What We Knew : Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany - Hardcover

Johnson, Eric; Reuband, Karl-Heinz

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0719555825 ISBN 13: 9780719555824

Publisher: John Murray, 2005

Synopsis

An unprecedented firsthand analysis of real daily life in the Third Reich, drawing on new interviews and surveys from both Germans and Jews who lived through the Nazi era. } What We Knew offers the most startling oral history ever done of life in the Third Reich. Combining the expertise of a German sociologist and an Americ

About this title

About the Author

Eric Johnson is professor of History at Central Michigan University, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and a Fellow of The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences. He is the author of various books, most recently The Nazi Terror: Gestapo, Jews & Ordinary Germans. Karl-Heinz Reuband is professor of Sociology at the University of Dusseldorf and a former visiting scholar at Harvard University's Center for European Studies. He is an expert in opinion research methods.

From Publishers Weekly

The refrains in Germany for many years after WWII were "we didn't know" about the Holocaust, and "if we had known and had tried to do something, we too would have been killed by the Nazis." These claims have not stood up to historical scrutiny. Large numbers of ordinary Germans were involved in carrying out the mass murder of Jews, and knowledge of it was widespread among the population at home in Germany. Moreover, the Nazi elite ruled primarily by consensus, not terror; it was a popular dictatorship. Central Michigan University historian Johnson and German sociologist Reuband confirm these interpretations in their wide-ranging study based on hundreds of interviews and surveys they conducted with both Jewish and Christian Germans. Johnson (Nazi Terror) and Reuband don't add much that is new to what we know about the Nazi dictatorship and the Holocaust, but the materials they have gathered are interesting. Roughly two-thirds of the book consists of transcripts of interviews with Jews who had a range of experiences (going into hiding, leaving Germany before Kristallnacht, suffering in the camps) and Germans (those who heard about the murder of Jews, those who didn't, those who participated). The analysis in the book's final third is sober and sobering. But it's the gripping immediacy of the interviews, laced as they are with anger, guilt, sadness and, still among some Christian Germans, pride, that carries the book. (Feb.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: John Murray
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0719555825
• ISBN 13: 9780719555824
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 464