for human encounters with those pigs in there. We do not consider them human beings as we are, but as second-class people. For years they have been able to continue their criminal existence, but now we are in power. If those pigs had come to power, they would have cut off all of our heads. Therefore, we have no room for sentimentalism. If anyone here cannot bear to see the blood of comrades, he does not belong and had better leave. The more of these pig dogs we strike down, the fewer we need to feed."
Not long after this, a rather bloody Purge, the Night of the Long Knives, occurred. In the aftermath, Hitler not only was declared Führer, but also justified the murders, noting that it was done to protect Germany. Publicly stating: "If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: in this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people and thereby I became the Supreme Judge of the German people. I gave the order to shoot the ring leaders in this treason, and I further gave the order to cauterize down to the raw flesh the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells in our domestic life. Let the nation know that its existence, which depends on its internal order and security, cannot be threatened with impunity by anyone, and let it be known for all time to come that if anyone raises a hand to strike the state, that certain death is his lot." No other year was that. No real evidence was presented that any of these people had actually been planning a coup or anything of the sort; Hitler simply publicly stated they were, and as a result he had them killed without trial.
Going back to the concentration camps and the roundup of dissidents, while some of the atrocities being committed there were mostly kept under wraps in the media, the government were none too shy about broadcasting the roundups and existence of these facilities in the media, precisely to help make anyone afraid to step out of line. It would also seem the Nazis had a policy to make sure they rounded up at minimum a sample from every community. This, combined with those released in the early going who went back to their communities and discussed things that happened there, all seemed to have done a bang-up job of instilling fear in the populace, as intended. In fact, there were even little jingles about these places, such as this one from 1935, translated: "Dear God, make me dumb, as in silent, that I may not to Dachau." As Captain America's Dr. Abraham Erskine so sagely put it, so many people forget that the first country that the Nazis invaded was their own. Or as one real-life contemporary German would state when interviewed: "You Americans can hardly understand the conditions under which we were living. It was as if all of Germany were a concentration camp, and we were occupied by a foreign power. We were unable to do anything to oppose them. What could one person do against that powerful organization?"
That said, though the Nazis did have an iron grip on the country at this point thanks to the coup and general support of the military among others, they still needed some semblance of public support, and thus simultaneous to all of this, the propaganda machine began doing its thing to help sway people to the side of Nazi ideology through various methods, including, of course, vilifying various groups like, most famously, Jewish people, while also beginning to sow the seeds for the need for war. In particular, attempting to paint the picture that it would not be the Germans who were the aggressors in such a war, but that they were simply defending themselves. At the same time, laws to encourage the Jewish population of the nation to leave were also instituted, such as on April 1, 1933, where there was a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. Further, April 7, 1933, expelled all non-Aryans from civil service, and there were laws against allowing Jewish lawyers, jurors, judges, etc. On April 25, 1933, they restricted Jewish enrollment in German high schools to 1.5 percent, and perhaps most famously, in 1935, the Nuremberg Laws became a thing. The list goes on and on, and all of this everybody was well aware of.
On top of this, the Night of Broken Glass and the aftermath was widely reported on in Germany and beyond. This occurred on the night of November 9, 1938, and into the morning of the next day. On this one, in a nutshell, the Nazis coordinated a widespread wave of aggression against the Jews. The idea was to make it look like the general public was just fed up with the Jews and they were acting on it, when in fact orders from the top came down that the SS, SA, and even the Hitler Youth were to basically riot around Jewish communities. In the end, hundreds of synagogues were burned and vandalized, with countless Jewish-owned businesses and homes suffering the same fate, all the while firefighters and police were instructed to stand aside unless it happened. Doubling down on the awful, the next day approximately 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to places like the Dachau Concentration Camp. The general point of it all seems to have been in line with simply trying to convince the Jews to leave the country in various brutal ways. On this one, those arrested whose families could show proof that they would be leaving the country soon seem to have been released without issue.
On top of the extreme oppression of the Jewish people being common knowledge, the eventual euthanasia program against certain groups, like the so-called feeble-minded, was also well known once it was instituted. Illustrating both, we have the heroic tale of priest Bernhard Lichtenberg, who very publicly prayed for the Jews of the nation daily with his congregation, as well as openly protesting both their treatment and the Nazi euthanasia programs. Despite countless warnings that if he continued his very public denouncement of the Nazis and their actions there would be severe consequences, he ignored this completely and even in 1941 wrote a letter to the Minister of Public Health, Leonardo Conti, stating: "I, as a human being, a Christian, a priest, and a German, demand of you, Chief Physician of the Reich, that you answer for the crimes that have been perpetrated at your bidding and with your consent, and which will call forth the Vengeance of the Lord on the heads of the German people." Unfortunately for Lichtenberg, very shortly after this he was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison. As for his sentencing, he requested that he be sent off with the Jews to the East in the hope that he could provide some comfort for them there, but this request was denied, and he was instead sent to the Dachau Concentration Camp where he contracted pneumonia and died in 1943. But again, up to this point it would seem everyone had a very good idea of what was happening to the Jews and political dissidents of the nation, given the Nazis' work exactly being subtle about any of it. In fact, in 1938, Time magazine named Hitler Man of the Year, precisely because of this. Now, contrary to what is sometimes inferred from this, this was not to honor him, but quite the opposite. They stated: "Lesser men of the year seemed small indeed beside the Führer. Germany's 700,000 Jews have been tortured physically, robbed of homes and properties, denied a chance to earn a living, chased off the streets; now they are being held for ransom—a gangster trick through the ages." They ended their article on the decision to name Hitler the Man of the Year on the ominous note: "To those who watched the closing events of the year, it seemed more than probable that the man of 1938 may make 1939 a year to be remembered." Time certainly nailed that one.
