What was the effect on normal German citizens during WWII??

Question

How oblivious were they, etc.

Answer 1

it is a vague question, but I assume that you are talking about the concentration camps.

The germans, for the most part, around the concentration camps claimed that they had no knowledge of what when on in the camps.

I have to point out that there were many different styles of concentration camps and not all of them were the extermination kind.  They had worker camps and political camps too.

I have been to about 7 concentration camps surrounding Auschwitz.  There are some camps built INSIDE cities.  I saw one camp that the surrounding buildings were HIGHER than the walls of the camps and there is no doubt that the locals would be able to see everything that was happening inside.

As far as the extermination camps its harder to say.  Auschwitz is located in the country side but not too far from towns around it.  There is no way that thousands of bodies being burned would not have been able to been smelled by those around.  (I have not smelled a burning body before but I have smelt burned hair and it smells bad!)  The locals might not have known what exactly was going on in there but they had to have some idea.

Even the Poles who were being shipped out from Warsaw had heard rumors about there being extermination camps.  How could the locals not know if so many others did?

They had to know, but didn't want to fess up to it. They knew about it and did nothing to save those people.

Answer 2

I know men and women who committed suicide in Berlin during last days of the WWII. Their names were Adolf Hitler, Eva Brown, Paul Joseph Goebbels, Magda Goebbels.

Normal German citizens died in Dresden under bombs of USA and Britain. It was preparing to mass destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  

Answer 3

This question is very vague. I am going to assume by normal Germans you mean people who were not rounded up and put into concentration camps [Jews, Poles, Gypsys, Catholics, g**s, communists]

The war in Germany started when they annexed Austria in 1938. The army had been building up. The n**i's had tried to unite the people under the National Socialist banner and for the most part they believed in the "reunification" of the German lands.

Once war was declared most men were conscripted into the military in some form or another.  Hitler's goal was to create replacement soldiers so they did not put women to work in the war factories. Women were given awards for having many children and in some cases were given slave labor workers as house maids.  The factories were staffed by old men and slave labors for conquered territories.

Some German couples were given "aryan looking" children from Poland, Czechoslovakia and the USSR, to raise as good Germans.

From 1943 on they lived in the terror of constant nightly allied bombings.  Food and supplies were scarce. People living in the country and farms were better off than city dwellers.

At the end of the war the Russians were very brutal.  Some women in Berlin committed suicide in order to save themselves from falling into Russian captivity.  Many of the German soldiers captured by the Soviet Army never returned from the POW camps