German Inaction
Many Germans knew exactly what the Nazis were doing to both German Jews and those in occupied countries. Inside Germany it was impossible not to see what was happening, or to hear first-hand reports from relatives, neighbours and friends. Tens of thousands of Germans either participated in the mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) or the death camp machinery, while tens of thousands more served in army units that either took part in the killings or witnessed them. These participants and eye witnesses talked of their experiences to relatives and friends, who in turn informed a wider circle of German society.

The response of the majority of ordinary Germans was either indifference or denial of the realities that were happening around them. Some Germans expressed active support for the Nazis’ policies, while the rest said and did nothing.

The reactions of ordinary Germans to the violence and destruction of Kristallnacht ("the Night of Broken Glass") in November 1938 illustrates this. Thousands of Germans came out to watch the organised attacks on synagogues and Jewish businesses as though the violence was a festival. The next day 100 000 Germans flocked to a rally in Nuremberg to hear antisemitic speeches and voice their approval of the violent assault on their Jewish neighbours. Although concentration and prison camps had been set up from the very beginning of the Nazi regime in 1933, most of these were outside major cities. After 1938 this changed and it became impossible for ordinary Germans not to see what was happening to the Jewish community.

In the Berlin area, for example, there were 645 forced labour camps, while in the state of Hesse there were 606 camps. It was impossible for Germans not to see what was happening in their neighbourhoods. This was especially the case for Germans who were on active duty in those areas of the Eastern Front where the mass killings were carried out. This is illustrated by this excerpt from an interview from the film "Shoah" with a Mrs Michelson, the wife of a Nazi schoolteacher who lived near the Chelmno camp in Poland:

"(So) The Jewish work squad went through the village in chains? Yes. Could people speak to them? No, that was impossible. No one dared. No one dared. Why? Was it dangerous?

Yes, there were guards. Anyway, people wanted nothing to do with all that. Do you see? Gets on your nerves, seeing that every day. You can't force a whole village to watch such distress! ... And the screams! It was frightful! Depressing. Day after day, the same spectacle! It was terrible ... Horrifying screams. Screams of terror!

Do you know how many Jews were exterminated there? Four something. Four hundred thousand, forty thousand. Four hundred thousand. Four hundred thousand, yes. I knew it had a four in it. Sad, sad, sad!"

German Action
As many as half a million Germans participated directly and indirectly in the machinery of the Holocaust. They included middle-aged policemen, young conscript soldiers, clerks, doctors, lawyers and professional army officers. Some rounded up the victims and transported them to mass graves where they were shot; others forced them onto trains which had been scheduled to run to death camps by railway bureaucrats; ordinary workers drove the trains and staffed the railway stations; others administered the camps as they would have a public service department; doctors “selected” who would live and who would die; guards herded the Jews into the gas chambers and dropped the poisonous pellets that brought about an agonising death.

In Auschwitz alone there were 7000 guards at any one time, while Dachau still had over 4000 staff towards the end of the war. Thousands of men served in the mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen), the German Police Battalions and SS brigades which operated in occupied Eastern Europe executing Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and communists.

Many other Germans contributed to the killing machinery in other ways. German business was especially complicit. Many industrialists and financiers had assisted Hitler's rise to power by contributing financially in the 1920s and early 1930s. They believed that Hitler would counter the German leftwing parties, especially the communists. Once he was in power, most German industrialists saw the chance to make large profits from his policies, especially the militarisation of the economy. It was therefore natural that German corporations should see no moral issues in the enormous profits they made from working millions of slave labourers to death.

Over 200 corporations were involved, including car manufacturers such as Volkswagen, BMW and Daimler-Benz (now Daimler-Chrysler), chemical industries such as I.G. Farben, and banks such as Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank. Some corporations even financed the building of concentration camps where they used slave labour to both help the Nazi war machine and make profits for themselves.

German Dissent
Many Germans did not accept the Nazis’ policies. Some actively resisted and others even plotted to overthrow Hitler. Most opposition forces were discovered by the Gestapo and either executed or imprisoned, but there was still a minority of Germans who resisted. There was scope to protest publicly about moral issues. For example, the churches protested about the T-4 euthanasia program in which thousands of disabled Germans were murdered, and ultimately Hitler cancelled it in 1941. As late as 1943, 500 German women protested outside Gestapo headquarters in Berlin demanding the release of their Jewish husbands who were destined for deportation. Many onlookers joined the protest and the men were saved, demonstrating that dissent did save lives.

Some members of the mobile killing units refused to carry out orders to execute Jews on the Eastern Front and were simply re-assigned to other duties. After the war many Germans claimed that they were only “following orders” and would have been shot themselves for refusing to take part in the Holocaust, but this clearly was not the case. The fact is that Germans could, and some did, dissent from major aspects of Nazi policies, but the majority chose either to remain silent or participated in the mass murder of Jews and other “racially inferior” groups.

Occupied Europe
Many heroic people organised underground resistance movements in occupied countries, and helped local Jewish communities to escape the Nazi killing machine. In Holland, Italy, Denmark, Yugoslavia and France, the Resistance was able to save thousands of lives. There were, however, many others who collaborated with the Nazis, either out of political conviction or for personal gain, and they played key roles in killing hundreds of thousands of Jews and others.

In Eastern Europe, with its long history of antisemitism, Hitler found it easy to recruit volunteers to kill Jews. In Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the Ukraine, Belarus (White Russia), Russia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland many people were keen to join the death squads. As soon as the Nazis occupied these countries they established local “home defence corps” made up of volunteers who staffed the police units which identified, rounded up and killed the local Jewish and Gypsy communities.

Many of these local volunteers had suffered under Stalin’s tyranny and embraced the Nazis’ propaganda linking Jews with communism. They often formed local fascist groups to carry out Hitler’s policies, including the Slovakian Hlinka Guard, the Croatian Ustashi, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, the Hungarian Arrow Cross and the Romanian Iron Guard. People in these countries knew every detail of the Holocaust because it happened in front of them every day.