Again, it's important to emphasize here that while there were certainly a lot of brutal and unjust deaths happening up to this point, along with all the other injustices, the overall plan with regards to the Jews seems to have been to run them out of any German-occupied nation. Unfortunately for the Jewish people, despite everyone pretty much being well aware of this, not just Germans but the world on the whole seemed to be bothered to do very little about this. And as we'll get into shortly, even when the opportunity was there to help, in the way the Nazis wanted as well, namely sending the Jews off to other countries, quite literally almost every nation the world over collectively said, "Yeah, no thanks," even knowing what was going on in Germany at the time. Although perhaps this shouldn't be so much of a surprise, given that even today this collective "not my problem" attitude with regards to accepting persecuted refugees from troubled nations is still very much a relatively common thing the world over. But as for this specific case, not helping the matter was that rampant anti-Semitism was hardly unique to Germany at the time, and not just that, but the general support for eugenics programs in some form was likewise pretty widespread the world over. For example, around this time eugenicists in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world were performing forced sterilization of the poor, sick, criminals, prostitutes, as well as forced abortions of pregnant women of ill repute or seen as inferior based on certain traits. Even the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, arguably one of the greatest humans to ever human, was in support of eugenics. They, however, had nothing to do with race. In fact, he was also unabashedly outspoken against people who judge people based on their race. For example, after being widely vilified for inviting Booker T. Washington to have dinner with him at the White House, Roosevelt's response to the extreme outcry, which included death threats, was simply: "I shall have him to dine as often as I please." He also said: "The only wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each black man and each white man strictly on his merits as a man, giving him no more and no less than he shows himself worthy to have." However, on the flip side, he also stated when it came to eugenics: "I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized and feeble-minded persons forbidden from leaving offspring behind." This dance was also supported by such famed individuals as Winston Churchill, Margaret Sanger, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, John Harvey Kellogg, and of course Adolf Hitler, among countless others. The Eugenics movement was spurred on and given its name by Sir Francis Galton in 1883, inspired by Galton's half-cousin Charles Darwin's work over half a century later.
Leading up to World War II, things had evolved significantly all over the world on this front, such as famed Cornell professor and neurologist Foster Kennedy even going so far as to write in 1942: "I'm in favor of euthanasia for those helpless ones who should never have been born—Nature's mistakes." He also stated that if a child reached the age of five and was still defective by societal views, that "the defective has no future or hope of one, then I believe it is a merciful and kindly thing to relieve that defective—often tortured and convulsed, grotesque and absurd, useless and foolish and entirely undesirable—the agony of living." While the idea of murdering five-year-olds didn't exactly catch on, in 1936 in the U.S., 31 of the then 48 states had various eugenics or forced sterilization laws. The Supreme Court even rang in in 1927 in the case Buck v. Bell concerning the force sterilization of, to quote, "feeble-minded white women," ruling that "it is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind." Not unique to the U.S. or Germany, most of the developed world had similar laws on the books with widespread support. That said, everyone did a collective "Oh, oh, wait a minute," thanks to the revelation that the Nazis had taken these ideas and run with them to their extreme during World War II. And after the war, public support for eugenics all but disappeared thanks to its association with Nazi Germany. But in the era of Nazi Germany itself, quite a lot of the populace of the world thought eugenics programs were a smashing idea, and anti-Semitism was likewise pretty widespread. The Nazis simply took these two ideas to their extreme and also put them together.
But as for the general public of Germany in the days leading up to and including World War II, we can both say for sure that the German people were extremely well aware of the concentration camps, despite many interviewed after the war denying knowledge of even their very existence. Further, they were also, to an extent, aware of some of the things that went on in those early camps, though the death camp/starvation concentration camps were not yet a thing before the war. And finally, they were also aware of the extreme oppression of the Jews in Germany, as were pretty much all of the rest of the world. Going back to the Nazi plan to simply get the Jews to leave, as alluded to, a big problem with this plan was that other countries weren't exactly keen about taking in a large influx of Jewish immigrants. This was also in part why relatively few German Jews fled the country. There's one German Jew, Victor Klemperer, would write in his diary of his own attempt to leave, meeting with the immigration advisor of the Jewish Community: "Result: less than zero. You really must get out, but we see no possibility." There was also another issue here, and that for most of these Jewish people, Germany was their home. Some were even veterans of World War I and had fought and had friends and family die for their country. The Nazis weren't Germany, and many still loved their country and hoped for change. As Klemperer would write in 1942: "I am German and still waiting for the Germans to come back. They've gone to ground somewhere." Although ultimately he did despair: "No one can take my Germanness away from me, but my nationalism and patriotism are gone forever."
