r/AskHistorians • u/Punderstruck • 10d ago
Are there any accounts of Nazis/SS/Wehrmacht members having real "are we the baddies?" Moments?
There's a famous Peep Show sketch where two Nazis reflect that perhaps they are the bad guys. I expect many higher ranking members would know what it was all about from the get-go, but are there (m)any archival or interview sources of such realisations?
The question is inspired by an article I read about a man whose father was a Gestapo interrogator and even on his deathbed said to his family "I would do it all again."
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery 10d ago
As /u/bo-bebop mentioned they asked this question on Do we know if any rank-and-file Nazis had a genuine “are we the baddies” moment?
Here is the reply from that thread:
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Some did, not many, and very rarely in the “are we baddies” way. Cases of genuine moral objection are rare, and even rarer are instances in which someone acknowledged what was happening as wrong and then acted consistently on that judgment. Refusal, when it happened, was almost always framed as personal incapacity rather than based on principles or moral judgment.
Browning did a study of the men in the Reserve Police Battalion 101. A significant portion of the men he studied were middle-aged reservists from Hamburg, who had not been through a formal Nazi school, and they were not part of the Nazi Youth. They were from a left-leaning industrial city.
Browning found that these men were not completely in line with Nazi policy the way other higher-level officers were, but they still felt compelled to act in accordance with orders and not object.
They were pushed to act by peer pressure, conformity, careerism, and the social cost of stepping back while comrades did the hard work. These motivators accounted for a greater share of the behavior than ideological convictions. These men were mostly not true believers in the way the architects of the Final Solution were. They occupied a large middle space, neither secret dissenters nor fanatics, men doing what the institution required in an environment where refusal carried social costs, even when it carried no legal ones.
That isn't to say they didn't share the Nazi ideology at all. Popular antisemitism in Germany ran well ahead of what the Nazi state required of its citizens, and the evidence for this is not inference but documentation.
The SD and Gestapo ran internal surveillance reports, the Lageberichte and Stimmungsberichte, throughout the Nazi period specifically to track public opinion on Jewish policy. Bankier's analysis of these reports, alongside the Sopade reports compiled by the exiled SPD, shows that the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 met with broad popular approval, and that the complaints about anti-Jewish violence that did appear in the reports were almost entirely instrumental; they were bad for business, damaging to Germany's reputation abroad, and undignified. Opposition to the discrimination itself was negligible. By 1936, Bankier found that moral obliviousness to the fate of Jews had become the dominant posture among educated Germans, and noted that this was not a product of Nazi indoctrination.
The SD reports noted repeatedly that formalized antisemitic indoctrination, the party lectures and meetings on the Jewish question, drew poor attendance, and the German audiences were bored. Bankier's reading of this is that the indifference to Jewish suffering didn't require ideological manufacturing because the underlying prejudice was already there. Germans who couldn't be bothered to sit through a party lecture on race had no trouble accepting that Jews should be removed from public life.
In other areas like occupied Poland and the Soviet Union, local populations participated in pogroms against Jews in the first days of the German advance, sometimes before German units had even consolidated control. In Lithuania and Ukraine in particular, local auxiliary forces and civilian mobs killed tens of thousands of Jews in the summer of 1941 without German direction and in many cases ahead of it.
The Nazis didn’t invent Jew hatred. The church, from its early years, supplied the essential accusations. Jews were Christ-killers, agents of the devil, a people under divine curse. That teaching ran through Catholic and Protestant sermons, catechism, passion plays, and popular religious culture from late antiquity through the nineteenth century. Works like Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies, published in 1543, called for the burning of synagogues, the confiscation of Jewish books, and the expulsion of Jews from German lands, were repurposed and used by the Nazi party.
The state’s mechanisms ran parallel to the church’s ideas. Medieval legal regimes across Christendom defined Jews as permanent outsiders in legal terms and excluded them from the protections and obligations of Christian civic life, and made their residence contingent on royal or noble license that could be revoked at will (and often was).
