How Much Did Average Germans Know About the Holocaust During World War Two?

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 22 August 2024

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is the question that historians have argued since the end of World War Two. How much did an average person know, and, more importantly, how responsible were they? What made people “perpetrators,” “bystanders,” and “victims” within a wider context of coercion and consent?

To explore this question is today’s guest, Richard Evans, author of “Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich.” We look at a connected series of biographical portraits of key Nazi figures that follows power as it radiated from Hitler to the inner and outer circles of the regime’s leadership. This includes personal lives of figures whose names appear in nearly all Nazi biographies, like Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels (“The Policeman” and “The Propagandist”), as well as professionals with skills deemed advantageous to the Nazi agenda, including Julius Streicher (“The Schoolmaster”) and the eugenicist Karl Brandt (“The Professional”), and some of the women in Hitler’s orbit such as Ilse Koch (“The Witch”) and Leni Riefenstahl (“The Star”).

Through these biographies, one of our greatest historians explores the enduring and unnerving questions: How could human beings carry out such terrible and murderous atrocities? Were they degenerate, deranged psychopaths, or were they ordinary men doing their jobs? How can examining individual personalities help us reach an understanding of the evil and immorality that sustained the Nazi regime?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Scott here with another episode of the History and Plug Podcast.
0:08.0	During World War II, how much did common Germans know about the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities.
0:13.6	What percentage of the population were victims versus ignorant bystanders versus active perpetrators?
0:18.9	This is a question that historians have asked since the end of World War II.
0:22.1	One interpretation is this.
0:23.6	Crimes of the Third Reich were blamed on Hitler alone and his inner circle, including
0:27.6	Himmler, Joseph Gobbles, Julius Stryker, and others, and the Holocaust being a closely
0:31.7	guarded state secret only involving the military on a need to know basis.
0:35.0	Ellers have said that the Holocaust was such a large operation that it could have taken place without widespread civilian knowledge and a large degree of civilian support.
0:43.7	This is a question that today's guest Richard Evans tried to answer.
0:46.6	He studied the third Reich for decades and is author of the new book Hitler's People, The Faces
0:50.4	of the Third Reich.
0:51.7	We look at a connected series of biographical portraits of key Nazi figures
0:55.5	that begins with Hitler but radiates outward from his inner circle out to promoters of the Third Reich,
1:00.8	like the filmmaker Lenny Riefenstahl, and now even further to lower-level perpetrators
1:05.0	and instruments of the regime.
1:06.8	During the Nervovir trials, anyone who could claim plausible deniability of what was happening
1:11.1	so that they could avoid a death sentence.
1:13.2	But this led to the confusion that we still have today
1:15.4	about what level of social buy-in there was
1:17.4	to the worst evils of the Third Reich.
1:19.4	This is a complicated question, but I think we get to as close
	...

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