Going back to the immigration problem, the United States, despite its surface levels supposedly "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" thing, and the extreme success the US once had with more open immigration policies being a boon to the country, at this point they had a hard limit of 153,744 immigrants annually. This, in turn, was divided by country, with an awful lot of entry requirements to qualify. On top of that, these requirements were so strict that many quotas during this time weren't filled at all, despite massively more applicants than that number. On top of that, despite news of the atrocities being committed against the Jews leading up to the war, the majority of the public opposed relaxed immigration guidelines or boosting the numbers to accommodate those desperately wanting out of Germany. Other countries more or less mimicked this general stance, with Britain even going further by taking steps to try and limit the number of German Jews who would be allowed to immigrate to Palestine, which was one place that was taking a relatively large number of Jewish immigrants compared to most states. That said, in 1938, Britain did agree to amend policy to take in 10,000 Jewish children, but made no special provisions for taking any Jewish adults outside of the already established normal immigration procedures. So the problem was: the Nazis wanted the Jews to leave, and this was part of their original master plan. Further, as a result of Nazi actions and new laws, many Jews desperately wanted to leave, but most couldn't because they had nowhere to go. That said, even if genocide wasn't maybe the original plan, it wasn't as if the idea of mass murder wasn't occasionally being proposed, even quite publicly, by the Nazis in power. Perhaps most pertinent to the topic at hand, in a speech in January of 1939, Hitler even went so far as to predict it: "Today I will once more be a prophet. If the international Jewish finances, in and outside Europe, should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." Apparently, the Nazis being the ones to cause a second world war wasn't a problem, though. Oh, we guess it should also be pointed out here that this was not the only time Hitler very publicly telegraphed his prediction of the Holocaust should another world war break out.
Of course, even with all of the propaganda and anti-Semitism, hating a cultural race or the like is one thing; getting people to go along with mass murder of them, including children, is quite another, let alone getting the German public to go along with the idea of another major war so soon after a devastating one like World War I, which again saw over 2 million Germans dead among an awful lot of other horribleness during and in the aftermath. Needless to say, the Nazis had a lot of creative storytelling to do. As such, first the Nazis did their utmost to convince everyone that the German brass were all about peace, but also made it clear they had a responsibility to protect Germans and thus needed to take up arms in order to protect the peace. As things progressed, they further pushed hard for the fact that they needed to defend against supposedly aggressive Poland, who were, according to them, mistreating ethnic Germans in their country. Now, not only that, they stated Poland was being extremely aggressive against Germany itself, flagrantly attacking, even though it turns out the truth of several cited events of Polish aggressions against Germany were actually Nazi staged as Polish soldiers. Perhaps the most famous of these attacks was on a German radio station the day before Hitler announced Germany would now retaliate because of these attacks, all as defensive action. Once Germany actually invaded Poland, the German press were also instructed to not reference this as a war, nor even Germany invading Poland, but rather simply Germany repelling Polish attacks. They were further trying to ensure that it would be other nations like Britain and France who would be the ones to declare war first against Germany, which they did a couple of days later, and thus once again Germany was simply defending itself against other nations declaring war against them. As a discussion for the comments below: up to this point, would the Nazis and Hitler have been more or less able to get away with convincing Germans of all of this if they had the internet? On the one hand, more than ever we all have access to hard and provable data; on the other hand, the spread of misinformation is perhaps greater than ever. I mean, let us know your thoughts.
In any event, directly after Germany invaded Poland, and answer propaganda machine further inflamed the German people, citing nearly 60,000 ethnic Germans supposedly slaughtered by the Polish directly after. In truth, there was a mass slaughter of ethnic Germans in the country in response to the invasion, but the number was about 10 times smaller than the German media reported. Speaking of mass murder, while countless thousands of Jews were murdered either directly or via maltreatment prior to the more concerted implementation of the Final Solution, this more systematic mass murder didn't begin until around 1941, when decisions were likewise being made with regards to war with the Soviet Union, as we'll get to shortly. That said, when Poland was invaded, the Germans did round up thousands of Jewish Poles, along with a pretty amazingly large number of other Poles, and summarily shot them and threw them into mass graves. Around the same time, now finally having a place to put the rest of the Jews, they began deporting them to the newly invaded country and elsewhere as the Nazis spread across Europe. As to what the general public thought about these deportations, it was generally stated that the mass roundup of the Jewish people would simply see them resettled and used for labor purposes. As anti-Semitism was at its zenith, few seemed to have had a huge problem with this, although it should be noted again that publicly speaking out against all of this wasn't exactly a great way to make it so you didn't join them; so that no doubt also contributed to the lack of outcry. Of course, the Nazi brass were aware that the labor front story had some plot holes in it. You see, they were also unabashedly rounding up elderly and disabled Jews who were unlikely to be very helpful towards these ends. To get around the logical problem, the propaganda machine spun a tale that those unable to work, like the elderly, were being sent to residential communities where they would live out their days in peace. With that, once established in 1941, the brass publicizing the existence of the Theresienstadt ghetto, which did in fact house a lot of elderly Jews, but conditions were intentionally made so bad that the populace would be sure to not take too long dying. In fact, over thirty thousand of its residents are known to have died there, despite it not technically being a death camp. On top of that, or what they didn't mention, was that Theresienstadt eventually also served as a way station of sorts to the death camps.
