Is knowledge of „Auschwitz“ really the decisive question?

Consider the second clandestine leaflet distributed in early July 1942 by the „White Rose“ resistance group, in which the murder of some 300,000 Jews in Poland was mentioned. The Munich students immediately added a disclaimer: Some people could argue that the Jews „deserved their fate,“ but then what about the murder of „the entire Polish aristocratic youth?“ In other words, these militant enemies of the regime were well aware that the mass killing of Jews would not impress all readers of the leaflet and that crimes committed against Polish Catholics had to be added, particularly in Bavaria. We cannot generalize on the basis of this example; we can only suggest that for many Germans the mass extermination of Jews was not of deep concern.

Knowledge about huge massacres is different from that of total annihilation but is the difference between the two as radical as many historians suggest it is? Is knowledge of „Auschwitz“ really the decisive question? In terms of the protest against or the acceptance of mass criminality, we cannot, it seems to me, establish an insuperable divide between awareness of the murder of hundreds of thousands of victims, among them one’s own neighbors, and that of the total extermination of an entire people.

Ω Ω Ω

All the killings were mass murder, but not all mass murders were the same. The killings perpetrated by the Latvians, the Lithuanians, the Romanians, the Ukrainians, the Poles, or the Croats were identical to those perpetrated by the Germans in terms of collective criminality. Yet each of these groups left an imprint of its own: The anthropology of mass murder may lead the historian to traits and trends that will have to be taken into account in understanding the deeper strata of this extraordinary collapse of Christian and Western civilization.

—Saul Friedländer, “The Wehrmacht, German Society, and the Knowledge of the Mass Extermination of the Jews,” in Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century, Bartov, Grossmann, Nolan eds., (New York: The New Press, 2002), 27, 28-29.