From: "Phil Payne" 

> > I wonder ho wmany people actually knew the  Holocaust was going on at
the
> > time?  And, if they did know, what would they have been ABLE to do about
it
> > over and above the life-or-death effort they were making to defeat the
> > Germans at the time?
>
> I wonder how many Germans knew the Holocaust was going on?

A lot, I think.  Holocaust denial became a way of life in Germany after the
war - just as every American will claim to be anti-Iraq war - but it's
amazing how much trivial documentary evidence has appeared over the years,
especially a great burst when Germany reunified.

Such things as records of the train charters.  Yup, the SS booked the
trains through a travel agency - there is, e.g., correspondence from the
Deutsche Reichsbahn complaining that all the charters were one-way and they
had no way to earn money on the return trips.

Lots of the denyers also try to foster the idea that the German Jews were
already ghettoized before the war.  Not true at all - they were distributed
throughout society and everyone would have known that Jews - and only Jews
- were disappearing.  Germans stay in touch - two decades on I still get
Christmas cards from my ex-neighbours.  It would surely have been obvious
that only the Jewish ex-neighbours weren't sending any.

Where businesses were forcibly taken over by non-Jewish Germans, there were
many complaints that the new owners were unskilled and had poor customer
relationship skills.

Where I lived in Norderstedt, near Hamburg, there was a genuinely
benevolent concentration camp housing around 300 Jews.  It was established
locally to protect them after the country-wide hate propoganda started -
but, unfortunately, it was one day cleared out and the occupants sent to
Auschwitz.

The way German local politics work now and worked then, there is NO WAY
that camp could have existed without funds being authorised in a very
public way - and its closure would have been just as visible.

So yes - I think most Germans knew what was going on by late 1942.  The
areas that the Jews were supposed to be resettled in were almost deserts in
an agricultural sense, historically supporting less than one person per
hectare.  Obvious, then, that you can't put a major part of the German
population in there without massive famine.

--
  Phil Payne
  http://www.isham-research.co.uk
  +44 7833 654 800

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