What We Knew Quotes

“In 1933 nearly 70 percent of Germany’s Jews worked in business and commerce; over 30 percent lived in the city of Berlin alone; and 70 percent lived in cities with a population of over 100,000 inhabitants.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Most non-Jews, however, experienced a very different Third Reich. Few harbored any fear of arrest even though they too often broke the law in minor ways. Most knew instinctively that the terror apparatus was not intent on punishing them so long as they broadly accepted and went along with National Socialism, which most did. Difficult as it is to fathom, given most people’s conception of dictatorship, most Germans appear to have led happy, productive, even normal lives in the Third Reich. This indicates that a dictatorship can enjoy widespread popularity among the majority even while committing unspeakable crimes against minorities and others.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“They picked up all of the Jews from our very small town. They froze to death in the railway cars. You could see that? My father was standing watch there. They unloaded them afterward as corpses.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Politics for most people is distant from their everyday lives. They give little attention to it and they don’t care about being politically well informed.10”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“In Germany the government was very bad, but the people were bad too; in Italy the government was forced to be bad to emulate Hitler’s laws and so on, but the people were very good.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“They did nothing, period. They did nothing. They did nothing to stop it. Guilt by omission is as bad as guilt by commission. You can be just as guilty by not doing something as you are guilty of doing something.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“If you are indifferent to a wrong, then you are part of it. If you know about it and you are indifferent, then you become part of it,”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“between 1995 and 2000 more than 12,000 new works on the Third Reich were published,”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Many of the Jewish survey respondents, however, first became aware of the Holocaust when they themselves became caught up in it and had not known about it before they were deported to the concentration camps and ghettos in eastern Europe.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Among Jews who had not emigrated, only a few had somehow managed to avoid incarceration. Most often these were either Jews in mixed marriages or the children of mixed marriages. A few others had gone into hiding, but the rest were all deported to concentration camps and ghettos.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“While only a handful of the thousands of non-Jews who took our survey had ever been sent to jail, taken into protective custody, or sent to a concentration camp even though the majority had committed illegal acts during the Third Reich, great numbers of the Jewish respondents”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“only 1 percent of the non-Jewish respondents in the four cities surveyed had ever even been arrested or even summoned to Gestapo or police headquarters in their communities in the course of a criminal investigation against them, and most of those who had been arrested or summoned had not been punished for their wrongdoing. In addition to this, upwards of 70 percent of the non Jewish respondents did not even know anyone personally who was not Jewish who had ever been charged with having committed an unlawful act.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Non-Jews realized well that their non-conformity would not likely get them in trouble, and it almost never did.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“But non-Jews seldom had any fear of arrest whatsoever. Whereas nearly half of the entire population of Jewish survivors who took our survey said that they had lived in constant fear of arrest and nearly three-quarters of the survivors who had remained in Germany after 1941 said that they had lived in constant fear of arrest, only about 5 percent of the non-Jewish respondents said that they had feared arrest on a constant basis and upwards of three-quarters of them reported that they had absolutely no fear of arrest at all.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“nearly half of all respondents, both Jewish and non-Jewish, had broken the law in a variety of minor ways. Typical of these were listening to illegal foreign radio broadcasts, belonging to illegal youth groups, offering aid and support to people threatened by the Nazis, and speaking critically about Nazi leaders and policies in the company of friends and acquaintances.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Thus, although both Jews and non-Jews often violated Nazi laws in a number of minor ways, the Nazi authorities would usually look aside in most cases involving non-Jewish offenders while proceeding ruthlessly in nearly all cases involving Jewish offenders.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“there had been a substantial minority of Germans who had offered aid and support for their Jewish friends and neighbors. In the end, however, the majority of the German population complied with the governmental policies that made Jewish life in Germany ever more precarious and offered no protest against them.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“therefore, the Jewish survivor evidence points toward the conclusion that anti-Semitism before Hitler came to power had either lain dormant or had not been very widespread among the German population. After Hitler came to power, however, it became ever more virulent over time.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“we found that the longer the survivors had remained in Germany, the more likely they were to have had their homes and businesses vandalized; to have been spied upon by their German neighbors, coworkers, and fellow classmates; and to have suffered verbal taunts and threats from German civilians.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“one must keep in mind that most Jewish survivors in the survey had left Germany during the 1930s and had therefore only experienced the beginning years of National Socialism.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Soon after 1933, however, the situation changed dramatically and grew ever worse over time. Thus, among Jews who were still living in Germany after the war broke out in 1939, only 6 percent answered that their family continued to have been treated in a friendly manner by the non-Jews in their communities.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“While some survivors like Karl Meyer of Cologne and Joseph Weinberg of Stuttgart say that they had not experienced much anti-Semitism from their German neighbors and townsfolk, the majority of the survivors offered harsher assessments. Nevertheless, most of the survivors also did not agree with people like the former Berliner Henry Singer, who stated that “the anti-Semitism was there before Hitler.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Only in the Rhineland city of Cologne, whose predominantly Catholic population had given Hitler the lowest percentage of votes among all major German cities, did the majority of respondents say that they had both not believed in National Socialism and not shared Nazi ideals. But, even among the Cologne respondents, those who had not sympathized with the Nazis only narrowly outnumbered those who had.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Many of the non-Jewish respondents were certainly not of the opinion that the Third Reich had been imposed upon them against their will. Indeed, many shared the views of Rolf Heberer of Freithal who said that he had been “ecstatic” when Hitler came to power and that “for sixty million Germans, that was what the people really wanted.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“asking the respondents a series of questions about their everyday lives in the Third Reich. Here we found that there was something of a Dickensian “best of times, worst of times” aspect to the Third Reich. For many non-Jews, the Weimar Republic had been the “worst of times,” and the Third Reich represented much better times for them. For Jews, the situation was reversed.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Hubert Lutz, had similar views about his upbringing in Cologne: “It was the most exciting time in our lives . . . it was a normal way of life for me.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“We had a wonderful and good life. . . . For us it was a normal life,” concludes Winfried Schiller about his youth in the Upper Silesian city of Beuthen during the Third Reich.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“That Nazism in Germany meant mistrust, suspicion, dread, defamation, and destruction we learned from those who brought us word of it—from its victims and opponents whose world was outside the Nazi community and from journalists and intellectuals, themselves non-Nazi or anti-Nazi, whose sympathies naturally lay with the victims and opponents. There were two truths, and they were not contradictory: the truth that Nazis were happy and the truth that anti-Nazis were unhappy. —Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free (Chicago, 1955)”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“It is also evident that many Germans did not want to know about what was being done to the Jews. Either it did not interest them or they wanted to suppress it from their consciousness. All too often, they were too involved in their own lives and worries, and they became blind to the sufferings of the Jews and deceived themselves about their fate.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“annihilated” and “exterminated,” even though such phraseology had an old history in Germany and had often been used when no mass murder of Jews had yet been envisioned”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany