Reading What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany over my extended Memorial Day road trip was edifying and quite depressing. As an oral history, the methodology employed by authors Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband-- from the specific semantic choices in survey questions to the analysis of social networks in distributing credible information-- adds a strong statistical sifting component to what might otherwise be just a book of interviews with Jewish survivors and Germans living under National Socialism.
This book is a sturdy resource for those studying the way in which individuals and social groups deal with cognitive dissonance in cases of demicide and mass murder. In historical studies of the Shoah, scholars have a hard time accounting for the "lack of knowledge" on the part of both Germans and Jews about the mass extermination of Jews under Hitler's regime. For example, many of the German soldiers on the Eastern front who could not have avoided being involved in the implementation of the Final Solution still claim in interviews that they were not aware of the mass extermination of Jews as a specific goal of the Nazi leadership. Many Germans watched Jews being carted away yet still refused to believe that their government could do something so horrible-- so they stuck to the "labor camp" explanations. Or the Nazi government's claims that stories of Jewish mass killing were just "atrocity propaganda" generated by the enemy Allies.
One particularly interesting observation made towards the end the book (on page 375, to be exact) caught my attention for a good part of the drive through Kentucky.
Whereas some might expect that people who were better educated would have become better informed about the Holocaust, our evidence shows that this is not the case. In fact, as the survey evidence... indicates, there was no correlation between the survey respondents' level of education and their awareness of the mass murder of Jews. Thus people who had only a primary school education were just as likely to have found out about the mass murder as those who graduated from secondary schools or even universities. This finding indicates that information about the Holocaust spread widely among people from all socioeconomic backgrounds just as it did among people from all communities across the map of Germany.
What, then, did those who claim to have known about the mass murder of Jews have in common?
What appeared to matter most in differentiating those who came to know about the mass murder and those who did not was how an individual was politically disposed to the Nazi regime and the personal experiences one had.
Fans of National Socialism, ordinary Germans, the majority of Catholics, Protestants, and clergymen-- even those who were not anti-Semites in the strict sense-- refused to believe that their government could be capable of such monstrosity. We might do well to learn from their mistakes and remember that trusting governments (or accepting their more dubious explanations without critical inquiry) brands us with the guilt of those who quite simply looked away and kept pretending.
