Eric A. Johnson > Quotes

“Beaten paths are for beaten men.”
― Eric Johnson

“In Germany the government was very bad, but the people were bad too; in Italy the government was forced to be bad to emulate Hitler’s laws and so on, but the people were very good.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“In 1933 nearly 70 percent of Germany’s Jews worked in business and commerce; over 30 percent lived in the city of Berlin alone; and 70 percent lived in cities with a population of over 100,000 inhabitants.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Most non-Jews, however, experienced a very different Third Reich. Few harbored any fear of arrest even though they too often broke the law in minor ways. Most knew instinctively that the terror apparatus was not intent on punishing them so long as they broadly accepted and went along with National Socialism, which most did. Difficult as it is to fathom, given most people’s conception of dictatorship, most Germans appear to have led happy, productive, even normal lives in the Third Reich. This indicates that a dictatorship can enjoy widespread popularity among the majority even while committing unspeakable crimes against minorities and others.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Politics for most people is distant from their everyday lives. They give little attention to it and they don’t care about being politically well informed.10”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“They picked up all of the Jews from our very small town. They froze to death in the railway cars. You could see that? My father was standing watch there. They unloaded them afterward as corpses.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“In ’33, a whole lot of the members of this working-class party from our suburb were arrested, above all those who had held some kind of leadership function in the party.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“While only a handful of the thousands of non-Jews who took our survey had ever been sent to jail, taken into protective custody, or sent to a concentration camp even though the majority had committed illegal acts during the Third Reich, great numbers of the Jewish respondents”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“We had a wonderful and good life. . . . For us it was a normal life,” concludes Winfried Schiller about his youth in the Upper Silesian city of Beuthen during the Third Reich.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Whether one believed the reports depended not only on the credibility of the broadcaster but also on one’s own experiences with the Nazi regime.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“I also knew two teachers who never got a job again in the entire Hitler period. They had to sell postcards to get by.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“annihilated” and “exterminated,” even though such phraseology had an old history in Germany and had often been used when no mass murder of Jews had yet been envisioned”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Among Jews who had not emigrated, only a few had somehow managed to avoid incarceration. Most often these were either Jews in mixed marriages or the children of mixed marriages. A few others had gone into hiding, but the rest were all deported to concentration camps and ghettos.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“half of the German population listened to foreign radio broadcasts at some point, but many only after the fall of Stalingrad.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Their willingness to kill stemmed not just from a readiness to follow orders, but often from an existing hatred of Jews that the German occupiers exploited. The willing participation of non-German ethnic minorities in many of the pogroms and massacres of Jews gave many Germans the sense that it was not they who were responsible for the murders they witnessed, but the bloodthirsty foreigners.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“extermination and annihilation of the Jews for a long time. In the early phase of the Nazi regime, during the 1930s, people may have dismissed this as mere rhetorical flourish, and at the time systematic mass murder was not yet in the planning stage. But in the course of the 1940s, the annihilation of the Jews was mentioned more and more. Hitler’s “prophecy” of January 1939—when he threatened the annihilation of the Jews in the event of a new world war—was most frequently mentioned in public starting in 1940–1941.34.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“For many Germans, even if they had heard such speeches, the murder of the Jews was beyond their imagination. And some may have suppressed what they heard because it disturbed them. The radical nature of the language that was used in this matter was also typical in other matters, which is why the Jewish professor Victor Klemperer aptly described the Nazis’ language as a language of “superlatives.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Adam Grolsch, who had witnessed the Jewish massacre in Pinsk, also witnessed two or three gas vans while he was in Rivne, Ukraine, but their function occurred to him only later: “They were parked in Rivne, and nobody knew what they were. . . . That is to say, they were mobile gas chambers for smaller operations. My attention was drawn to it by the BBC.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“But where the Jews were concerned, did they talk about that? Many people say that nobody talked about it. They’re lying.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“we also carried out in-depth, face-to-face interviews with a sizable number of the respondents to the written surveys, chosen in part randomly and in part because they represented people from especially interesting and important sub-groups of the original survey population”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“While some survivors like Karl Meyer of Cologne and Joseph Weinberg of Stuttgart say that they had not experienced much anti-Semitism from their German neighbors and townsfolk, the majority of the survivors offered harsher assessments. Nevertheless, most of the survivors also did not agree with people like the former Berliner Henry Singer, who stated that “the anti-Semitism was there before Hitler.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“That better-educated people were no more immune to National Socialism than the less educated calls into question the widely held belief that tolerance and enlightenment are more likely to be found among people who have a higher education. It is the content of socialization that counts, not the degree of sophistication.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“one must keep in mind that most Jewish survivors in the survey had left Germany during the 1930s and had therefore only experienced the beginning years of National Socialism.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Only in the Rhineland city of Cologne, whose predominantly Catholic population had given Hitler the lowest percentage of votes among all major German cities, did the majority of respondents say that they had both not believed in National Socialism and not shared Nazi ideals. But, even among the Cologne respondents, those who had not sympathized with the Nazis only narrowly outnumbered those who had.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“while some people insisted that the mass murder of Jews was something that “everyone knew about,” others maintained just as insistently that hardly anyone could have known about the Holocaust during the Third Reich. Although the reality lay between these two opposing contentions, people were able to hold completely different viewpoints. This can happen because societies are not homogeneous but are made up of interlocking social networks that allow information to diffuse in some circles while not in others.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“heard in communist circles that numbers of Jews were being gassed.”45.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Receiving information, however, is not the same as believing it.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“the British Broadcasting Service (BBC) started broadcasting news about mass shootings of Jews to the German population and in the German language as early as the fall of 1941.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“That is to say that after I had seen all of that, I then wrote, “If there is any God at all, then Germany should never be allowed to win this war.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

“Among those who said they had heard something about it, 60 percent said they had completely believed it and 8 percent said that they had believed it in part. Among the rest, 14 percent said they had not believed it at first, and 18 percent said that they had not believed it at all.”
― Eric A. Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany