The Holocaust is often regarded as distinctive because of its organised, industrial-style killing in specially designed extermination camps: Chełmno in the Wartheland; Auschwitz-Birkenau in eastern Upper Silesia; Majdanek and the ‘Reinhard camps’ – Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka – in the General Government in Poland. But around half of the 6 million Jewish victims were killed outside the camps, in fields and forests, in villages and towns across eastern Europe. Murder outside the camps, sometimes dubbed the ‘Holocaust by bullets’, included shooting into ditches, ravines, pits and mass graves, and death through enforced starvation, disease and maltreatment. In the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, Jews were killed not only by invading Germans but also by locals: former neighbours and workmates. These face-to-face killings may appear, at first glance, more like the kinds of genocide that have exploded elsewhere at different times: people killing other people in the localities where they lived. Yet there are significant differences in purpose, scale and complexity.

This chapter analyses a selection of personal testimonies written by non-Jewish German refugees and non-Germans with experiences of Germany under Nazi rule to the 1939 Harvard essay competition ‘My Life in Germany before and after 1933’ in order to explore how behaviour in private in Germany under National Socialist rule helped to constitute a ‘bystander society’. It argues that the pressures to demonstrate conformity in public did not simply create dissonance between individuals’ public and private selves, but also transformed private attitudes and habits. As a result, a ‘bystander society’ emerged after 1933 in Germany that was characterised by people tending not to intervene on behalf of the direct targets of persecution: as such, it was a precondition of the Holocaust.

THE EVENTS OF 9 NOVEMBER 1989 were initially greeted with what appeared to be virtually universal acclamation. Over the summer of 1989 the “Iron Curtain” that had divided Cold War Europe began to develop gaps and holes through which people were able to escape to the West. In the course of the early autumn, across East German towns and cities hundreds of thousands of people came out on the streets to demonstrate their disaffection with the regime. On the occasion of the GDR’s fortieth anniversary celebrations, on 7 October 1989, the Soviet Union under Gorbachev’s leadership had indicated its unwillingness to step in and shore up by force an unpopular Communist regime. On 9 October 1989, despite intense preparation and the real possibility of a bloodbath on the lines of the earlier Tiananmen Square massacre in China, the ruling East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) and its State Security Service, the Stasi, renounced the use of force and allowed a mass demonstration in Leipzig to proceed peacefully. In the face of widespread popular opposition and lacking in reliable support even among its own ranks, in the following weeks the SED itself began the process of unraveling its own grip on power. Long-time SED leader Erich Honecker was replaced by the ever-smiling Egon Krenz and, following a brief trip to Moscow from which Krenz returned apparently converted to the cause of reform, sweeping political changes were introduced. It was even an official spokesperson for the SED, Günther Schabowski, who on 9 November 1989 conveyed the momentous Politburo decision about new travel regulations, which effectively meant, as Western journalists and East Germans alike rapidly realized, that the wall would no longer serve its previous function — exercised for some twenty-seven years — of keeping East Germans inside the GDR against their will. The unification of Germany, which took place less than a year later, on 3 October 1990, was neither intended at this time, nor was it a direct outcome of this moment, yet the opening of the Berlin Wall removed the crucial precondition for the existence of an independent second German state, which could not continue to exist in face of a more affluent democracy in the west.