Speaking of Theresienstadt and the propaganda machine, in 1944, after hundreds of Danish Jews were deported there the year before, the Danish Red Cross and the International Red Cross were successfully able to convince the Nazis that they should be allowed to come inspect the ghetto to ensure its people were actually being treated well, contrary to what the world press were reporting concerning mass extermination and countless crimes against humanity at this point. Wanting to put their money where their mouths were, the SS finally agreed to such an inspection several months after the request was made, so they had a chance to pretty up the place first. As such, before allowing such an inspection, the Nazis accelerated the deportation of Jews stashed in Theresienstadt, sending thousands off to their death to reduce the population density. As for the remaining populace, they were put to work renovating everything, planting gardens, repainting homes, etc. If you look at pictures from the results of all of this, the place does appear to be quite nice, and the populace that were chosen to remain for the inspection looked healthy. Of course, once the Red Cross completed their inspections, normal operations resumed. Thus, had further to take advantage of the apparent great conditions there. Around the time of the Red Cross visit, the SS for themselves made a documentary of sorts of the beautified place, including showing residents of the ghetto attending concerts, playing sports, working in their gardens, otherwise just having a gay old time. Of course, what they failed to mention was that in order to get this footage, beyond, of course, the aforementioned beautifying of the place, they also had to coerce the populace into playing their roles, using everything from threats to food to get them to cooperate. That said, the problem with the video they made here was that the life of those in the ghetto was in many ways depicted as superior to that of many of the general populace back in Germany at the time. Now actually, from this, when the SS finally completed the film, they decided not to show it to anyone; it's thought because of this reason. This is not unlike a rather funny mix-up during the Cold War in which Stalin allowed The Grapes of Wrath, under the alternate name The Road to Wrath, to be viewed by the Soviet populace to depict how bad things could get under capitalism, except the whole thing kind of backfired in that the film depicts incredibly impoverished Americans are still able to afford cars—something many in the Soviet Union just didn't have—and thus the film was quickly pulled and subsequently banned.
Go back to the ghettos and trying to paint a rosier picture; another thing the Nazis did to tell people from looking too closely was to spread about the idea that the Jews were all disease-ridden. They even went so far as to post quarantine signs at the entrances of ghettos, which simultaneously helped keep people away while also explaining all of the bodies there was just widespread disease inside, which, to be fair, thanks to the abhorrent conditions, sometimes was actually a self-fulfilling prophecy. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Going back to shortly after the invasion of Poland and other countries soon after, while again there certainly were an awful lot of deaths and atrocities happening, the concerted effort to systematically annihilate the Jews and various others as a central policy still wasn't yet a thing. This all changed, however, in 1941, when the Final Solution was agreed upon, initially via use of mass firing squads, kicking things off in the most brutal way imaginable. We have the Kiev and Babi Yar Ravine, where over 30,000 Jewish people were shot and killed in a two-day span on September 29th and 30th of that year, though upwards of a hundred thousand more people were also killed and dumped in the ravine as well at various points of German occupation. The original grisly act was described by the commander in charge, stating: "The difficulties resulting from such a large-scale action, in particular concerning the seizure, were overcome in Kiev by requesting the Jewish population through wall posters to move. Although only a participation of approximately five to six thousand Jews have been expected at first, more than thirty thousand Jews arrived, until the very moment of their execution still believed in their resettlement." Thanks to an extremely clever organization, a truck driver who witnessed what happened next described the gut-wrenching atrocity: "I watched what happened when the Jews—men, women, and children—arrived. They led them past a number of different places where, one after the other, they had to give up their luggage, then their coats, shoes, and overgarments, and also underwear. They also had to leave their valuables in a designated place; there was a special pile for each article of clothing. It all happened very quickly, and anyone who hesitated was kicked or pushed to keep them moving. After that, once they undressed, they were led into the ravine, which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep. When they reached the bottom of the ravine, they were seized by members of the Schutzpolizei and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot. The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun. I saw these marksmen stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other. The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew, who had meanwhile laid down, and shot him." Although well over 30,000 Jews were victims of this insanity, only 29 survived. One such, Dina Pronajeda, stated she dumped onto the bodies before being shot, then played dead while the Nazis shot at those still alive around her. Once nightfall came, they had covered many of the bodies with dirt, but there were still SS walking around shooting anyone they found alive. However, it was dark, and when an opportune moment came, she was able to crawl out from among the bodies and sneak away without being seen. Another interesting thing to point out is that the decision to start the systematic mass annihilation of the Jews followed almost immediately after the United States entered the war, thus making it a so-called world war, with Nazi politician and Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels stating, regarding the Jewish question: "The Führer warned the Jews that if they were to cause another world war, it would lead to their destruction. Those were not empty words. Now the world war has come; the destruction of the Jews must be its necessary consequence. We cannot be sentimental about it now."