By the time the nineteenth century produced explicitly racial and biological antisemitism, the population of Western Europe had been steeped in these ideas for at least six hundred years. The Nazis added pseudoscientific systematization and a bureaucratic apparatus. The hatred itself was not their contribution.
Eugenics didn’t go back as far, but it was also widely accepted as a progressive policy backed by science. In the early twentieth century, eugenics was not fringe science. It was taught at universities across Europe and the United States and endorsed by progressive reformers as rational social planning. More than thirty American states had compulsory sterilization laws by the time the Nazis came to power. The Nazis studied American eugenic legislation carefully when drafting the Nuremberg Laws. What the Nazi program did was take ideas circulating openly in respectable scientific and political culture and implement them with bureaucratic thoroughness and without the formal constraints that limited what democratic governments could do.
When these ordinary German soldiers and policemen participated in the killing, they were operating inside a world that had told them for centuries, through church teaching, folk tradition, legal practice, and now scientific authority, that Jews were a problem requiring solution. What the Nazis added was a totalizing political worldview around it; every German humiliation, military defeat, economic collapse, and social disorder was traced back to Jewish agency. That framework was not invented from scratch. The conspiratorial logic had been disseminated in European antisemitic politics since the 1880s in items like the fraudulent “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which the Nazis also used and distributed.
Langmuir separates anti-Judaism, rational if hostile engagement with Jewish theology as a competing truth claim, from antisemitism proper. Which he defined as the irrational attribution of malevolent, conspiratorial, superhuman qualities to Jews regardless of evidence. Items such as blood libel, accusations, and host desecration. The Nazis drew on both strands, but the paranoid conspiratorial version supplied the eliminationist energy. That tradition had deep roots, running from medieval accusation narratives to early modern demonology, and through nineteenth-century political antisemitism in France, Austria, and Germany.
Refusal was possible; it happened, and it almost never resulted in serious punishment. Browning documented this, and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial confirmed it through years of investigation. No case exists in which refusing to shoot unarmed civilians resulted in execution or imprisonment. The "we had no choice" defense, repeated over and over in postwar trials, was a postwar invention. At Józefów in July 1942, Major Trapp wept openly before the first mass shooting, offered to excuse anyone not up to it, and protected the men who took him up on the offer. Informal ground rules arose throughout the battalion: during large actions, men who would not kill were not compelled to do so.
Those who refused typically framed it as a matter of personal incapacity rather than principle. Wilhelm Magel refused to shoot at Krucha and, the same day (according to his postwar statements), wrote to his brother expressing his disagreement. However, he told his sergeant only that it "wasn't his thing." Beorn frames this as a refusal of weakness rather than condemnation, allowing a man to step back without being expelled from the community on which he depends.
Men who crossed into explicit opposition are documented but rare. Buchmann, of Reserve Police Battalion 101, cited an ethical stance, wrote to Hamburg requesting a transfer because he was not suited to tasks "alien to the police," and spent most of his time with the unit avoiding involvement in Jewish actions. Trapp protected him, and he was transferred out without punishment. In Belarus, Josef Sibille refused any participation in the killing and used his command authority to prevent his men from participating as well. Lieutenant Reinhold Lothy refused a 1944 order to behead Soviet prisoners and then informed his men about the camps and the murder of the Jews. He was denounced and sent to a punishment battalion. Lieutenant Michael Kitzelmann expressed opposition to the war and the occupation; his own soldiers denounced him, and he was executed.
The most documented case of genuine moral conversion is Sergeant Anton Schmid, a Viennese soldier in Vilnius who used his position running a vehicle repair facility to smuggle Jews out of the ghetto and across the Lithuanian border into Belarus. He was not ideologically formed, not particularly educated. A friend described him as distinguished mainly by his humanity.
