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How Will We Know?

How Will We Know?

Last updated on: December 5, 2024 at 10:36 am by Roger E. Olson

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How Will We Know? 2024-12-05T10:36:39-05:00 Roger E. Olson

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Did Germans Know About the Holocaust? Lessons for Today. This photo shows children who survived the Holocaust. | Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Politics. Government. Ethics. Theology. For the Christian, all are related. I wrote here about that not long ago.

I have made an in-depth study of Germany in the 1930s and into the 1940s and beyond with special focus on the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi Party. I lived in Munich, where it all began in the 1920s and sought out both sites and facts. I interviewed people who lived through those times. I have read many books about those times and watched numerous documentaries about them.

One fact that will surprise many Americans (and others) is that the vast majority of Germans in the 1930s did NOT know about the Holocaust. Whether they should have known is debatable. It was very well hidden from the vast majority of Germans.

I watched a video with interviews of citizens of Dachau (which was not actually an extermination camp) during the 1930s and 1940s. They said, convincingly, that they did not know what went on there. They thought it was a prison for people who wanted to overthrow the German government. That is how it began, but many dissidents who did not try to overthrow the government were also placed there. Some Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals were also placed there. Eventually, during the War, Russian POWs were included and many executed. But the citizens of Dachau were warned away from it. I have visited it; it is not very close to the town. One must take a bus from the train station to the camp.

Most of the concentration camps were very secret with ordinary German citizens told to stay away and warned that any investigations of them would result in captivity in them or worse.

Yes, to be sure, ordinary German citizens knew about the “internment camps,” but they did not dare attempt to know what they were for or what went on in them. The major extermination camps were in Poland. Those in Germany were remote and strongly guarded.

According to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s biographer and friend, Eberhard Bethge, his (Bonhoeffer’s) mother did know about the extermination camps. Her son and son-in-law were agents with the Abwehr, German military intelligence service. They told her. One day she dared to mention what she knew to a neighbor who harshly warned her not to speak of such things.

Most Germans thought that the Jews were being resettled “in the East,” the new “Lebensraum” conquered by the German military beginning in 1939.

What did they really know and when did they know it? Not very much and too late.

But they should have suspected it—given the Nazi rhetoric of anti-semitism and the harsh treatment of Jews and others beginning in the mid-1930s.

One historian said that most German citizens believed that the harsh treatment of the Jews, evidenced by the “Night of Broken Glass,” was the work of some of Hitler’s lieutenants and that Hitler himself surely did not know about it and if he did know about it did not approve of it.

How will we know if…. I already know that many migrant children are being kept in institutions where they are not treated well. Don’t ask how I know; either believe me or don’t. But I know. Just like Bonhoeffer’s mother knew. But there is a conspiracy of silence surrounding them. Why do we not see them on national news television? I recently watched a very believable news report that said thousands of migrant children who were held in these institutions have simply disappeared. How? To where? Who is looking for them? Some claim they are being exploited. By whom? How? Where?

I watch the various evening news programs on all four major American news networks and I watch BBC America and other news outlets. Especially the American network thirty-minute news programs include about one-fourth to one-third of commercials and a significant amount of time talking about celebrities, products, entertainment, etc. Investigative journalism seems to have died out. I remember when “Dateline” did a lot of it. Also “20/20.” Now they and other similar “news magazine shows” seem to focus almost exclusively on “true crime” cases, almost all about white, blond, young, female victims.

How will we know? Would we ever really know? How many Americans knew about the “internment” of Japanese Americans during WW2? How many know about it now? It was clearly illegal; they were US citizens. However, during war many things can be done by governments. When are we not at war?

*Note: If you choose to comment, make sure your comment is relatively brief (no more than 100 words), on topic, addressed to me, civil and respectful (not hostile or argumentative), and devoid of pictures or links.*

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