Finally having begun the open genocide, plans began in earnest to convert some of the concentration camps to also include designated facilities for rapid mass executions, as it was noted that the mass firing squad method was bad for troop morale and also rather inefficient on the scale they needed, as well as it wasted an awful lot of bullets. And as to that scale, from March 1942 to November 1943 alone, some 1.5 million Jews were murdered in just three concentration camps by gas chamber. So what did people know about this escalation of atrocities? Almost immediately after these mass murders began, the Allies caught wind of it. While there were various sources of information the Allies had access to with regards to the mass killings in and outside of the concentration camps, a personal favorite source also just happens to be one of our favorite people to talk about here on Today Found Out, and no, it's not Teddy Roosevelt, the undisputed greatest man to ever man, but one of the runners-up to that position, a badass individual by the name of Captain Witold Pilecki. When Pilecki wasn't busy getting the people eventually in charge of guarding and torturing him to rethink their life choices and value all life all the way down to the little ladybug, because to him all life had value—more on that and bonus facts later—he was fearlessly doing his duty for his country and the Allies, including being the first to report the use of Zyklon B and the gas chambers. So how did Pilecki know about this? This rather daring Polish man decided to infiltrate Auschwitz in the most dangerous way possible. You see, after the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Pilecki and some like-minded friends formed the Tajna Armia Polska, the Polish Secret Army. Not long after the formation of organized widespread Polish resistance, its members began hearing reports of the conditions within the newly constructed Auschwitz concentration camp, put into operation in the spring of 1940. Those first reports originated with prisoners released from the camp and from civilians such as railroad employees and local residents. In order to cut through the very troubling rumors and figure out exactly what was going on there, Pilecki came up with a bold plan: become a prisoner at Auschwitz. With a little convincing, his superiors eventually agreed to allow him to try. According to Eleanora Ostrowska, owner of an apartment Pilecki was at when he was taken, when a Nazi roundup began—where a city block would suddenly be closed off and most civilians inside would be rounded up and sent to a slave labor camp, and sometimes even just mass executed on the spot—a member of the resistance came to help Pilecki hide. Instead, Ostrowska said they told, rejected these opportunities and didn't even try to hide in my flat. She reported that soon a German soldier knocked at the door, and Pilecki whispered to her: "Report that I have fulfilled the order," and then opened the door and was taken by the soldier, along with about 2,000 other Poles in Warsaw on September 19, 1940. It is at this point that we feel compelled to point out that he didn't really know if he'd be sent to Auschwitz. As Dr. Daniel Pallavoda noted of Pilecki's capture: "Since the AB-Aktion and roundups were still going on, the Nazis could have tortured and executed him in occupied Warsaw's Pawiak, Mokotów, or any other Gestapo-run prison. They could have taken him to Palmiry to murder him in the forest. At the very least, they could have sent him to a forced labor colony somewhere in Germany." While he was willingly surrendering with the hope of being sent to Auschwitz, Pilecki lamented the behavior of his fellow countrymen during the roundup. He stated: "What really annoyed me the most was the passivity of this group of Poles. All those picked up were already showing signs of crowd psychology, the result being that our crowd behaved like a herd of passive sheep. A simple thought kept nagging me: stir up everyone and get this mass of people moving." As he had hoped, perhaps the only person to ever hope such a thing. He was later sent to Auschwitz. He later described his experience upon arrival as such: "We gave everything away—to bags to which respective numbers were tied. Here, our hair of head and body were cut off, and we were slightly sprinkled by cold water. I got a blow in my jaw with a heavy rod; I spat out my two teeth; bleeding began. From that moment we became mere numbers. I wore the number 4859. We were struck over the head not only by SS rifle butts but by something far greater—our concepts of law and order and of what was normal. All those ideas to which we had become accustomed on this Earth were given a brutal kicking."
Pilecki also stated that one of the first indications he observed that Auschwitz was not just a normal prison camp was the lack of food given to prisoners. In his estimate, the rations given to prisoners were calculated in such a way that people would live for six weeks. He also noted that a guard at the camp told him: "Whoever will live longer, it means he steals." Assessing the conditions inside Auschwitz was only part of Pilecki's mission; he also took on responsibility for organizing a resistance force within the camp, the Związek Organizacji Wojskowych Głównnego Oddziału, or ZOW, and I apologize for my pronunciation. The goal of ZOW included improving inmate morale, distributing any extra food and clothing, setting up an intelligence network within the camp, training prisoners to eventually rise up against their guards and liberate Auschwitz, and getting news in and out of Auschwitz. Ensuring secrecy of the ZOW led Pilecki to create cells within the organization. He trusted the leaders of each cell to withstand interrogation by the guards, but even so, each leader only knew the names of the handful of people under his command. This limited the risk to the entire organization should an informant tip off a guard or if a member is caught. Going back to the topic at hand, Pilecki's first reports to the Polish government and Allied Forces about the conditions in the camp and atrocities occurring there left the camp with released prisoners, but when releases became less common, passing reports onto the outside world depended largely on the success of prisoner escapes, such as one that occurred on June 20, 1942, when four Poles managed to dress up as members of the SS, weapons and all, and steal an SS car, which they boldly drove out of the main gate of the camp. A cobbled-together radio, built over the course of seven months as parts could be acquired, was used for a while in 1942 to transmit reports until, he said, "all of our fellows' big mouths" resulted in the Nazis learning of the radio, forcing the group to dismantle it before they were caught red-handed and executed. As alluded to, Pilecki's reports were the first to mention the use of Zyklon B gas, a poisonous hydrogen cyanide gas, and gas chambers used at the camp. He saw the first use of Zyklon B gas in September 1941, when the Nazis used it to kill 850 Soviet POWs and Poles in Block 11 of Auschwitz I. He also learned that the gas chambers at Auschwitz II, or Auschwitz-Birkenau, from other resistance members after construction of the camp began in October 1941. ZOW also managed to keep a pretty good running log of roughly the number of inmates being brought into the camp and the estimated number of deaths, noting at one point over a thousand a day from the new transports were gassed; the corpses were burnt in the new crematoria. All of the reports were always sent to the Polish government in exile in London, and they in turn forwarded the information to other Allied Forces.
