I think one of the most disturbing things about the popular narrative we teach around the Holocaust is how the “No one knew,” myth still flourishes and is still widely spoken and believed. “No one knew what was happening until the camps were liberated! The world was shocked!” was taught to me when I was a child and was likely taught to many of you too. I’ve even heard it said aloud in Holocaust testimonies classes, even after we’ve read testimonies that directly contradict this falsehood. People are really fucking attached to it.
“No one knew!” has been repeatedly disputed and disproven, to the point where the mass narrative of it has become terribly indicative of people’s need to dispel feelings of guilt and shame above all else. Even above telling the truth.
Im p sure the original narrative of “no one knew!” was in part the result of low-level German and Polish bureaucrats seeking to avoid arrest and prosecution, because there was a dearth of specific written orders in regards to outlining the machinations of The Final Solution. Which allowed many to claim ignorance and innocence. But it also has been useful in the reimagining of the allies role in the Holocaust, reimagining their complicit silence and inaction into the shock and disgust of witnesses and good liberators.
Because people DID know. Jan Karski infiltrated the Warsaw ghetto before it was liquidated and witnessed firsthand exactly what was happening to the Jewish people. He was sent by the Polish Underground to the UK carrying a message for the UN titled “The Mass Extermination of the Jews in German Occupied Poland.” He had a direct audience with Roosevelt, where he attempted to provide details of what was happening to compel the allied forces to act before it was too late. This was in 42-43.
In 1944, the New York Times published a story about the Warsaw ghetto uprising WHILE IT WAS HAPPENING. This wasn’t a mystery in the states. People knew about the forced ghettoization of the Polish Jews and what they faced as they fought back.
Lanzmann’s Shoah presents several interviews with Polish onlookers outside of Treblinka who, in laughing and awkward remembrance, explained how they would slash their fingers across their throats at Jewish people arriving in cattle cars to “warn them about their fate.” This was in the early period of the Holocaust, before the mechanized, mass exterminations of Auschwitz.
Also in Shoah, several Polish women and men in villages outside of Sobibor (who smilingly explain that their lot in life improved after the local Jews were rounded up and transported to the death camp) acknowledged that yes, at the time, they knew of the fate of their neighbors. They knew they were going to their death and would not be returning. Which is the only way we can explain how quickly Jewish homes and businesses were taken over by their neighbors and city councils.
Like. I’m neck deep in Holocaust testimonials lately and keep knocking my head against this specific Holocaust myth and I feel horrified that it continues and people keep fucking saying it with little introspection on why the narrative is so attractive to them.
Black Earth, by Timothy Snyder contains this, thematically similar chestnut:
“The big ghettos, such as Warsaw, took on a kind of colonial appearance, as rickshaws replaced automobiles (stolen by Germans) and the streetcar service (restricted by Germans). The luster of subjugation attracted German tourists, who often returned home with a pleasant sense of imperial mastery.”
Snyder points to Elisabeth Harvey’s “Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization” for more details about early/prepatory elements of the Holocaust as a purposefully tourist-accessible spectacle.
From the beginning, the Holocaust was driven by publicly visible violence and deprivation, and often was deliberately made as visible as possible because it served as propaganda to a huge cohort of Germans who actively supported the Nazi regime’s actions and in many cases specifically participated in them.
To claim otherwise is to deny history and give fascists a means to claim ignorance (and hence innocence).
Y E S.
Also what needs to be acknowledged…the public spectacle of starvation and degradation went part and parcel with antisemitic propaganda forwarded by the Nazis. When people witnessed the degradation of the Jewish people in the ghetto, they felt disgusted. This disgust was very strategically directed at the Jewish people themselves, not at the regime who had created their degradation. The nazis specifically considered this in the creation of their uniforms, to be neat and clean and sharp. Juxtaposed with the unkempt, starved, sick and foreign-seeming Jewish people, onlookers were encouraged to place the blame of degradation and dehumanization on the victims instead of on the SS, who were neatly dressed, healthy, cleancut. This propaganda was scarily effective and still is, in the way young white nationalists lean towards rehabilitating the image of Nazi Germany over accepting this history of violence and genocide.
Not to wear out Black Earth but-
The next morning the “scrubbing parties” began. Members of the Austrian SA [the Nazi paramilitary], working from lists, from personal knowledge, and from the knowledge of passerby, identified Jews and forced them to kneel and clean the streets with brushes This was a ritual humiliation. Jews, often doctors and lawyers or other professionals, were suddenly on their knees performing the menial labor in front of jeering crowds. Ernest Pollak remembered the spectacle of the “scrubbing parties” as “amusement for the Austrian population.” A journalist described the “fluffy Viennese blondes, fighting on another to get closer to the elevating spectacle of the ashen-faced Jewish surgeon on hands and knees before a half dozen young hooligans with Swastika armlets and dog-whips.”
Admittedly, that’s from the Anschluss period, which usually is framed as preparation for rather than the enactment of the Holocaust. That said, Snyder lays out the clear historical case that from those kinds of specifically public humiliations to later attempts to incite pogroms in conquered territory emerged the ideas of ghettoizing, then starving, and ultimately systematically killing Jews.
The Holocaust originated as something to be seen, but which people have been taught to believe was invisible as it occurred. There’s a kind of question being begged by that weird discrepancy - why are people so routinely taught something so wildly wrong about it?
(via saint-batrick)
