The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (84 page)

VII

Details about the extermination spread through any number of channels in the Reich and beyond. Thus, for example, every summer hundreds of women visited their husbands who were guards in Auschwitz and other camps, as just mentioned; they often stayed for long periods of time. As for the German population of the town of Auschwitz, it complained about the odor produced by the overloaded crematories.
¹³⁸
This particular problem was confirmed by Höss: “It became apparent during the first cremations in the open air that in the long run it would not be possible to continue in that manner. During bad weather or when a strong wind was blowing, the stench of burning flesh was carried for many miles and caused the whole neighborhood to talk about the burning of Jews, despite official counter-propaganda. It is true that all members of the SS detailed for the extermination were bound to strict secrecy over the whole operation, but as later SS legal proceedings showed, this was not always observed. Even the most severe punishment was not able to stop their love of gossip.”
¹³⁹

What German civilians living in eastern Upper Silesia gathered about Auschwitz, what railwaymen, policemen, soldiers, and anybody traveling through the eastern reaches of the Reich could easily hear or witness, Reich Germans visiting the Warthegau or settled there learned simply by comparing what they had seen on their earlier visits, in 1940 or 1941, and what could not be missed one or two years later. “I saw nothing more of the Jewish population of what had been Poland,” Annelies Regenstein reminisced in an interview. “In 1940, I traveled on one occasion through the ghetto in Litzmannstadt, a dark area of the city fenced off with barbed wire in which thousands of Jews were herded together and left to vegetate.
Something of the terrible fate of these people probably seeped into the population
(emphasis in original). But anti-Semitic propaganda and a hostile attitude on the part of the resettled Germans towards the Jews made them indifferent.” As historian Elisabeth Harvey put it: “She [Regenstein] did not spell out her own reactions at the time to the knowledge that was ‘probably seeping’ into German consciousness.”
¹⁴⁰

Another former woman settler, Elisabeth Grabe, spoke more explicitly of her own experience, also in the Warthegau: “The Jews who had lived in the ghetto in Zychlin and Kutno disappeared one day (I can’t remember when that was, perhaps 1942). People whispered to each other that they had been loaded into lorries and gassed [
Sie wären in Autos geladen und vergast, wurde genuschelt
]. These rumors affected me even more painfully than the notion that I was using confiscated [Polish] furniture.”
¹⁴¹
Of course the information thus whispered around described quite precisely the killings in Chelmno.

By early 1943 the information about mass extermination of the Jews was so widespread in the Reich (even if the “technical details” were mostly not precise) as to have probably reached a majority of the population. A recurring rumor mentioned the gassing of Jews in tunnels somewhere on the way to the East.
¹⁴²
This kind of information didn’t seem to soften anti-Jewish hatred and brutality. Thus the Spanish Consul in Berlin reported that, in April 1943, trucks with deportees were stopped on their way to the railway station by bombed-out people, who attempted to seize the luggage of the victims.
¹⁴³
Generally speaking, recent historical research increasingly turns German ignorance of the fate of the Jews into a mythical postwar construct.

The Party Chancellery deemed it necessary to issue appropriate guidelines in response to the spreading knowledge. The opening sentences of the confidential document sent out on October 9, 1942, were telling: “In the context of work on the final solution of the Jewish question there has recently been some discussion by people in various parts of the Reich about ‘very harsh measures’ against the Jews, particularly in the eastern territories. It has been established that such statements—usually distorted and exaggerated—are passed on by people on leave from the various units engaged in the East, who have themselves had the opportunities to observe such measures.”
¹⁴⁴

Opposition leaders were particularly well informed. Historian Hans Mommsen has shown that in 1942 the gassing of Jews was known to the Jesuit priest Alfred Delp, to the Prussian finance minister Johannes Popitz, and to Helmuth von Moltke, among others.
¹⁴⁵
On October 10, 1942, Moltke wrote to his wife: “Yesterday’s lunch was interesting in that the man I ate with had just come from the [General] Government and gave an authentic report on the ‘SS blast-furnace.’ So far I had not believed it, but he assured me that it was true: 6,000 people a day are ‘processed’ in that furnace. He was in a prison camp 6 km away, and the officers there reported it to him as absolute fact.”
¹⁴⁶

