Quotes from Eric A. Johnson

In Germany the government was very bad, but the people were bad too; in Italy the government was forced to be bad to emulate Hitler's laws and so on, but the people were very good.

They picked up all of the Jews from our very small town. They froze to death in the railway cars. You could see that? My father was standing watch there. They unloaded them afterward as corpses.

Politics for most people is distant from their everyday lives. They give little attention to it and they don't care about being politically well informed.10

In 1933 nearly 70 percent of Germany's Jews worked in business and commerce; over 30 percent lived in the city of Berlin alone; and 70 percent lived in cities with a population of over 100,000 inhabitants.

What has been said is often less important than what has not been said.

Poles and Russians had been detained in Auschwitz before it became a death camp for Jews,

economic performance counts heavily in the development of a political system's legitimacy

For many Germans, the reduction of unemployment, the construction of the autobahns, and social policy measures merged to form a picture of something being done for the little guy.

heard in communist circles that numbers of Jews were being gassed."45.

Around 59 percent of those surveyed admitted that they had once believed in National Socialism, 51 percent said they had supported National Socialism's ideals, and 41 percent indicated that they had admired Hitler.

Others clung to the belief that the rumors did not reflect the truth until the very end. Some who heard about the extermination camps did not want to believe in systematic mass murder.

What I heard from the officers and the generals was, "Kids, this will never end well." Those were the officers I knew, and with some of them I had very close personal contact. None of them were Nazis. They all would say only, "My God, this isn't going to end well.

She was trying to free her mother, who had recently been deported to Auschwitz. The lawyer responded bluntly, "You can file a petition, but you will not see your mother again. Auschwitz is an extermination camp." When she received notification of her mother's death a few months later—"died of sepsis and phlegm in Auschwitz"—she considered this plausible. "Later, I found out that it was just one of many death notices issued on that day.

Adam Grolsch, who had witnessed the Jewish massacre in Pinsk, also witnessed two or three gas vans while he was in Rivne, Ukraine, but their function occurred to him only later:

Adam Grolsch, who had witnessed the Jewish massacre in Pinsk, also witnessed two or three gas vans while he was in Rivne, Ukraine, but their function occurred to him only later: "They were parked in Rivne, and nobody knew what they were. . . . That is to say, they were mobile gas chambers for smaller operations. My attention was drawn to it by the BBC.

Only a small minority, between 3 and 6 percent of the respondents, directly witnessed the events.50.

between 1995 and 2000 more than 12,000 new works on the Third Reich were published,

the next largest source of information about the Holocaust came from foreign radio broadcasts

amount of fear that most Jews perceived grew in a nearly linear fashion

If you are indifferent to a wrong, then you are part of it.

half of the German population listened to foreign radio broadcasts at some point, but many only after the fall of Stalingrad.

Even if many people had heard foreign radio broadcasts about the murder of Jews, it was by no means guaranteed that the reports were trusted.

We only found out about that via the BBC. And because we knew the power of propaganda, we also knew what was suspected of the BBC, that it also understood its craft and must have made a lot of smears. One believed it only in part. There were horrible things reported there, things one could not believe, for example, the mass shootings in the Ukraine, where German soldiers were involved. When we heard that, we didn't believe it,

the Wehrmacht was always something different from the Nazis. We always believed that the Wehrmacht stood as a contrast to the Nazis.53.