En una entrada anterior planteaba esta pregunta: ¿Qué sabían los alemanes del Holocausto? El artículo que la motivó fue: Willing Executioners?—The Holocaust, Germans, and Collective Guilt, en Takimag.
Leyendo Modern Times Revised Edition: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties
There is a sense in which "the crime without a name", as Churchill termed it, was a national act of wrongdoing. True, the genocide programme from first to last, despite its immense scale, was furtive. Hitler never once referred to it, even in the endless haranguess to intimates which form the subjects of his Table-talk and other documents. (...)
From Hitler's silence downwards, the entire operation of genocide was permeated by unspoken, unspeakable guilt. Even Himmler, the archetype of the sacerdotal revolutionary, who superinteded all the details of the crime, only visited Auschwitz twice. As in all totalitarian systems, a false vernacular had to be created to conceal the concrete horrors of moral relativism. SS terms for murder included "special treatment", resettlement", "the general line", "sovereign acts beyond the reach of judiciary", above all "sending East". (...)
[Hitler] told the Gauleiters on 29 May 1944 that before the end of the year all the Jews would be dead: "You know all about it now, and you had better keep it all to yourselves. Perhaps at some later, some very much later period we might consider whether to tell the German people a little more about this. But I think we had better not! It is we here who have shouldered the responsibility, for action as well as for an idea, and I think we had better take this secret with us into our graves."
Hence security around the death-camps was elaborate. The wife of a German officer, who at a confused railway junction got onto a death-train by mistake, was ordered to the ovens nonetheless so that she could not relate what she had seen. No victim emerged alive from Auschwitz until two Slovak Jews escaped in August 1944. All the same, millions of Germans knew that something horrible was being done to the Jews. There were 900.000 people in the SS alone. Countless Germans heard and saw the endless trains rattling through the night, and knew their significance, as one recorded remark suggests: "Those dammed Jews - they won't even let one sleep at night". (...) Race paranoia was deeply rooted in German culture and had been fostered by generations of intellectuals. It antedated Hitler; dwarfed him. Forty years later it is difficult to conceive of the power and ubiquity of inter-white racism, especially anti-Semitism (and not in Germany alone). In a sense, then, it was the German people who willed the end; Hitler who willed the means.
Para un repaso a la literatura sobre la cuestión, recomiendo leer estas dos entradas de Wikipedia en el capítulo sobre la responsabilidad del Holocausto: Who knew about the killings? y Involved: German people. Varios estudios recientes concluyen que el alemán medio sospechaba y callaba. Las noticias sobre la persecución de judíos abundaban y los rumores sobre una eliminación más sistemática estaban extendidos, pero el alcance real del genocidio se intentó ocultar a la población desde las instancias oficiales y no era conocido por muchos.
Otra pregunta relevante es: ¿cuánto sabían los gobiernos aliados sobre el Holocausto y qué hicieron para proteger a los judíos de sus exterminadores? Johnson critica duramente a los gobiernos occidentales por negarse a abrir sus fronteras a los judíos pese a saber que estaban siendo perseguidos (y, en el caso británico, por restringir severamente la inmigración judía a palestina).