At about the same time members of the clandestine “Freiburg Circle” were putting the final touch to the “Great Memorandum,” the outcome of the group’s discussions about the social, political, and moral bases of a post–National Socialist Germany. The Freiburg economics professor Konstantin von Dietze authored the fifth and last appendix to the memorandum, “Proposals for the Solution of the Jewish Question in Germany.” The document was discussed in November 1942 at Dietze’s home by several leaders of the political opposition (among them Karl Goerdeler), key members of the Confessing Church, and others. Although the “Final Solution” as such was not mentioned in the fifth appendix, the mass extermination of Jews was recognized: “These persecutions [of the Jews] have unmistakably been at the will of the central authorities. They led not only to innumerable forced evacuations, during which many Jews died; hundreds of thousands of human beings have been killed systematically merely because of their Jewish ancestry…. The full extent of such infamous deeds is hardly imaginable; in any case it cannot be portrayed fully in objective facts or figures, since no agency has openly assumed responsibility for them.”
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Recognition of the mass extermination did not, however, induce the Freiburg group to consider the Jews in post-Nazi Germany as individuals and citizens like all others. “The existence of a numerically significant body of Jews within a people,” the memorandum emphasized, “constitutes a problem that must lead to recurrent difficulties, if it is not subjected to a fundamental and large-scale arrangement.”
¹⁴⁸
A series of contemplated measures for dealing with this “Jewish problem,” both in Germany and on the international level, followed: The traditional anti-Semitism of German conservatives and of the German churches found full expression, with an additional touch of notions garnered from Nazism: “All who belong to the Jewish confession, as well as those who belonged to this confession earlier but have not joined another religious affiliation, are considered Jews. If Jews convert to Christianity then they remain members of the body of Jews, as long as they have not been naturalized by the state in their homeland.” And, beforehand, the authors declared: “The state, after revoking the Nuremberg Laws, renounces all special regulations for the Jews, since the number of surviving Jews and those returning to Germany will not be so large that they still could be considered a danger for the German Volkstum.”
¹⁴⁹

Another illustration of the mixture of knowledge regarding the exterminations and the permanence of anti-Semitism among German opposition groups and in much of the population appeared in the second clandestine leaflet distributed in early July 1942 by the essentially Catholic “White Rose” resistance group based at the University of Munich. In this leaflet the murder of Jews in Poland was mentioned. Yet the Munich students presented the issue in a strangely convoluted way and added an immediate disclaimer:

“We do not intend to say anything about the Jewish question in the broadsheet; nor do we want to enter a plea in their defense. No, we simply want to cite as an example the fact that since the conquest of Poland 300,000 Jews have been murdered in that country in the most bestial fashion. In this we see the most fearful crime against human dignity, a crime with which no other in the whole history of mankind can be compared. For whatever one thinks of the Jewish question, the Jews too are human beings and this has been done to human beings. Perhaps someone may say the Jews deserved such a fate; this statement would be an incredible presumption. But assuming somebody did say this, how would he deal with the fact that the whole of the younger generation of Polish nobility has been annihilated?”
¹⁵⁰

In other words these militant enemies of the regime were well aware that the mass killing of Jews would not impress most readers of the leaflet and that crimes committed against Polish Catholics had to be added. Whether this addition also expressed the attitude of the “White Rose” group is hard to tell, but it certainly indicates their own assessment of Catholic middle-class public opinion in Germany sometime in mid-1942.