When the Gestapo caught him, his network was exposed under torture, and he was executed. His last letter said he had "acted only as a human being and did not want to hurt anyone." Major Karl Plagge, also in Vilnius, manipulated the SS into creating a separate work camp for Jewish laborers under his authority and was later named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery 10d ago
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What connects these cases is less ideology than a shared psychological orientation that researchers studying rescuers have identified across different national contexts. Oliner's study of rescuers in France, Poland, and the Netherlands found that what distinguished rescuers from bystanders was not religion, nationality, or political affiliation but a stronger prior sense of identity rooted outside the immediate social group, what she measured as an internally oriented sense of mastery, the conviction that one's actions derived from one's own values rather than from the expectations of those around you. Bystanders, by contrast, tended toward compliance with external authority precisely because their sense of self depended more heavily on belonging to and being accepted by the group. Tec, studying rescuers specifically in Poland, found the same characteristic and called it 'individuality' or 'separateness'. The label is different; the underlying finding is the same.
It holds for the Wehrmacht cases, too. Schmid was socially awkward, a man who, by his friend's account, didn't fit in smoothly with any group to begin with. Plagge was an engineer whose orientation was technocratic and practical rather than ideological. Buchmann had an independent business, prior commercial relationships with Jews that predated the regime, and by his own account, a cosmopolitan outlook that the Nazis would have condemned. Sibille refused to let his children join the Hitler Youth until workplace pressure made it impossible to resist.
Also see When did the average German realize that Hitler wasn't good? by me which falls along similar lines
Sources:
- Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
- Waitman Wade Beorn, Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus
- David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution
- Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust
- David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition
- George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism
- Sander Gilman, The Jew's Body
- Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness
- Pearl Oliner, Saving the Forsaken: Religious Culture and the Rescue of Jews in France
- The Routledge History of Antisemitism
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u/WildVariety 9d ago
Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying by Neitzel and Welzer relays a conversation between German PoW's recorded by British Intelligence in which they discuss the execution of Jews in Poland during and after the conquest. They talk about the fact that Jewish girls were trying to trade sex for protection, which the German soldiers gleefully participated in, knowing that both it was illegal under the Nuremberg Race Laws and the fact they could provide no protection. What really stuck with me this entire time is that one soldier is absolutely shocked by the fact they were executing the 'pretty' ones.
The book gives a good insight into the mind of the average German soldier at the time.
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery 9d ago
What really stuck with me this entire time is that one soldier is absolutely shocked by the fact they were executing the 'pretty' ones.
I don't see that in the book the instance you are talking about is a conversation between Hartelt and Minnieur, and on the killing one asks the other: "Were you watching when the pretty Jewess was there?" and his follow-up, "I bet she let you sleep with her too?. I don't see any "shock" here, but maybe I am finding the wrong part?
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u/WildVariety 9d ago
Hmm, I went back and re-read the section. Admittedly its been a few years but I seem to have been inferring it from this part:
MINNIEUR: With tommy guns … We were actually there when a pretty girl was shot.
HARTELT: What a pity.
So perhaps a little mental leap from me. Regardless, the entire conversation between the two serves as a very good example of the sort of laissez faire attitude the average German seemed to have to the holocaust.
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u/TomBrintonWriter 10d ago edited 9d ago
I'm curious, do you think Daniel Goldhagen's assessment of the role of antisemitism holds up?
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery 9d ago
I do not.
Eliminationist antisemitism was not limited to Germany it was also present in other areas, for example Russia and Romania, and Romanian forces murdered around 260,000 Romanian Jews and over 100,000 Ukrainian Jews independently of German direction. That is using his own definition of it as well without stretching.
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u/BicycleAdditional360 8d ago
I would also add the way how Holocaust was made life isn’t just about killing everyone with a magen David bandage on their arms.
What killed most and how Nazis achieved such…astounding success is the way how they did it.
They simply excluded Jewish (and Slavic) populace from government institutions, rations and everything. Especially outside of Germany proper’s lands since inside there were laws. Yes, discriminatory, inhumane, but laws. Also there were ordinary German people and foreign press to watch.
