Good German

Good Germans is an ironic term — usually placed between single quotes such as 'Good Germans' — referring to German citizens during and after World War II who claimed not to have supported the Nazi regime, but remained silent and did not resist in a meaningful way. The term is further used to describe those who claimed ignorance of the Holocaust and German war crimes. Despite these claims, post-war research has suggested that a large number of ordinary Germans were aware of the Holocaust at least in general terms: captive slave laborers were a common sight; the public knew Jews were being deported to Poland; and the basics of the concentration camp system, if not the extermination camps, were widely known.

Despite the Nazi regime's efforts to keep the mass murder of Jews a secret and destroy any evidence of mass killings, hundreds of thousands of Germans were involved to some extent in the genocide: participating in the killings directly (Einsatzgruppen); guarding (SS-Totenkopfverbände) and administering (SS Main Economic and Administrative Office) the camps where Jews and others were systematically murdered and worked to death; and providing support for both the civil and military authorities which facilitated the machinery of genocide.

See also

• German collective guilt
• Italiani brava gente
• Résistancialisme
• Responsibility for the Holocaust
• The Good German – a 2006 Steven Soderbergh film
• Wehrkraftzersetzung

References

Sources

• Dochartaigh, Pól Ó; Schönfeld, Christiane (2013), "Introduction: Finding the 'Good German'", Representing the Good German in Literature and Culture After 1945: Altruism and Moral Ambiguity, Camden House, ISBN 9781571134981