Quotes from Eric A. Johnson

asking the respondents a series of questions about their everyday lives in the Third Reich. Here we found that there was something of a Dickensian "best of times, worst of times" aspect to the Third Reich. For many non-Jews, the Weimar Republic had been the "worst of times," and the Third Reich represented much better times for them. For Jews, the situation was reversed.

Many of the non-Jewish respondents were certainly not of the opinion that the Third Reich had been imposed upon them against their will. Indeed, many shared the views of Rolf Heberer of Freithal who said that he had been "ecstatic" when Hitler came to power and that "for sixty million Germans, that was what the people really wanted.

That is to say that after I had seen all of that, I then wrote, "If there is any God at all, then Germany should never be allowed to win this war.

Only in the Rhineland city of Cologne, whose predominantly Catholic population had given Hitler the lowest percentage of votes among all major German cities, did the majority of respondents say that they had both not believed in National Socialism and not shared Nazi ideals. But, even among the Cologne respondents, those who had not sympathized with the Nazis only narrowly outnumbered those who had.

it is not easy to explain why the youngest survivors were the least likely to say that their families continued to enjoy positive relations with non-Jews after 1933.

relations between Jews and non-Jews not only became worse almost immediately after 1933, but they continued to worsen over time.

Membership in the Nazi Party was even forbidden by the Church for some time.

That better-educated people were no more immune to National Socialism than the less educated calls into question the widely held belief that tolerance and enlightenment are more likely to be found among people who have a higher education. It is the content of socialization that counts, not the degree of sophistication.

anti-Semitism became ever more palatable and popular among their German neighbors over the years.

one must keep in mind that most Jewish survivors in the survey had left Germany during the 1930s and had therefore only experienced the beginning years of National Socialism.

we found that the longer the survivors had remained in Germany, the more likely they were to have had their homes and businesses vandalized; to have been spied upon by their German neighbors, coworkers, and fellow classmates; and to have suffered verbal taunts and threats from German civilians.

therefore, the Jewish survivor evidence points toward the conclusion that anti-Semitism before Hitler came to power had either lain dormant or had not been very widespread among the German population. After Hitler came to power, however, it became ever more virulent over time.

there had been a substantial minority of Germans who had offered aid and support for their Jewish friends and neighbors. In the end, however, the majority of the German population complied with the governmental policies that made Jewish life in Germany ever more precarious and offered no protest against them.

Thus, although both Jews and non-Jews often violated Nazi laws in a number of minor ways, the Nazi authorities would usually look aside in most cases involving non-Jewish offenders while proceeding ruthlessly in nearly all cases involving Jewish offenders.

nearly half of all respondents, both Jewish and non-Jewish, had broken the law in a variety of minor ways. Typical of these were listening to illegal foreign radio broadcasts, belonging to illegal youth groups, offering aid and support to people threatened by the Nazis, and speaking critically about Nazi leaders and policies in the company of friends and acquaintances.

Non-Jews realized well that their non-conformity would not likely get them in trouble, and it almost never did.

While only a handful of the thousands of non-Jews who took our survey had ever been sent to jail, taken into protective custody, or sent to a concentration camp even though the majority had committed illegal acts during the Third Reich, great numbers of the Jewish respondents

Among Jews who had not emigrated, only a few had somehow managed to avoid incarceration. Most often these were either Jews in mixed marriages or the children of mixed marriages. A few others had gone into hiding, but the rest were all deported to concentration camps and ghettos.

in early March 1933, the Nazi vote reached 43.9 percent. This was, however, only a partially free election and must be seen as a special case: Communists, who were accused of having set fire to the Reichstag building shortly before the election, were de facto banned from voting and their party's functionaries were incarcerated; other political parties were also greatly hindered.

Many of the Jewish survey respondents, however, first became aware of the Holocaust when they themselves became caught up in it and had not known about it before they were deported to the concentration camps and ghettos in eastern Europe.

We administered our main surveys by mail for methodological reasons. More than other types of survey research, mail surveys provide respondents with a feeling of anonymity and encourage them to be more open to sensitive questions. Also, in mail surveys, respondents have more time to recall the past and this improves their ability to remember. In addition to this, the response rates in mail surveys are at least as good as in face-to-face or telephone surveys

our surveys received response rates of between 45 and 50 percent, which are generally considered very admirable in survey research dealing with older populations in large cities.

we chose our samples so that they would be truly representative of the respective population.

we also carried out in-depth, face-to-face interviews with a sizable number of the respondents to the written surveys, chosen in part randomly and in part because they represented people from especially interesting and important sub-groups of the original survey population