However extremely important the topic at hand, despite direct evidence and eyewitness accounts, on the whole it seems, in the early stages at least, the Allies thought the reports of mass killings, starvation, brutal and systematic torture, gas chambers, medical experimentation, etc., were wildly exaggerated and initially questioned the reliability of Pilecki's reports. Nevertheless, Pilecki sold it on and even managed to convince his network of resistance fighters inside the camp that they could successfully take control for a short while and escape if the Allies and Polish underground provided support. He had envisioned air drops of weapons and possibly even Allied soldiers invading the camp. However, the Allies never had any intention of such an operation, and the local Polish resistance in Warsaw refused to attack due to the large
Hands. It should be noted that anyone caught helping an Auschwitz escapee would be killed along with the escaped prisoner, something the local populace knew well. Further, the 40 square kilometers around Auschwitz were extremely heavily patrolled, and the escapees' shaved heads, tattered clothes, and gaunt appearance would give them away in a second to anyone who saw them. Despite this, all three not only survived the initial escape but managed to get to safety without being recaptured. Unfortunately, Piletsky's plan to garner support for liberating Auschwitz never materialized. After arriving at the headquarters of the Home Army on August 25, 1943, and desperately pleading his case for the Home Army to put all efforts into liberating Auschwitz, he left feeling, to quote him, "bitter and disappointed" when the idea was discarded as being too risky. In his final report on Auschwitz, he further vented his frustration on his superiors' cowardliness.
Not only reports from the likes of frankly amazing heroes like Piletsky, the Allies also were, among many other sources, intercepting transmissions from the Germans about all manner of mass killings. Churchill summed up the gathered intelligence in a live broadcast in 1941, quoting, "As Hitler's army's advance, whole districts are being exterminated; scores of thousands, literally scores of thousands of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police troops. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the 16th century, there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale, then this. But this is but the beginning; famine and pestilence have yet to follow in the bloody ruts of Hitler's tanks. We are in the presence of a crime without a name."
Outside of such speeches as this, there are literally thousands upon thousands of known news reports in the Allied world discussing these atrocities in surprisingly accurate detail, in some cases with headlines like "From the London Times: Massacre of Jews--Over One Million Dead Since War Began," or the Montreal Daily Star with the article, "Nazi Slaughterhouse: Germans Massacre Million Jews in Extermination Drive." Edward Morrow of CBS Radio, on December 13, 1942, reported very frankly, "What is happening is this: millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered. The phrase 'concentration camps' is obsolete, as out of date as economic sanctions or non-recognition. It is now possible only to speak of extermination camps." Summing it up with remarkable accuracy in late 1942, the U.S., Soviet Union, and Britain all released a joint statement that read, "Jews are being transported in conditions of appalling horror and brutality to Eastern Europe, in Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse. The ghettos established by the German invaders are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries. None of those taken away ever heard of again. The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labor camps; the infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions. The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women, and children."
Needless to say, the Allied world was well aware of what was happening. That said, it should be noted that World War One propaganda reports by Allied countries included an awful lot of atrocities that turned out to be exaggerated or not true at all after the fact. So people, even in Allied lands, were initially skeptical despite the evidence and reports that were presented.
Going back to Germany, the tightly controlled German media were unsurprisingly prevented from discussing the various massacres so openly. With the Nazi party themselves largely both denying all of this and, with regards to the Jews, denying the poor living conditions within ghettos and concentration camps, as previously noted. That said, given the German media and Nazi brass seemed to often feel the need to counter rumors publicly, it would at least seem the case that the rumors were out there fairly prominently. On that note, listening to illegal broadcasts from Allied sources within Germany and German-controlled regions was a thing, as were, at times, reading dropped Allied leaflets and the like.
Not just that, it's pointed out by history Professor Dr. Connell Fagues that exterminating that many people wasn't exactly something that could be done without an insane amount of support staff on various levels knowing about it. Stating the task was so enormous, complex, time-consuming, and mentally and economically demanding that it took the best efforts of millions of Germans. All spheres of life in Germany actively participated: businessmen, policemen, bankers, doctors, lawyers, soldiers, railroad and factory workers, chemists, pharmacists, foreign production managers, economists, manufacturers, jewelers, diplomats, civil servants, propagandists, filmmakers and film stars, professors, teachers, politicians, mayors, party members, construction experts, art dealers, architects, landlords, janitors, truck drivers, clerks, industrialists, scientists, generals, and even shopkeepers--all were essentially cogs in the machinery that accomplished the "Final Solution."
Going back to illegal broadcasts, so as the war progressed and Germany began to suffer some rather catastrophic defeats, the Nazis began to have a much more difficult time satisfactorily explaining away events to favor Germany. For example, after the Germans were trounced in Stalingrad in February 1943, the dissonance between official news stories and what was being reported by the German media seemed to result in more and more Germans beginning to reject the state propaganda and turn to foreign radio broadcasts instead, in order to learn what was really going on--foreign broadcasts again that were quite openly discussing the countless atrocities. That said, as was happening to an extent in Allied lands, even among those among the German populace who were listening to the broadcasts and otherwise heard the seemingly pretty rampant rumors about all of this, there seems to have been a great deal of skepticism. After all, it's not like the German people were stupid when it came to their own government's propaganda machine. It would seem many were well aware that they were being fed lies on a number of fronts from the Nazis, so it was thus not a stretch that the other side might come up with their own set of lies, making the Nazis and Germany out to be committing unspeakable acts. This sort of propaganda again wasn't that uncommon on both sides in the last World War, which was still relatively fresh on everybody's minds.
