80: German Vs Nazis

 On the 80th Anniversary of Kristallnacht it's interesting to see how the Germans (especially the German Government) always refers to the people who committed the pogrom as Nazis and not as Germans - the same with other Holocaust crimes. It's a way for the Germans (especially those who were 18 or older in 1945) to try and distance themselves for the crimes they helped commit. In reality at its peak in 1945 the Nazi Party had 8 million people (out of the 1945 German population of 66 million people.) With that said it is only factual to say the Germans carried out Kristallnacht and the Germans carried out the Holocaust.

The ordinary German kept the Nazi death machine going from 1933 until 1945. Without the support and active participation of every level of German society the Holocaust would not have been possible. All the Germans had to do was protest against these crimes and they would have been stopped. Here’s an example of how much power the ordinary German in Nazi Germany actually had:

At the beginning of 1943 the Germans decided to deport the last remaining Jews in Germany and send them to the death camps. Of the 6,000 arrested in the Fabrikaktion (Factory Action) in Berlin around 1,800 “protected” Jewish men and boys (those either married to non-Jewish Germans or were classified as “Mischlinge” - “Mixed-blood” or part Jewish) were also arrested and slated for deportation.

 Within hours of the start of the arrests on February 27, 1943 hundreds of non-Jewish women and children went to the Rosenstrasse building where their friends and relatives were being detained and protested against their arrest and deportation to the death camps. The open protests lasted until March 6, 1943 when Hitler, seeing how desperate his situation was and how much he needed the German people to continue to support him in order for him to remain in power, ordered the SS (who were ready to fire on the protesters) to release all the Jews – thousands of them (the “protected” and the “not protected”) from Rosenstrasse and the deportations.  The Rosenstrasse protest was the only mass public demonstration by Germans in the Third Reich against the deportation of Jews.

Had the ordinary German wanted to stop the deportation and murder of millions upon millions of innocent men, women and children they could have. The fact was that the majority of Germans were not official members of the Nazi Party, but benefitted from their active participation in the murders and so didn’t want them to stop. That is why I always use the word “Germans” and not “Nazis” when referring to the crimes committed from 1933-1945.