FACT VERSUS OPINION: What did Germans and Austrians know, during the war, about the concentration camps?
There has been an exchange between a reader and myself about what Germans and Austrians did or didn’t know, during the war, about the concentration camps.
She holds that, based on what she heard from a very good honest German who fled Germany BEFORE the war, that Germans knew about the camps or anyway knew that something nefarious was going on.
I hold this is false, based first and foremost on what my father told me, that he - a young teen in Austria - did not know, and in fact that no one around him knew. Information about the camps was not broadcast, but hidden. People were told Jews were taken into custody for safe-keeping. I have, as an adult, also heard this from other sources.
The end of the reader’s answer:
Elsa, I've read Weisel and many of the best memoirs by survivors these last few years, plus viewed many documentaries. I disagree with your opinion.
The end of my response:
I am not giving opinion. I am giving facts - the fact of what my father knew, the fact also of what the people around him heard on the Nazi-controlled media, facts about what Nazi media was sending out (you can check into this) …
You believe my father was lying. You are entitled to hold whatever opinions you like.
This morning, I got an email from a friend whose family emigrated from Germany to Canada in 1955:
My father was drafted into the German army in 1942 and fought until it was over. He never heard of any camps and the lies in our history books compared to his and my mother’s tales, had so many contradictions that I spent my high school years disputing the lies and being kicked out of history class constantly.
The winners print the stories and the losers suffer outrageous attacks.
In 1957 we had a rock thrown through our window with a message of Nazis go home.
Canadian tolerance wasn’t a thing back then for me or other Germans.
Sincerely,
Jurgen
If Jurgen's father never heard of any camps, that means that, almost certainly, likewise around him none of the other soldiers heard of any camps. That goes with what my father (a few years younger, so he did not get into the army) told me: that he never heard of any camps, not from the news, not from anyone.
In fact, it was devastating for him to find out, after the war, that everyone in the one Jewish family in his village was killed.
If you want the full exchange between the reader and myself, it’s in the comments below the post. I will give the link again at the end:
truthsummit.substack.com/p/what-really-happened-at-the-rhine-meadows-camps
The reader leaps, for instance, from a fact about her good honest German friend - “He quite literally had relatives who knew and supported the Third Reich” - to her belief that people knew what was happening for reasons such as that she had “watched footage of Jewish people rounded up in ghettos, public squares, in train stations.”
My answer was that I have no idea even about what is going on in the train station of the closest city. In fact, I haven’t been near that train station - or any other - for years. Also it’s an enormous leap from seeing people rounded up, to believing they’re being taken to a camp to be killed.
But yes, there definitely was widespread anti-Semitism - as there was throughout the West.
On the other hand, did people know about the camps? According to reading I have done, until 1942, Hitler was trying to find a country, like Liberia, where the Jews could be shipped.
A big question. How to cool down and sort through the facts.
By the way, about yesterday’s post on the 2 very different accounts of what happened in the Rhine Meadows camps for German prisoners of war, my sense is that the weight of the evidence is that James Bacque’s account - that a large number of German POWs died - is fact-based.
Note that if you are in the UK, you can’t access Bacque’s video, Other Losses. It is blocked as hate speech!!! My suggestion to the people who wrote about this was that VPN might be helpful. It enables you to relocate your computer (in the virtual world) to another country which can give you access to see the film. My main suggestion: see both films for yourself, also do further research.
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Here again is the full exchange which sparked this post. You can find it in the comments right below the post:
Posted November 15, 2023
There is no way to know what most people knew back when.
The good thing is:
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.
I would think the answer to? whether Germans or Austrians knew is not blank or white. There were people who knew, and others who didn't. Some were probably in denial.
The same goes on now. I have friends here in the US who have no idea of the hate towards Jews. They live in their world, happy, naive. There are others who do. Jews, and others, who are passive, don't want to speak out out of fear, abs others who are the haters.