What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany: An Oral History

This is a great book that provides excerpts from interviews Johnson and Reuband conducted with Jews and Germans. The interviews give exact details about how much and what kind of information the Germans and Jews had about the mass extermination of the Jews. The book also includes the results from their phone and mail surveys about what the Germans and Jews knew, which along with the interviews provide actual evidence for their conclusions.

The Gestapo served as the leading instrument of terror in Hitler's police state and its terror fell most heavily upon specifically targeted groups, including, Jews, Communists, Socialists, Homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Sinti and Roma, and out-spoken critics of the regime. As for the vast majority of Germans, they had no contact with the Gestapo, provided the Gestapo few tips, and felt little fear of ever being arrested. The German public's silent acquiescence to Nazi policy did not, however, preclude whispered criticisms of the regime or knowledge of the fate of these targeted groups. Johnson's conclusions, in short, are consistent with those reached by other leading scholars in the field while offering a unique depth lacking in most studies. Specifically, Johnson=s extensive research into the Gestapo merges records of post-war trials of former Gestapo officers with original documentation drawn from Gestapo case files, an array of contemporary surveys, and numerous personal interviews. Within Johnson=s focus on the Krefeld and Cologne Gestapo offices, Gestapo officers aggressively and brutally enforced the laws directed at specific target groups. Despite the evidence at hand, most Gestapo officers would never be called to account for their crimes and usually lived out their lives in post-war West Germany on a full pension.

"What We Knew" by Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband. Subtitled: "Terror, Mass Murder, and Every Day Life In Nazi Germany". Basic Books, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2005. This book was written by a team of authors, one, an American historian and the other, a German sociologist. The excellent team of writers has compiled a lengthy book (434 pages) that attempts to determine what, if anything, the ordinary German knew about the extermination of so many people, including more than six million Jews, by the Nazi regime which held power from 1933 to 1945. The authors have applied the techniques of modern statistical analysis, interviewing a large sample of individuals who lived through the terror, in an attempt to extrapolate their opinions, into an estimation of the actual feelings and actual knowledge of the actual participants, Jew and Gentile. I emphasize the word, "actual". I congratulate the authors on their efforts. I would be frightened to attempt the same thing. The greater portion of the book (some 253 pages) accumulates selected interviews with both Jews and Gentiles. Pages 3 to 135 deal with interviews of the Jewish participants while pages 141 to 259 deal with the testimonies of the "ordinary Germans". These interviews represent a "primary source" as Historians define them. By their very nature, however, these interviews do not lend themselves to a flowing, comprehensive story. This makes it difficult to read. The interviews do present a statistical sample of how the people felt about the terror and what they knew about the camps. In the next few chapters, called "Part THREE", pages 263-399, the authors analyze the data. This section of the book is a good "Secondary source", as defined by Historians. There are tables summarizing a wealth of information, such as the "Level of the Knowledge of Mass Murders of Jews among Jewish Survivors", broken down by the country to which the survivor escaped. Interestingly, on page 313, Table 10-3 shows that the main "Source of Knowledge" of the Mass Murders of Jews was radio broadcasts! Technology affecting History. One wonders what television would have done. I served in the United States Navy in the segregated South during the late 1950s. Back home, in Manhattan, my tales of water fountains for "Colored" and "Whites" were looked upon as sea stories from a distant country. It took television reports of incidents such as Selma, Alabama, to make the nation conscious of the meanness of segregation. Who knows what a future statistician might make of our nastiness in segregation and what the ordinary citizen, living in The Bronx, knew about the evils of segregation? The final conclusion of the authors is that "...a dictatorship can enjoy widespread popularity among the majority even while committing unspeakable crimes against minorities and others". (Page 398).

I was born and raised in Germany, many years after the end of World War II and the Nazi period. There is a tremendeous amount of information available about the Third Reich, the war, and the Holocaust; but for me, there was always something lacking: How could all that happen? How was it possible? And what did people really know? The standard answer, which I was given a lot when I aksed people about it, was that they didn't know anything about the Holocaust until after the war. I never found that very convincing. There is just no way that a country can organize the killing of millions of people, many of who were their own citizens, with the vast majority of people being absolutely clueless. It simply doesn't make any sense. Didn't people notice how their neighbours disappeared? And wouldn't soldiers on visits home mention things they had seen? Given the involvement of the German Army in many of those crimes - a fact that is still hotly contested in shamefully large circles to this date - I have never found the claim credible that "we didn't know anything". Finally, there is a way to get better information. "What We Knew" contains the results of a decade long scientific study about what people - Jewish and non-Jewish - knew and experienced. A large part of the book consists of interviews, separated into different categories. Of course, the picture is infinitely more complex than "we didn't know anything" or "they all knew" - but now finally, it is starting to make sense. I admit that even having read so many voices I am still at a complete loss as to how this all was possible. But at least now we know what people knew, how many people knew etc. This book is a masterpiece, and it's a must-read for anybody interested in what was going on almost 70 years ago.