That said, from various journal entries and the like, we do at least know some Germans who weren't directly involved were convinced, though they were powerless to do anything about it. For example, we have the case of one Friedrich Kellner, a staunch and, in the early days at least, very publicly outspoken opponent of the Nazi party, which got him on the brutal end of more than one beating. As events progressed, he finally accepted there was nothing much he could, from a practical standpoint, do about any of it, although he still wasn't exactly quiet about the things he found out, ultimately making him a target of the Nazis. With one Nazi official, Ernst Monog, writing a report about Kellner's actions which read, "He should be made to disappear." Nevertheless, Kellner was not killed and instead wrote, "I could not fight the Nazis in the present as they had the power to still my voice, so I decided to fight them in the future." Thus, he took to doing his best to document the Nazi atrocities and methods of getting the public to support them or otherwise allow things to happen. The summation of his work was in the form of his journal titled "My Opposition."
Noteworthy to the discussion, it had many historians who advocate that the German populace knew a lot more than seemed to be the case after the war. Points out that much of Kellner's information came from publicly available sources such as Nazi broadcasts, hundreds of newspaper clippings, and talking to various community members around him, as well as listening to illegal Allied broadcasts and the like. Basically, there was nothing much special about Kellner; all the information he had access to. On this note, Kellner had some rather harsh words for his fellow Germans, stating, "There is no punishment that would be hard enough to be applied to these Nazi beasts. Of course, when the retribution comes, we'll have to suffer along with them, but because 99% of the German population is guilty directly or indirectly for the present situation, we can only say that those who travel together will hang together." Of the atrocities committed, he was aware of these included the so-called "mercy killings" of various Germans, as well as countless mass murders against civilians both domestically and abroad in occupied territories. For example, he documented the execution of about 100 French civilians in retaliation for two German officers being killed, stating, "To let people who are completely innocent suffer for the deeds of another is reminiscent of the horrific deeds of wild beasts in times long ago," as were the slaughter of Jews. He states, among other evidence he collected, "A soldier on leave here said he personally witnessed a terrible atrocity in the occupied part of Poland. He watched as naked Jewish men and women were placed in front of a long, deep ditch, and upon the order of the SS, or shot by Ukrainians at the back of their heads, and they fell into the ditch. Then the ditch was filled in as screams kept coming from it." He also elaborated, "This cruel, despicable, and sadistic agreement against the Jews that has lasted now several years, with its final goal of extermination, is the biggest stain on the honor of Germany. They will never be able to erase these crimes." No other here is that he was already documenting these atrocities in 1941 before the more mass implementation of the so-called "Final Solution." To help spread the word beyond openly discussing these things with those around him, he would also rather bravely do things like gathering dropped Allied leaflets and placing them around his town so the maximum number of people would be exposed to them.
His grandson, English Professor Robert Scott Kellner, notes of his grandfather's work, "Friedrich knew that people like the Nazis would never lose their thirst for power and absolute rule. The last of the Holocaust survivors were soon to depart, but his voice will remain--a voice to check revisionist historians and Holocaust deniers with an irrefutable account--an account not by a Nazi or a victim of the Nazis, but by an average German citizen." That said, while he was more or less an average German citizen, he was one who actively sought information about what the Nazis were up to from any source that he could find, piecing together everything from there to try and discern the truth. So what about everyone else? Again, historians are in disagreement as to the extent of the wider public's knowledge about what was going on. This is despite countless surviving journals showing that at least some people were very aware, or at least suspected, what was going on, not to mention the innumerable number of people directly involved on some level and their relations, not to mention again people seeming to have had at least some level of access to the needed information. So what about the other side of the argument, on the side that it maybe wasn't totally common knowledge? Besides many after the fact claiming that they didn't know, we have that it appears many of the Jews rounded up weren't under the impression they would be taken off to death camps or the like. The general perception seems to be that they knew they were going into a really bad situation with the very real possibility of dying, but that they didn't think they were being mass murdered, just extremely mistreated. The Nazi regime helped foster this notion a variety of ways. For example, in 1941, a booklet printed by the Nazi brass for widespread consumption outlined how Jews in places like Poland had been given work, access to hospitals, food, and those who needed it even provided with vocational training. More directly, they reassured the Jews rounded up and in the ghettos that the deportees from these points were being sent to places with better conditions. To help corroborate this, upon arrival into the concentration camps, many inmates were forced to write letters about the good condition in the camps. On this note, even in the ghettos themselves, there seemed to have been a lot of skepticism about the "Final Solution." The issue primarily seems to just go back to, once again, despite all the evidence slapping everybody in the face, many just refused to believe their fellow human beings could actually be doing this, and it wasn't just some sort of propaganda campaign from the other side. As one of the leaders of the Jewish resistance in Warsaw, Yitzhak Zuckerman, noted, "Common sense could not understand that it was possible to exterminate tens and hundreds of thousands of Jews."
Of course, as Allied troops began liberating countries and their concentration camps as they marched toward Germany, things eventually changed. But before it did, the Allied soldiers almost universally would later write of their exasperation at the apparent widespread accounts from Germans themselves that they had been totally ignorant of any of these atrocities. For example, William Ward of the 232nd Infantry stated, "All of the locals were adamant that they were Nazis and didn't have any idea what had taken place at the concentration camp." Another, by the name of Arthur Johnson, stated, "All these people who claimed they didn't know anything about it, and they were just 10 or 15 miles from Weimar Buchenwald concentration camp." Noteworthy on this one, to counter previous Allied reports about atrocities, Nazi propaganda had stated all the bodies were from mass burial of air raid victims, in this case both showing a plausible alternate story as well as also demonstrating that the news was out there for the German public to the extent that the Nazis felt like they needed to address the topic.
