Good German
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Good Germans is an ironic term, usually placed between inverted commas, 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.[1][2] 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.[3]
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
- Responsibility for the Holocaust
- The Good German – a 2006 Steven Soderbergh film
- Wehrkraftzersetzung
References
Citations
- ^ Frank Richoct, "The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us", New York Times, (October 14,2007).
- ^ Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, p. 17
- ^ John Ezard, "Germans knew of Holocaust horror about death camps",The Guardian, (February 17,2001).
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
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