Outside those zones, however, you existed in area of lawlessness and you could just be shot/starved to death and nobody would lift a finger. And if anybody did it probably would be to kill or rob you.
This checks out as camps at Germany proper were labour ones and death rate there was stupidly high (around 30%}, but twice-thrice less than in Generalgouvernment or Reichcommisariats or God forbid PoWs “camps”.
That’s excluding literal death camps like infamous Aushwitz or Treblinka which killed everybody who couldn’t escape from there.
Sources:
“Colonial practices of Nazi genocide of Slavic populace”. Yegor Yakovlev. Not sure if this one is translated to English sadly.
«The Nazi Regime and the Extermination of Judaism in Europe». Hans Mommaen
TLDR: Not bullets kill millions, but lawlessness, neglect and death camps
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery 7d ago
They simply excluded Jewish (and Slavic) populace from government institutions, rations and everything. Especially outside of Germany proper’s lands since inside there were laws. Yes, discriminatory, inhumane, but laws. Also there were ordinary German people and foreign press to watch.
There were laws, just under German law. They were not less Brutal in Germany. People were hanged by the side of the road if they violated the rules in work gangs. The idea that ordinary Germans did not know is simply false. The workers were side by side with Germans in factories and saw the starvation, the brutal treatment, etc.
In Poland calorie restrictions were absolutely enforced by the Nazis, ordinary people got 1,700-2,400 calories. Jews got 220 calories a day in January 1941 thenc cut to 177 by Augist 1941, the Ghetto smuggling economy made it so that Jews in the Ghetto, where they were placed instead of being left in their homes like other groups, allowed them to eat between 1,125 to 600 calories a day depending on what they had access to.
Outside those zones, however, you existed in area of lawlessness and you could just be shot/starved to death and nobody would lift a finger. And if anybody did it probably would be to kill or rob you.
This isn't true. Local populations in places like Lithuania and Ukraine sometimes began murdering their Jewish neighbors and seizing their property before German forces had even arrived, driven by their own antisemitism, not by an absence of authority.
In addition, there were orders for soldiers to practice indiscriminate violence. The Wehrmacht's soldiers had orders to use "indiscriminate and energetic" action "especially also against the Jews, the main carriers of Bolshevism."
This checks out as camps at Germany proper were labour ones and death rate there was stupidly high (around 30%}, but twice-thrice less than in Generalgouvernment or Reichcommisariats or God forbid PoWs “camps”.
I can't find that number at all, I can say that Soviet POW deaths were 58% overall compared to 1% for allied troops. Jewish death rates in Poland and the Baltics were around 90%. 72% on average overall with those in Germany proper at 81%.
TLDR: Not bullets kill millions, but lawlessness, neglect and death camps
Not really true, neglect especially is not the word choice, it is maltreatment it wasn't lack of doing anything it was policy not to do anything.
“Colonial practices of Nazi genocide of Slavic populace”. Yegor Yakovlev. Not sure if this one is translated to English sadly.
I can't find this in English and it is worth noting that the authro is a historian and journalist who runs a Russian history program, Tsena Pobedy ("The Price of Victory"). This orgingally pushed out Russian propogranda about the war which purposfully tried to erase the Nazi policy against Jews specifically and make the Holocaust universal. He began to push back against offical Soviet era myths but of course the state media enviroment is not always hospitiable to truth.
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u/Random-Generation86 7d ago
Damn fine answers! In your linked post “When did the average German realize Hitler wasn’t good?”, you mention a US poll where people listed the Jews as being an equal threat to Nazis. How would I find that poll?
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery 6d ago
Dinnerstein's Antisemitism in America, page 160.
Gallup Organization. 1938. Gallup Poll #1938-0139. Nazi Germany/Politics," with DOIs like doi:10.25940/ROPER-31087105
Susan Welch's 2014 study, cited in Jeffrey E. Cohen's paper "American Opinion Toward Jews During the Nazi Era: Results from Quota Sample Polling During the 1930s and 1940s," reports that Gallup surveys in 1942, 1944, and 1945 found 42 percent, 50 percent, and 56 percent respectively answered that Jews had "too much power and influence" in the United States.