In the end, while the matter is still hotly contested, the general consensus is that it is clear a considerable number of people beyond those directly involved did have access to the needed information to know what was going on, but not just largely apparently unwilling to believe it, even when directly told. After the war, resistance to the idea seems to have still been a thing throughout the world, at least at first. In short, for a world on both sides used to pretty rampant and often blatantly false propaganda when it came to World War One, and a German populace quite familiar with a whole lot of BS coming from their own government on the propaganda front, it was perhaps difficult to know what to believe, especially when the atrocities were so insane in their reported degree. On top of this, for many Germans peripherally complicit in these acts and under Nazi rule with little else they could do about it, many perhaps simply didn't want to believe that it was true, even when exposed to the necessary information. As one contemporary German housewife noted, "Of course, there were rumors about the camps, but no one believed them. We thought that the prisoners might be working hard, that they might not be getting plenty of good food, and we even imagined some beatings or making the prisoners shout in chorus, 'Heil Hitler!'" Of course, once direct evidence in the form of pictures and videos and survivor accounts and the like flooded the news ways the world over, skeptics throughout the world, for the most part, finally came to accept the truth as a result of this and how harsh the Nazis had been against their own people after they came to power.
After the war, a relatively unique thing happened in Germany that you don't often see in the history books: a defeated people really didn't see themselves that way, nor their former enemy as their enemy. Rather, the general public, hence the way the history books largely write about it in Germany, saw the Allies as also having liberated Germany from the Nazis. In fact, in Germany, the major destruction in the country and the high cost of human lives during the war is not generally attributed to the Allies' actions, but rather to the Nazi regime itself. Thus, somewhat unique in history, the opposing forces who were victorious are not generally seen in a negative light by those they defeated--far from it. On that note, the occupation of the German cities by the Allied army is characterized as liberation, a befriending. Despite, of course, that the Allied soldiers at the time didn't seemingly view the race to Berlin as a race to free Berlin.
Fast forwarding to today and how World War II is taught in German schools (we've actually covered that in full in another video), but briefly, a major emphasis in the German education system is placed on studying the build-up to the Nazis and their actions after they came to power, with the students confronted with the crushing effects of totalitarian regimes, racial ideologies, and where these can lead. In addition to photo and video documentaries, most schools organize mandatory school trips to Holocaust memorials, usually former concentration camps. With all this emphasis towards the end of making sure nothing like that ever happens again in Germany and beyond. In contrast, the details of the fields of war are often undeployed in German schools. A possible reason for this is that showing maps of expanding German territory during the first two years of the war and discussing their winning battles might cause encouragement of nationalistic pride, which seems counterproductive to many given the points that the educators are trying to teach.
At first glance, it is great to study these events in detail to make sure they don't happen again. However, an issue for Germans, of course, is the sense of collective responsibility. Despite no student today, or their parents, or even potentially grandparents having anything to do with anything that happened in World War II, we see this not just in the case of Germany and World War II but often in other atrocities that have passed the world over, with blame sometimes being assigned to people living today, occasionally many generations away from anyone who had anything to do with it. How much weight does the idea of original sin have? How is a person born in the 2000s responsible for the Nazi atrocities? It is still heavily frowned upon to display the modern-day German flag, despite officially and explicitly not being a Nazi symbol in most contexts other than international football matches. On a similar note, a national display such as pledging allegiance to the flag during class every morning would have the worst possible connotations in Germany, despite being commonplace in the United States. Furthermore, there's a high percentage of the population with immigrant heritage. As you might expect from all this, there is some concern that the German school systems today might be going too far with the seeming obsession with the Nazis and all the mistakes that were made, instead of spending more time on broader history as is more typical in other nations. Whatever one's own opinion on that, as an interesting little side note, the German denazification process was considered such a success that decades later Americans sought to apply a similar methodology after occupying Iraq. Unsurprisingly, that wasn't exactly useful.
Bonus fact: Going back to the badass that was Captain Witold Pilecki, you might think it's strange Pilecki frequently quite willingly threw himself into incredibly dangerous situations, not just given he seemed to have little concern for his own self-preservation, but also that he had a wife and kids back home. Polish actor Marek Probosz, who studied Pilecki extensively before portraying him in "The Death of Captain Pilecki," stated of this, "Human beings were the most precious thing for Pilecki, and especially those who were oppressed. He would do anything to liberate them, to help them." Mirroring the sentiment, Pilecki's son, Andrzej, later said his father would write, "We should live worthwhile lives, to respect others and nature. He wrote to my sister to watch out for every little ladybug, to not step on it but place it and stared on a leaf, because everything has been created for a reason. Love nature," he instructed us like this in his letters. As alluded to, it wasn't just his children he taught to respect life at all levels, you see. Unfortunately for Pilecki, he was ultimately arrested and executed by the Soviets in 1948, bizarrely under false charges of supposedly having been a German collaborator during the war. Note here his actual crimes were gathering things like documented proof that the voting results of the People's Referendum of 1946 were heavily falsified by the Communists, among other acts that made him an extremely undesirable citizen under Soviet rule. However, two years after his execution, at a time when his family was struggling because of it, a man approached Pilecki's teenage son and stated, "I was in prison as a guard with your father. I want to help you because your father was a saint. Under his influence, I changed my life. I do not harm anyone anymore."