In Europe

insurance companies transferred Jewish holdings to the state treasury or Nazi accounts. Personal possessions were sent as Christmas gifts to the ethnic German colonists. The homes of Jews were plundered, in the knowledge that their inhabitants would never come back. Everyone ‘knew’ it in their own way.
    At first the existence of the death camps was talked about only in very small circles. By autumn 1943, almost all the highly placed Nazis had been informed. That was for tactical reasons: after receiving that information, no one could bow out by pleading ignorance or innocence; now they were all part of the conspiracy. That, too, is why Himmler, at a closed meeting of
Reichsleiter
and gauleiter in Poznań on 6 October, 1943, spoke in relatively plain terms about the extermination of the Jews.
    What he said, literally, was: ‘The phrase “the Jews must be destroyed” is easy to say, but the demands it places on those who implement it are among the heaviest and most difficult in the world.’
    Albert Speer's flat denial at Nuremberg saved his life. Along with Goebbels and Göring he was Hitler's closest assistant, and one of the most senior officials in the Third Reich. In his memoirs he mentioned a visit he received in summer 1944 from his mentor, Karl Hanke. The old Nazi was completely beside himself: never, never must Speer accept an invitation to visit a concentration camp in the district of Upper Silesia.This old friend of his had seen things there he was neither allowed nor able to describe. He could only have been referring to Auschwitz. Speer: ‘I didn't enquire any further. I didn't ask Himmler about it, I didn't ask Hitler about it, I did not talk about it with my friends. Nor did I have it investigated: I didn't want to know what was going on.’
    Years later, in her impressive study of Speer, Gitta Sereny demonstrated that he not only
could
have known much more, but that he actually
did
know much more. Once the war was over, however, he skilfully repressed that knowledge, as did countless other Germans.
    Primo Levi wrote about a German fellow chemist. Levi and his German colleague performed the same experiments, and both of them worked at the same, huge Buna site. There was one difference between them: in the evening Levi slept inside a barbed-wire enclosure, while his colleague lived on the outside. This
Oberingenieur
said later that he had known nothing about the gas chambers, and that he had never asked anyone about them. ‘He did not comfort himself with lies,’ Levi wrote, ‘but with lacunae, with blank spots.’
    How many ‘blank spots’ could a person live with between 1940–5? The pamphlet distributed by the students of the White Rose in Munich spoke of ‘the most beastly murder’ of 300,000 Polish Jews. Tucked away in the house on Amsterdam's Prinsengracht, Anne Frank wrote on 9 October, 1942:‘We assume that most of them were murdered. The English radio speaks of gassing. Perhaps that is the fastest way to die.’ One week later, in Dresden, Victor Klemperer referred to the Auschwitz camp as ‘a fast-moving slaughterhouse’. On 27 February, 1943 he said that it was ‘no longer probable that Jews will return alive from Poland’.
    So
they
knew about it. Were they the only ones with eyes and ears?
    Tens of thousands of
Wehrmacht
soldiers were involved, directly or indirectly, in the mass executions in Poland. In his classic study of the activities of a typical death squad, Reserve Police Battalion 101, Christopher Browning shows that the battalion was in a state of continual flux: respectable fathers from Hamburg reported for duty, took part in mass executions, then went home to carry on life as usual. One of the commanders, newly married, even took his young bride along: in the market square at Miedzyrzec she was a direct witness to the murder of the local Jews. The stories flew around the country: in letters that escapedthe censors’ attention, from soldiers on leave, in photographs sent home from the East. It was only in November 1941 that photographing such executions was forbidden.
    After 1943, anyone in Germany who looked around enough – as I once heard a young German formulate it so inimitably – ‘knew for sure that they didn't want to know more.’ In that same year British and American bombers scattered millions of pamphlets over Germany, containing precise information about the systematic murder of the European Jews, the death camps and the gas chambers. Eric