Good German

Rommel was portrayed as an honourable German in movies such as The Desert Fox but this was later challenged as a myth.^[1]

Good Germans is a euphemism for German citizens during and after WWII who claimed not to have supported the Nazi regime, but remained silent and did not resist in a meaningful way.^[2][3][4] The term further denotes those who claimed ignorance of the Holocaust and German war crimes. Despite these claims, post-war research has suggested that a large number of ordinary Germans were aware of the Holocaust at least in vague terms: captive slave laborers were a common sight, the public knew Jews were being deported to Poland, and the basics of the concentration camp system, if not the extermination camps, were widely known. While there is some controversy as to its exact meaning, the term "Good Germans" is therefore usually used to signify passivity by ordinary Germans in the face of widespread crimes against humanity.

Despite the Nazi regime's efforts to keep the extermination of Jews a secret and destroy any evidence of mass killings, hundreds of thousands of Germans were involved to some extent in the genocide: participating in the killings directly; guarding and administering the camps where Jews and others were systematically murdered and worked to death; and providing support from both the civil and military authorities which facilitated the machinery of genocide.

See also

• Hitler's Willing Executioners – a 1996 book by Daniel Goldhagen
• German collective guilt
• Responsibility for the Holocaust
• The Good German – a 2006 Steven Soderbergh film

References