In fact, in the summer and autumn of 1943, Germans began to talk openly in public about the murder of the Jews, equating it with the Allied bombing of German civilians. In Hamburg it was noted ‘that the common people, the middle classes, and the rest of the population make repeated remarks in intimate circles and also in larger gatherings that the attacks count as retaliation for our treatment of the Jews’. In Schweinfurt in Bavaria, people were saying exactly the same thing: ‘the terror attacks are a consequence of the measures carried out against the Jews’.
