Student and Teacher Talk: What did ordinary Germans know about the Holocaust?

A joint education event with the German History Society.
For many years, it was assumed and accepted that most ordinary Germans did not know about the events of the Holocaust until 1945, until the liberation of the camps forced them to confront the evidence with their own eyes. In recent years scholars have challenged this claim on a number of levels, in ways that now suggest the Holocaust was actually the open secret of broad sections of German society. This workshop introduces participants to the kinds of evidence that historians can use to assess Germans’ knowledge of the unfolding mass murder and asks what is at stake in this shift of interpretation.
About the speaker
Neil Gregor is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Southampton and director of the Parkes Institute. He has published widely on diverse aspects of Nazi Germany, including Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich (1998) and Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past (2009), both of which won the Wiener Library’s Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History, and How to Read Hitler (2014). His book on The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press.