Quotes from Eric A. Johnson

Whether one believed the reports depended not only on the credibility of the broadcaster but also on one's own experiences with the Nazi regime.

many Germans who received information about the mass murder from other people no doubt heard it from people who themselves had heard it on the radio. Indeed, other than the sources of information about the Holocaust already mentioned, all other sources were of secondary importance at best.

Flyers and leaflets dropped by Allied airplanes during the war informed only a small minority of Germans. This is no accident. Few Germans ever got hold of such fliers, since they were quickly collected by Nazi supporters and members of the Hitler Youth. In addition, the murder of Jews was never a major topic of Allied military propaganda.

Jewish organizations had pushed early on to make the persecution and murder of the Jews a key issue, the Allied military leadership regarded it as more important to wear down the German military and to make this the topic of the leaflets in order to undermine German morale.55

Receiving information, however, is not the same as believing it.

He was then exposed, and then he was also arrested, because he was a Jew. But where was he sent to? The people also knew about that.

Many Germans, however, were quick to accept the new situation and concerned themselves only with their own private lives and tended not to think about what was happening to the Jews.

He was a proud young man who had been called up into the SS, and he was in a concentration camp. The young man simply didn't go along, and he was shot as an SS man. And that was also known to us in our town.

But where the Jews were concerned, did they talk about that? Many people say that nobody talked about it. They're lying.

Among those who said they had heard something about it, 60 percent said they had completely believed it and 8 percent said that they had believed it in part. Among the rest, 14 percent said they had not believed it at first, and 18 percent said that they had not believed it at all.

Gassed. They were killed, and soap was made from the bones. The people were nothing more than that. Wasn't it especially dangerous to talk about that? It wasn't dangerous.

when my father came back from a large metal workers demonstration directed against the Nazis. Like many of the demonstrators, he was horribly beaten up by the SA.

news of the atrocities reached a large portion of the German public by the end of the war. A substantial minority of about one-third of the population became aware of the mass murder of Jews while it was still taking place, and most believed this information, especially because it came from persons they trusted.

I also knew two teachers who never got a job again in the entire Hitler period. They had to sell postcards to get by.

For many Germans, even if they had heard such speeches, the murder of the Jews was beyond their imagination. And some may have suppressed what they heard because it disturbed them. The radical nature of the language that was used in this matter was also typical in other matters, which is why the Jewish professor Victor Klemperer aptly described the Nazis' language as a language of "superlatives.

annihilated" and "exterminated," even though such phraseology had an old history in Germany and had often been used when no mass murder of Jews had yet been envisioned

In '33, a whole lot of the members of this working-class party from our suburb were arrested, above all those who had held some kind of leadership function in the party.

there was a remarkably strong connection between knowledge about the euthanasia program and knowledge about the mass murder of Jews.

It is also evident that many Germans did not want to know about what was being done to the Jews. Either it did not interest them or they wanted to suppress it from their consciousness. All too often, they were too involved in their own lives and worries, and they became blind to the sufferings of the Jews and deceived themselves about their fate.

my cousin hid out at a friend's place. They already knew that it was dangerous for them, because the SA had been marching around grabbing up people from their homes and hauling them off. So my cousin went into hiding, and then the Nazis took his mother into custody, the so-called Sippenhaft [a kind of special arrest for family members].

We had a wonderful and good life. . . . For us it was a normal life," concludes Winfried Schiller about his youth in the Upper Silesian city of Beuthen during the Third Reich.

The Latvians wanted to storm the ghetto. They wanted to kill the Jews. So the Germans had to protect us—the German army or SS or whatever it was. It is paradoxical.

Their willingness to kill stemmed not just from a readiness to follow orders, but often from an existing hatred of Jews that the German occupiers exploited. The willing participation of non-German ethnic minorities in many of the pogroms and massacres of Jews gave many Germans the sense that it was not they who were responsible for the murders they witnessed, but the bloodthirsty foreigners.

Hubert Lutz, had similar views about his upbringing in Cologne: "It was the most exciting time in our lives . . . it was a normal way of life for me.