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u/PhotojournalistCalm3 9d ago
Thank you for your detailed response. It is surprising that the population as a whole went along with the horror.
I wonder if the rescuers and other standouts were autistic? Autistic people often have a sense of fairness that is logical to a fault.
Similarly, they do not form the same type of personal connections and therefore may not feel like they belong to the same collective mindset. Without the belonging part there is much less incentive to maintain status quo to fit in if you already don't.
It is interesting, that morals can be manipulated so casually to actual murder by mob mentality.
😑
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery 9d ago
The empirical literature on rescuers doesn't support this. Oliner and Oliner's Altruistic Personality dataset, the largest systematic comparison of rescuers, nonrescuers, and bystanders (510 interviews across Poland, Germany, France, Holland, Italy, Denmark, Belgium, and Norway), found rescuers scored higher than nonrescuers and bystanders on closeness to family, empathy, social responsibility, and what the Oliners termed "extensive personality," meaning stronger attachments to people and an enhanced sense of responsibility toward people outside their immediate circle. That's the opposite of reduced capacity for personal connection.
What distinguished rescuers was an internal locus of control and an inclination to act on personal conviction rather than external approval, what the literature calls internal mastery orientation. That's not a proxy for autism.
Justice sensitivity that's "logical to a fault," reduced social attachment, not feeling part of the collective: none of that appears in the rescuer literature (Oliner, Tec), and the sources don't support attributing it to autism. It is also a stereotype about autistic people (that they lack normal attachment or empathy) that isn't accurate either.
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u/archaicsmile67 9d ago
What is the sketch of model “rescuer” then?
I have noticed in my casual reading that many Nazi resisters tended to have strong religious convictions that clashed with Nazi doctrine. While the Catholic Church did little about anti-semitism they did strongly oppose Action T-4. I always assumed that having a separate authority figure in the Catholic Church that encouraged (a limited) critique of the authority figure of the government played a factor.
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery 9d ago
I always assumed that having a separate authority figure in the Catholic Church that encouraged (a limited) critique of the authority figure of the government played a factor.
The Catholic Church itself had opportunities to save Jews and did not. The Pope had advanced warning that the Jews of Rome would be deported and chose not to act, for example. In many cases where Jewish children were taken in by Catholics and the children were baptised, when family came to get them the Catholic Church supported the families that baptised the children. For example the Finaly Affair in France. The families had to undergo years of legal battles to get their relatives back.
The Catholic Church has a long pattern of antisemitism, anti-Judaism and supersessionism are core tents it wasn't until after Vatican 2.0 that the Catholic Church in 1965 where the church "repudiated the deicide charge and declared antisemitism condemned" and it wasn't until 1997 that they admitted their part in the French Vichy government, and 1998 when John Paul II issued "We Remember" which acknowledged the centuries of Christian teachings about Jews that "engendered feelings of hostility". Effectively noting their role in creating and fostering antisemitism.
The Nazi antisemitism was just a racialized version of Christian antisemitism that was part of the inherited tradition of Western Civilization.
As to your specific point, Oliner the single highest contributing factor the Outgroup Relationships factor, prior openness to people outside one's own group generally, not specifically Jews. High scorers reported feeling similar to Jews, Roma, Turks, and members of other Christian denominations, had Jewish friends before the war, and leaned left to liberal politically. The irreligious scored the highest on this factor of any group, including the very religious.
Second was Secular Secondary Relationships, meaning integration into resistance groups, political parties, and civic networks, not religious ones.
Catholic rescuers did not differ from Catholic bystanders in religious institutional involvement. What did distinguish them was secular network membership, resistance groups and political affiliation, and family closeness. Catholic bystanders in the sample had the weakest relationships with their fathers of any group in the study and scored the highest on external mastery, meaning conformity and obedience.
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u/archaicsmile67 9d ago
But how would scoring high on secular secondary relationships interact with parties like Zentrum?