Notwithstanding such spreading knowledge, the regime’s propaganda was, as we saw, penetrating the minds of the
Volksgenossen
, activating preexisting layers of anti-Jewish hostility. A report of July 7, 1942, from the SD in Detmold to the SD main office in Bielefeld emphasized again a point already previously made. “The population has no understanding for the fact that Jews married to an Aryan are not obligated by law to display the star of David [This probably applied to the Jewish partners in mixed marriages with children]…. It is being asked with increasing frequency on what ground full-blooded Jews still run around without the star. Precisely this exception—so people say—is especially dangerous as the non-tagged Jew may nowadays be much more easily mistaken for an Aryan than before and may thus, without being suspected, eavesdrop and spy, as one encounters only marked Jews on the streets.” The report went on to describe a scandalous incident that had taken place on a local train, when a former SS man (now political leader) made space for an untagged Jew on his bank. Another passenger drew the attention of the former SS man to what he had just done, which led to embarrassment and anger all around.
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There were exceptions, of course. The same SD office sent a different report to Bielefeld on July 31 about the deportation of the last Jews from neighboring Lemgo. According to the agent, many of the older inhabitants (even party members) criticized the deportations “for all kinds of reasons.” People related to the Catholic Church often expressed the fear that the Germans would be punished by God for these acts. In discussions with supporters of the deportations, some people went so far as to argue that Jews would not harm a fly and that many had done much good. In neighboring Sabbenhausen, the wife of the teacher Heumann tried to bring sausage and other sorts of food to the Jews being deported: She was arrested.
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Whether as God’s punishment or as retaliation by the Jews, for many Germans the original sin that would cause the retribution was the pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938, when all synagogues in the Reich were set on fire;
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and of course the deportations added to the burden of guilt. Thus an SD report of August 3, 1943, from Ochsenfurt, near Würzburg, alluded to the widespread rumor “that Würzburg would not be attacked by enemy planes because in Würzburg no synagogue had been set on fire. However, others say that now the planes would come to Würzburg, as a short while ago the last Jew had left Würzburg. Before his deportation he predicted that now Würzburg would be bombed.”
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At times, however, the reactions were mixed with political comments that squarely put the blame upon the regime. In mid-August a local party official in Wiegolshausen (in
Gau
Mainfranken) reported on an hour-long conversation with a “very religious” peasant whose views “clearly expressed various trends that are dominant in this part [the religious one] of the population”: “Without Hitler—no war—our fight against the Jews has brought about the present developments of the war; Bolshevism, not as dangerous as is described—Doubts about victory—and if something changes regarding religious matters, there will be an uprising in the country.”
¹⁵⁵

In many ways the SD reports show the resilience of religious feelings and beliefs and thus point to the important role that guidance from religious authorities could have played. As we saw, both Protestant and Catholic prelates and many ordinary priests knew that the trains transporting the Jews from the Reich and from all over Europe to “Poland” were not carrying them to labor camps but to their death. Clergymen who after the war claimed lack of knowledge, the likes of Cardinal Bertram or Bishop Gröber, for example, simply lied. They did not know, in historian Michael Phayer’s words, because they did not want to know.
¹⁵⁶
Typically Bertram refused to receive briefings about the situation of the Jews from Margarete Sommer, the extremely well informed assistant to Bishop Preysing (whom we already encountered). Bertram demanded that any report from Sommer be put in writing and undersigned by Preysing to guarantee its authenticity; otherwise, he threatened, “I will not schedule anymore appointments for her.”
¹⁵⁷
Bertram could not have ignored that writing down the reports was tantamount to severe punishment.

As beforehand Catholic dignitaries remained divided about the appropriate way to react: The leading advocates of a public protest were Preysing and a group of Munich Jesuits, while the majority wished to avoid any confrontation with the authorities and favored various degrees of accommodation. Not unexpectedly the most “accommodating” prelate of all was Bertram. Matters came to a head when, in August 1943, upon Preysing’s request, Sommer prepared the “Draft for a Petition Favoring the Jews,” that would be signed by all the country’s bishops and sent to Hitler and to other members of the party elite.