Reddit reviews The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

The German war by Nicholas Stargardt is quite good for showing how pervasive knowledge of the holocaust was in German society during the war. Highly recommend this book.

> In The German War, acclaimed historian Nicholas Stargardt draws on an extraordinary range of firsthand testimony -- personal diaries, court records, and military correspondence -- to explore how the German people experienced the Second World War.
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>When war broke out in September 1939, it was deeply unpopular in Germany. Yet without the active participation and commitment of the German people, it could not have continued for almost six years. What, then, was the war the Germans thought they were fighting? How did the changing course of the conflict -- the victories of the Blitzkrieg, the first defeats in the east, the bombing of German cities -- alter their views and expectations? And when did Germans first realize they were fighting a genocidal war?
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>Told from the perspective of those who lived through it -- soldiers, schoolteachers, and housewives; Nazis, Christians, and Jews -- this masterful historical narrative sheds fresh and disturbing light on the beliefs and fears of a people who embarked on and fought to the end a brutal war of conquest and genocide.

Not really. Knowledge of the holocaust was more widespread among people than many let on after the war. Deportations of Jews were announced before hand on the front page of papers, and the location was always the train station. This was done in day time, and there are quite a number of photographs showing German Jews being walked in column to train stations for deportation to death camps. So Jews, trains, and disappearing "east" were pretty well known.

In Germany itself, the knowledge the Jews were being exterminated was wide spread enough for a pervasive rumor to spread that the fat in German soap was extracted from dead Jews (German soap had the initials RIF carved in them, which was interpreted by some as Reichs-Juden-Fett "State Jewish Fat"). In fact, the rumor was so prevalent, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Gobbles actually had some of his people look into whether it was true or not. Indeed, talk of the Holocaust was so wide spread in Germany, the government actually had to take steps to crack down on how freely the conversations were in 1943.

Certain details were unknown, specifically that gas was used. The prevalent rumor was that the Jews were put in giant communal baths and electrocuted. When you remember the Jews were gassed in chambers disguised as communal showers, you can see how the secrecy around the Holocaust did affect what the German public heard.

Other evidence includes secret police reports that reference people talking about the holocaust. For example, when evidence of the Russian atrocities in East Prussia was printed, police reports from Stuttgart talk of people dismissing the atrocities, saying it what was to be expected after what the Germans did to the Jews.

I'd recommend reading The German War if you want to see where a lot of the modern scholarship is on this subject.