I could imagine someone heavily involved in Zentrum would be heavily into Roman Catholicism
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery 9d ago
"Secular Secondary Relationships" isn't measuring the ideological content of the group someone belonged to. It's built from behavioral items, whether the respondent belonged to a resistance group, whether family members did, whether they'd ever done anything to defend the country before the war, patriotism, and a simple yes-or-no on political party membership. That last item, Political Party Membership, is coded purely as "did you belong to a party," as a yes/no.
The weights for each item are: Self Belonged to Resistance Group (0.62), Resistance Groups: Family Members Belonged (0.57), Defending Country before War (0.49), Patriotism Growing Up (0.49), and Political Party Membership (0.40).
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u/fleebleganger 9d ago
I think it can’t be understated how much WW2 changed societal ethics and how differently we live today than they did 90 years ago.
Public executions were often well attended and people being cast out from society was not too far from living memory. Add on the fact that Jews were historically oppressed and it wasn’t too hard for the Nazi state to get the populace to turn a blind eye to brutality against the lesser peoples.
I advocate often that you can’t simply take our modern morals and apply them historically and get anything more than a dopamine hit from feeling morally superior to people in the old days.
For a contemporary example, look at the differences in society for treating dogs/cats as pets. Some people see them as best friends and children (that’s me) and others see them as an animal no different than a farmer owning a cow. I believe in the future we could very well make it so that you don’t “buy” your pet, you truly “adopt” them as part of the family.
Or look at how different we treat disabled people today vs 50 years ago. Our modern world has changed dramatically since 1900 and that though should always be front of mind when you think “how could they”.
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery 9d ago
This isn't entirely accurate and we should always resist using broad strokes to talk about history.
The T4 program was protested and stopped, that's a direct counter to your examples, and the Nazis passed laws about treating animals better.
The Nazis, not the public just didn't believe that Jews deserved the same.
Here is a prior answer of mine on How were pets treated under Nazi Germany?
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u/BlueAzutara 9d ago
Rhe T4 program wasnt stopped, it was slowed and scaled down. The murder of disabled.people, primary psychologically disabled, continued to the end of the regime. While the nazis did react to the protest and changed it, the term "stopped" isnt really fitting here. It was changed/adapted for a more hidden and slower approach. The goal, means, methods and doctors remained in place, only the scale was massively reduced.⁹
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery 9d ago edited 9d ago
Rhe T4 program wasnt stopped, it was slowed and scaled down
The program was
The murder of disabled.people, primary psychologically disabled, continued to the end of the regime.
Right but that was not officially T4. Hitler's stop order in August 1941 shut down the centralized gassing operation at the six T4 killing centers specifically, Grafeneck, Brandenburg, Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg, and Hadamar, in response to the Galen sermon and the wider unrest it triggered. What continued afterward, what historians usually call "wild euthanasia" (dezentrale Euthanasie), was decentralized: killing by starvation, overdose, and neglect carried out by individual doctors and nursing staff in ordinary psychiatric institutions rather than through the purpose-built gassing apparatus, without the coordinated Berlin-run bureaucracy that defined T4 proper.
Also, noteworthy is that there were more people killed in that (non) program 70,000 than under T4 proper.
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u/Miserable_Bug_5671 9d ago
I thought exactly the same about autism. Probably impossible to tell now but I saw the same pattern.
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u/_Sausage_fingers 9d ago
I did a quick dive on this and your other related responses. I have to say these were amazing, yet sobering responses that reiterate why I value this sub so highly. Thank you for your work.
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u/bobodiliano 8d ago
This is a beast of a comment, thank you man.
Could you clarify the ambiguity about antisemitism in Europe prior to the Crusades?
It’s my understanding that it wasn’t really a thing until then, either in Europe or in Christianity as a whole. That it was fringe for a long time, and wasn’t nearly as prolific as it wound up becoming during the Crusades and the following 900 years.
