The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

by Nicholas Stargardt

As they spoke about this throughout the Reich, people inadvertently disclosed something which had previously been half concealed – their own knowledge that all the abstract Nazi rhetoric about exterminating the Jews had been literally accomplished. In 1941 and 1942, when the deportations were at their height; when many people had bid at auctions in Hamburg and other cities for Jewish furniture and fittings; when many witnesses had returned with details of the mass graves and mass shootings in the east; and when, above all, any widespread German opposition to the killing might have saved Jewish lives, people had spoken about the unfolding genocide differently: piecemeal, behind closed doors, through rumours and in relation to specific killings. Now in the third quarter of 1943, all this lay in the past: ‘what we did to the Jews’ provided the public acknowledgement that had been withheld at the time.