recent holocaust research and what the people of germany knew
The New York Times published an article on a chilling, but important, phase of Holocaust research: a newly compiled list of every ghetto, concentration camp, and slave labor site that could be found. It turns out that the number is huge, far more than what scholars had imagined:
The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.
If you have any inkling of geography, there is an insane number. In the US, there are about 30,000 incorporated towns and cities – and US is larger than Germany and its neighbors. That means there were about 12,000 more slave camps and ghettoes in Europe than towns in America (!!). The obvious conclusion from Maritn Dean, the study’s co-author :
“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.”
Obviously, this level of violence and murder could not be accomplished without the assistance of much of the population. What this research shows was that this not hidden and done away from the German public’s eyes, it was literally in plain view. The moral implications of this are horrifying.
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Research by Karl-Heinz Reuband and Eric Johnson based on life histories and studies of media consumption behavior corroborates the finding that “we simply didn’t know” is little more than an excuse used by Germans of that generation.
John
March 4, 2013 at 1:23 am
isn’t stuff like this why some German teens/college students growing up in the 1960′s kinda went berserk? I remember vaguely that the Baader-Meinhoff people were strongly influenced by learning about the crimes of the generatoin before – though of course it’s possible that they were also just using it as an excuse since they seemed kinda nutty
andrew
March 4, 2013 at 1:45 am
The fact that the number of camps, sub-camps, ghettos, and POW camps was this high is just astounding to me. The original report of roughly 20,000 camps in the first volume of the encyclopedia of camps and ghettos was sobering enough, but the fact that it continues to grow (let alone double) is just frightening. It is important to recognize that their definition for inclusion is quite broad (see this C-SPAN interview [http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/288723-1] with the editor for a nice summary of the project and different types of camps and ghettos in the Nazi system), but still….
tvm
March 4, 2013 at 2:46 am
What’s really frightening is the ability of peoples all over the world to just overlook atrocities as they are committed by their governments. Whether it’s the German in WW2 (of course the worse of the worse), the French in the decolonization wars, the murderous enslavement of chinese coolies for the guano trade (benefiting 19th-century England), the genocide of Native Americans, Japanese occupation of China, examples are so many of people knowing that something is happening but rationalizing it / justifying it / ignoring it. Just witness today as the drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, or the torture at Guantanamo, are largely considered ok by the American population.
Luis
March 4, 2013 at 8:47 am
It shouldn’t be forgotten that other countries — their governments and people — used the same excuse of “just not knowing” as many in the WW2 German generation did. A great number of people across Europe turned a blind eye to what was going on. This research just makes their claims less credible as well.
Jason
March 4, 2013 at 1:55 pm
Of course no one here is trying to compare a ghetto with an actual concentration camp, right?
Anonymous
March 4, 2013 at 2:35 pm
@anon: Ghettoes and camps are different organizational forms, but they were both integral part of the Holocuast. The ghetto, in this context, simply doesn’t mean “poor area,” as it does in modern English. These were area created by German and German allied governments as places to herd Jews. There were places of violence and starvation, and many acted as the first stop to the camps. So counting ghettos is very important in this context,
fabiorojas
March 4, 2013 at 4:09 pm
That German generation today says “they just didn’t know” because of the shame they feel for their atrocities, living in a world today where human rights and industrialization are often synonymous. If we didn’t shame them so much for what they did (or didn’t do), to the point where they are in perpetual denial, we do a real disservice to our ability to understand what exactly was happening in German culture and Jew’s and gypsies and gays and other’s relationship to it, to produce such such a tragedy. It’s likely that most Germans were convinced that Jews were inferior and morally suspect and distasteful and lacked patriotism, and in such a strongly nationalist (and relatively homogenous??) state with an embarrassingly poor economy, the annihilation of Jews and waging war on Europe was cathartic and empowering. We need to make sense of the Germans, not morally upbraid them. No one needs to tell anyone else in this country that genocide is awful, the vast majority of us know that. But we still have some serious questions about how genocide is *possible*, and for those in the U.S. who think the Holocaust was awesome (KKK, neo-Nazis), we need to explain their behaviors using the same theories we do everyone else’s — culture, constraints, values, incentives, morals, material circumstances, race — rather than just, “they are bad people.” Surely, as members of such an interconnected society, we are in some way responsible for producing them.
questioningquestioner@questia.com
March 4, 2013 at 9:44 pm
I have not in any way indicated that it is not relevant to count ghettos. But any comparison with an actual concentration camp is way off. Furthermore – the world was less global at that time. Sure everyone knew about ghettos and that people were poor and starved there because these ghettos existed in all towns. But that does not imply that one can leap to a conclusion that everyone knew about concentration camps, which is implied in this post.
One can argue for that, but should do it differently.
Danish system
March 5, 2013 at 9:58 am