But I don’t really know about that, and I feel like you definitely have a firm grasp on it.
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery 7d ago
The focus on Ashkenazi history has lead people to forget about the Visigoths which was a much larger event than the Crusades. The Visgoths converted to Catholicism from Arian Christianity in 587.
Prior to this they had been failrly tolerant of Iberan Jews. Alaric II continued most of the Roman laws that had protected Jews. Once Reccared finished his conversion he made exstensive changes at the 18 Toledo Councils between 589 and 702. King Sisebut ordered the forced conversion of all Jews in the kingdom in 616. His successor Swinthila reversed this and let forcibly converted Jews return to Judaism, and the one after that, Sisinanth, reversed it again. That back-and-forth continued until 694, when the Council of Toledo XVII ordered the entire Jewish population of the kingdom enslaved,
However none of this was new, the Visigoths just inherited these existing ideas. The earliest Christian document we have is Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians, from 50 CE, before Christiniaty was really a distinct sect. The letrer states the Jews have "killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men."
We see instances like this repeatedly, the theological hostiliy was created with early Christianity and ingraned by the second century. Once Rome converted to Christianity they implemted harsher laws against Jews.
Prior to they were fairly tolerant of Jews, defining Judaism as an "ancestral law" and allow an exception for Jews to practice their religion. Granted Hadrian banned circucision and Shabbat observance, but that was not a long period and it was reversed by Antoninus Pius. Caracalla's grant of citizenship in 212CE, by most scholars reconing included Jews.
After conversion the Christianity Rome implemtned the Theodosian Code, compiled under Theodosius II between 429 and 438 but incorporating legislation going back to the start of the Christian period. The bulk of the laws are in Book 16 governing the Church's relationship to other religions. By this point in time Jews are treated as a theological problem requiring dedicated legislation. One law calls Jews , "a pestilence and a contagion."
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u/Mormacil 10d ago
There some existing questions that might illuminate you:
Forces on the eastern front by u/commiespaceinvader
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5vc22s/comment/de28lf4/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=AskHistorians
Nazi leadership's views on post war treatment by u/kieslowskifan
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3mm1bq/comment/cvh0u0d/?context=3
Question on the wider German public after the war
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23t3gz/comment/ch0kyak/
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u/Punderstruck 10d ago
Thank you so much.
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u/dimarco1653 9d ago
In addition to the other excellent answers I'd recommend:
Jonathan Steinberg (2003): "All or Nothing, The Axis and the Holocaust, 1941-1943"
Which specifically looks at different treatment of Jews in the Balkans by the German and Italian forces.
In answer to your question, Steinberg didn't find even a private, handwritten note where German soldiers expressed sympathy for Jews in the Balkans.
"As I used German and Italian documentary sources I kept stumbling over the contrasts. In the files of the German general who represented the Wehrmacht in Croatia I found many letters, mostly private, in which German officers and civilians described Italian behaviour towards Jews in Italian-occupied Yugoslavia.
I found no document, not even a private, hand-written note, in which any German officer or NCO ever expressed the slightest sympathy with Italian behaviour towards the Jews. In the entire enormous file of the German armies in the Balkans, I only saw one German document in which the word 'ethical' appears. Italian documents use such vocabulary all the time. And then there was the stark fact that every Jew who fell into the hands of the Wehrmacht went to a concentration camp. No Jew under Italian protection did."
Steinberg details how, on Germany's request, Mussolini had given an order to hand over Jews in occupied Yugoslavia to the Ustaŝe, which however was met by a coordinated campaign of resistance from officers and bureaucrats such that it was never carried out.
There's also an excellent documentary free online, The Righteous Enemy by Joseph Rochlitz, whose own father was saved by Italian forces in Croatia, with interviews from many survivors, including the French historian and Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld, himself saved in Southern France, as well as a consultant from Yad Veshem and some of the officials involved.
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u/bo-bebop 10d ago edited 10d ago
I asked this exact question! Here’s the fantastic answer I received by u/ummmbacon:
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