In their first published leaflet, the young idealists of the White Rose resistance circle sought to recall the glory of German culture in days gone past, and by contrast show the crude barbarity of Nazism. Their call to action was the inevitable shame that “every honest German” would feel “when the veil falls from our faces and the awful crimes that infinitely exceed any human measure are exposed to the light of day.” Their second leaflet was even more explicit. By way of addressing “the Jewish question,” they stated the simple fact that “since Poland was conquered, three hundred thousand Jews have been murdered in that country in the most bestial manner imaginable,” and they wonder to themselves how the German nation could be “behaving so apathetically in the face of all these most abominable, most degrading crimes?”

Tragically, the moral certainty that this circle of resistors displayed had little practical effect. Shortly after beginning their activities, they were discovered and executed; they had sought to address themselves to a German society which lay too far within the grip of Nazism to receive their message. Nonetheless, the method of their address remains notable for the manner in which they approached the topic of atrocities in the East. Rather than taking pains to establish the facts of the ongoing Holocaust and thereby convince their audience that stories filtering back about rampant murder were true, their leaflets took it as a given that whoever might read it would be familiar with the specific fate of Jews and Poles (and all other victims) at the hands of their German conquerors. The White Rose was not trying to publicize hitherto unknown facts. Rather, they were making a moral argument about those facts which were already known. Their leaflets were distributed entirely at random, and they still felt certain that the average reader would be familiar with their subject. Though their argument about the moral dimension of the Holocaust was not widely received, they were not wrong in their other assumption. The average German knew that a massive program of murder and abuse was being undertaken in their name, even if they did not know every detail.

Simply put, it was distressingly easy to rationalize away the fate of other people, especially when the actions against them took place at a great distance in a foreign land, and especially when one had been taught that the victims were not people at all. The fact of the matter is that when Hitler came to power Jews made up a very small percentage of Germany’s population. In Germany in 1933 there were just over half a million Jews; a little less than one percent of the total population. Over the next six years about half managed to emigrate. The period of Nazi rule then managed to so thoroughly isolate this small population from the rest of German society that, as Richard Overy concludes, “most Germans had little reason to think of the Third Reich as particularly sinister.” For the ethnic German, aryan by Nazism’s standards, “it was possible to live in Germany throughout the whole period of the dictatorship and perhaps witness an incidence of state repression on no more than two or three occasions in twelves years.” It was further possible for rural Germans to have never even met a Jew, let alone maintain a standing relationship with one. So, although Germans knew that Jews were being persecuted generally, and while they may have been a witness to some beatings or other humiliations, their general sense of the pogroms against Jews was disconnected, as if they were something which occurred far off and which were necessary, even if they were conceded as regrettable.

This was at least the perspective of Elisabeth Gebensleben, a forty-nine-year-old woman who described herself as the type to interest herself first in “politics, then the features.” She was something of an ardent Nazi, and in her correspondence with her daughter Irmgard, she hailed the rejuvenation of German national life under Nazism, and crowed that “the ruthless intervention of the nationalist government might appear strange to some, but first we have to systematically clean up.” But what about the “mean, horrible” “campaign against the Jews,” asked her daughter from Holland. Elisabeth’s reply was dismissive. As characterized by Peter Fritzsche, “Elisabeth confronted Nazi terror, but after a moment of hesitation she dismissed the evidence as accidental or justified it in the name of German suffering.” However, no matter how Elisabeth might have justified it, she knew that Nazism represented a mortal danger to Jews in general.

And, it’s not as if Elisabeth occupied some special position which afforded her unique knowledge. That which she knew, she concluded from observations made in the course of everyday life. Except for brief moments when they tried to clean up their image for the international eye, such as during the 1936 Olympics, the Nazis were never shy about the antipathy they held for Judaism. Exemplified by the infamous Nuremberg Laws, Jews were subjected to increasingly harsh restrictions that curtailed their public life, stole their property, and marked them as notably different by requiring them to affix “Sarah” or “Israel” to their legal names,” and wear a yellow star whenever they left their homes. All as a prelude to a major coordinated action against the entire population, all of which was trumpeted every step of the way by Nazism’s propaganda service. By the time of the Anschluss with Austria, “the concentration camps began to fill up with people incarcerated simply for being Jews.” The later night of terror known as Kristallnacht confirmed that “Jews in Germany were not simply a persecuted minority but a racial enemy whom the Nazis were willing to murder as ‘free game.’”

None of this took place out of sight of the average German. Today in Vienna the Anschluss is memorialized by a statue of an old Jewish man with bent back and burdened by razor wire being forced to scrub the street beneath him. It is an image taken directly from history, when the city’s Jewish population was forced out onto the streets to be humiliated and abused in full public view. Ruth Klueger, who was living in the city at the time, remembers the young members of the Hitler Youth marching past her window while singing about “Jewish blood spurting from their knives,” and she remembers being chastened out of a showing of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves by a young woman who “asserted the superiority of her Germanic forefathers as opposed to the vermin race [Ruth Klueger] belonged to.” Rather than being the stuff of cloak and dagger, the persecution of German and Austrian Jews was a public spectacle.

Peter Fritzsche writes that up through the end of 1942, “the deportations of Jews from Germany were visible, even public affairs that prompted a variety of response, from shock to satisfaction.” By the following year, however, “‘public notices prohibiting Jews from using park benches, telephone booths, swimming pools, [and] restaurants’ had become unnecessary and were ‘gradually removed.’” How else might they have been made “unnecessary” if not for the systematic removal of Jews from society? It was not possible to live as a witness to the changes wrought by Nazism during their decade in power without also witnessing the wretched fate of the persecuted.