Nada, o muy poco, hasta casi el final de la guerra. Ésta es la conclusión de Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, profesor de Derecho Internacional en Ginebra, en un interesante y provocativo artículo para Taki's Magazine.
Me he preguntado a menudo hasta qué punto el alemán medio sabía que se estaba perpetrando un Holocausto contra los judíos, pero nunca he profundizado en la respuesta. Intuitivamente, no parece creíble que un crimen de estas proporciones pueda ocultarse, y siempre levantan suspicacia los intentos de exculpar a los seguidores y hacer recaer toda la responsabilidad en los líderes. Por otro lado, cuesta creer que la moral de una sociedad avanzada pueda degenerar hasta el punto de racionalizar un genocidio de estas características.
La tesis de Alfred-Maurice es verosímil: la sociedad alemana en tiempos del nazismo era profundamente anti-semita, pero eso no significa que apoyara el exterminio de los judíos. Los campos de exterminio estaban fuera de Alemania (con excepción de Dachau, cuyo propósito oficial era otro), los altos mandos exigían un secretismo absoluto sobre la campaña genocida, y los rumores de que ésta se estaba produciendo eran tomados por la población como propaganda de guerra del enemigo.
Vale la pena leer el artículo entero, pero copio algunos fragmentos:
From the Nuremberg trials we learn that the Endlösung was classed in the category of geheime Reichssache—that is, the highest level of State secrecy. In other words, the Nazi government tried to keep it away from public scrutiny—the shootings took place far away in the Baltic States, in Poland, in the Soviet Union—and the extermination camps—Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Lublin-Majdaneck, Sobibor, Belzec and Chelmo—were all outside of the Reich. For good reason. True enough, Dachau was in Bavaria, but this camp was established primarily to hold German Communists, Social Democrats, and homosexuals.
(...)
Of course, Germans saw that Jews were convened to assemble at the market place or at the train station whence they were transported east. But should every German have thought that transportation to the East meant death? Why? What precedents had they to believe such a thing? In America, some 120,000 Japanese-Americans and some 40,000 German-Americans were also picked up and transported to internment camps. Their neighbors saw it and did nothing to oppose it. But no one in the U.S. would have dreamt that these poor people were going to be exterminated.
(…)
It is crucial to understand that Hitler knew that the Germans would not approve of the Holocaust. Rumours were rejected as enemy propaganda. Only a few Germans really knew what was going on, and many of them committed suicide at the end of the war to escape prosecution. Others went into the Resistance against Hitler, specifically because of their knowledge of some aspects of the Endlösung, even if they had no way of establishing the whole picture. Count Helmuth James von Moltke, the head of the conspiratorial “Kreisauer Kreis,” did have access to some information, since he worked in military intelligence. In 1943 he wrote to his former Oxford professor Lionel Curtis the following lines: “in Germany people do not know what is happening.” Moltke himself, did not know the true dimensions of the crime, because he thought that only hundreds of thousands had been killed—not millions!
Otros más versados que yo en la historia de la Alemania nazi sabréis decirme si este relato de los hechos está bien fundamentado o si la literatura mainstream lo rebate rigurosa y documentadamente.
