None of my ten friends ever encountered anybody connected with the operation of the deportation system or the concentration camps. None of them ever knew, on a personal basis, anybody connected with the Gestapo, the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service), or the Einsatzgruppen (the Occupation Detachments, which followed the German armies eastward to conduct the mass killing of Jews). None of them ever knew anybody who knew anybody connected with these agencies of atrocity. Even Policeman Hofmeister, who had to arrest Jews for “protective custody” or “resettlement” and who saw nothing wrong in “giving the Jews land, where they could learn to work with their hands instead of with money,” never knew anyone whose shame or shamelessness might have reproached him had they stood face to face. The fact that the Police Chief of Kronenberg made him sign the orders to arrest Jews told him only that the Chief himself was afraid of getting into trouble “higher up.”

Sixty days before the end of the war, Teacher Hildebrandt, as a first lieutenant in command of a disintegrating Army subpost, was informed by the post doctor that an SS man attached to the post was going crazy because of his memories of shooting down Jews “in the East”; this was the closest any of my friends came to knowing of the systematic butchery of National Socialism.

I say none of these ten men knew; and, if none of them, very few of the seventy million Germans. The proportion, which was none out of ten in Kronenberg, would, certainly, have been higher among more intelligent, or among more sensitive or sophisticated people in, say, Kronenberg University or in the big cities where people circulate more widely and hear more. But I must say what I mean by “know.”

By know I mean knowledge, binding knowledge. Men who are going to protest or take even stronger forms of action, in a dictatorship more so than in a democracy, want to be sure. When they are sure, they still may not take any form of action (in my ten friends’ cases, they would not have, I think); but that is another point. What you hear of individual instances, second- or thirdhand, what you guess as to general conditions, having put half-a-dozen instances together, what someone tells you he believes is the case—these may, all together, be convincing. You may be “morally certain,” satisfied in your own mind. But moral certainty and mental satisfaction are less than binding knowledge. What you and your neighbors don’t expect you to know, your neighbors do not expect you to act on, in matters of this sort, and neither do you.

They Thought They Were Free— The Germans, 1933-45, Milton Mayer