Deportation of Jews as residents in Eisenach look on, Eisenach, 9 May 1942

The deportations of the Jews

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In Eisenach in 1942, the Nazis marched Jews from the town through the streets. It was just nine years after the the Nazis came to power. Since then, the broad German society had willing backed many of the Nazi regime’s major and minor changes needed to push forwards their persecution of minorities.

Large sections of the German population had wanted, elected and supported the Nazi regime. Historians have characterised the Third Reich as a ‘dictatorship of consent’, built on broad mass support.

Certainly not all those cheering Hitler – for example, the enthusiastic members of the Hitler Youth – may have fully known and shared the aims of the Nazi regime’s policies of persecution and mass murder. Similarly, the profiteers, enriching themselves with the possessions of those expropriated and deported, need not necessarily have also wanted their mass murder. Nonetheless, anyone aware of events in their own surroundings, reading the newspapers and attentively following what Hitler said in his speeches could also have known that Jews were being murdered.