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Two books, published almost simultaneously in 2006, add significantly to our knowledge of the public face of the Holocaust. Peter Longerich's "Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!" Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933-1945 ["We Didn't Know Anything About That!" The Germans and the Persecution of the Jews] is the more ambitious of the two. Longerich tracks Nazi public rhetoric on the Jews for the twelve years of Hitler's rule, and attempts to reveal the German public's thinking about what it heard and saw. Jeffrey Herf's The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust focuses on Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda during the war, and makes no determined attempt to analyze how it was received. Neither book presents startling news, but both provide an astonishing amount of carefully considered evidence from the period. Most readers of Books & Culture will prefer Herf's cogent analysis to 448 pages of reasonably clear German, but despite their areas of common focus, the books are worth reading together.
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The two present parallel, and largely consistent, chronological surveys of what Germans saw and heard during the war. Besides the familiar public statements by Hitler, Goebbels, and other Nazi leaders (e.g., Hitler's statements like this one: "If Jewry imagines itself to be able to lead an international world war to exterminate the European races, then the result will not be the extermination of the European races but rather the extermination of Jewry in Europe!"), both books trace the propaganda found in newspapers and posters. Longerich provides a greater sampling of newspapers, and also considers newsreels, the radio, and Allied broadcasting and leaflets, but the wider range of sources does not lead to significantly different conclusions.
Both books give only limited attention to the comprehensive system of Nazi speakers and propagandists at the local level, who regularly received guidelines on what they were to say about Jews in speeches and conversations. The Nazis saw such word-of-mouth propaganda as more effective than magazines and newspaper articles (a widely circulated print during the Nazi era showed Hitler speaking to his early followers, with the caption: "In the beginning was the word"); considering such material would have strengthened both analyses, even if the conclusions would not have changed greatly.1
The focus of Nazi anti-Semitism varied. After the signing of the German-Soviet pact in August 1939, public anti-Semitism diminished considerably, to be renewed suddenly after the June 22, 1941 attack on the Soviet Union. As enormous numbers of Jews were killed in 1942 and 1943, Nazi propaganda attacked the Jews through every imaginable channel. After mid-1943, with the bulk of the killing done, the intensity declined somewhat, but anti-Semitic propaganda hardly vanished.
The Nazis presented World War II as a defensive struggle against Jewish plans for world domination. The Jews were out to destroy Germany, in a literal, biological sense. The only response was to exterminate the Jews first. The war was a matter of life or death. Either Germany and its people would survive and the Jews would perish, or the Jews would triumph over the bodies of murdered Germans.
As both books point out, "the Nazis combined blunt speech about their general intentions with suppression of any facts or details regarding the Final Solution" (Herf, p. 268). German media completely ignored the death camps, such as Auschwitz, and mass shootings. Specific guidelines ordered propagandists to avoid such details. There were many rumors and reports from soldiers home on leave—but it was surely difficult for an average German to use such information to know what actual horrors were occurring (though some succeeded in so doing). Germans, in short, knew that bad things were happening, but had no clear idea just how bad those things were. In this, Nazi propaganda was following a successful strategy. If Germans had known for certain what was going on, there is little doubt that even many of those who were anti-Semitic would have been horrified. Just as it is possible for people to ignore the AIDS catastrophe in Africa while still being moved by the tragedy of individuals, so Germans, in J. P. Stern's words, knew enough to know that they did not want to know any more.
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