Tag Archives: germans

Opinion polling in occupied Germany

11 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by in Allies, Culture, Jewish life, Politics and government, postwar

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Polls are a snapshot of what people are thinking at any given time. We’ve drifted toward seeing polls as somehow predictive of how people will act, one reason polling in general has taken a hit since Brexit and Trump’s election.

But polling has been around a long time as a way to get inside the minds of groups of people. That info can be used to form policy or see the effects of policy. That’s why the US military government did a range of polling in the US zone after World War II. Batteries of questions asked Germans about their daily lives, family, work, their opinions about the allies and Germany’s occupation, and particular policies such as the dismantlement of German factories as war reparations.

If you want to read a full report of the polling, check out Public Opinion in Occupied Germany, The OMGUS Surveys from the University of Illinois Press, 1970.

One issue the Americans looked at was antisemitism.

In December 1946, the military government polled 3006 Germans in the US Zone of Germany and the US sector of Berlin. The questions floated around one main issue – What did the years of antisemitic Nazi propaganda leave in the minds of the Germans?

In general, the poll found that people with stronger antisemitic opinions tended to be less educated, from a lower socioeconomic class and less informed. They also tended to be more critical of the Allies, and thought National Socialism was basically a good idea.

The results were broken down into people with few prejudices (20%), Nationalists (19%), Racists (22%), Antisemites (21%), and strong antisemites (18%).

In other words, the numbers looked pretty awful.

To break it down, western Berlin had the lowest percentage of people classified as racists and antisemites – at 45%. Bavaria was the state with the lowest percentage – at 59%!

Women expressed stronger antisemitic opinions than men – 67% of the women versus 50% of the men.

An interesting question measured whether a person recognized that the Germans had tortured and murdered millions of innocent Europeans. 72% of people with few prejudices agreed with this, while only 41% of the racist/antisemitic people did.

Which goes to show you that there has always been a significant percentage of people who choose to believe what they want, against all evidence.

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The End

08 Friday May 2015

Posted by in 1945

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VE_Day_celebrations_on_Bay_Street_1945It’s been 70 years since the official end of WW2 in Europe. A good time to be grateful. Western Europe hasn’t seen a significant conflict on its soil in three generations. No matter what people think of terrorism, it isn’t a World War.

The Cold War wasn’t (or isn’t) fun. The threat of nuclear annihilation that influenced the second half of the 20th century was real. But those were fears, those were threats. That wasn’t a firestorm raining from the sky, or tanks rolling through towns, or child soldiers, or gas chambers. There are wars all over the world right now, but nothing like that.

Here in Germany, there’s been a lot of information about the end of the war in the media. It’s taken all those years for survivors to speak up, mostly children back then, now in their 70s and 80s. They still don’t wholly understand what they lived through. “It’s incomprehensible,” they say. It may be hard to imagine what it was  like, but we – the younger generations – need to try every once in a while. Not in the knee-jerk, finger-pointing sort of way. Those of us who live comfortably and in peace need to remember how fragile that is, and how privileged we are.

In many places, my home country for one, we’ve passed into a pseudo-peace where wars are fought in our name all over the world without us knowing what’s really going on. That’s a scary situation, and one that could lead to very bad places, as I noted in a post a couple of years ago about the Sadness of War.

But still, nothing going on today has the scale of WW2. I get the sense the Germans are immensely grateful for the peace they’ve lived since then. On a political level, they’re still aware of Germany’s responsibility to the past. That’s why the German chancellor Angela Merkel will attend ceremonies in Moscow (the former western allies won’t go, because of the Ukraine conflict). As skeptical as I am about Russian politics today, I think it’s right to honor what the Soviet Union did in WW2. It took the brunt of the fighting, and the deaths, defending their land from invasion.

In western Germany, the Americans were the real winners of WW2. 1945 started a love affair with all things American that didn’t truly break until the Iraq War. The US was the “Schutzmacht,” Germany’s protector. In the past 15 years or so, the public skepticism about the US and its interests has grown. The recent scandal about the German intelligence service spying on European interests for the Americans is fuel for the fire. The Germans are grateful for everything the US had done for them after WW2, but there are calls to move on. The ex-Schutzmacht can’t be trusted like it used to.

That leaves Germany, a central member of the European Union, trying to find its role 70 years after the catastrophe it brought upon the world. For years, international polls have shown how admired modern Germany is, and people around here tend to be slightly stunned when they learn this. They’re more used to the childish and vicious reminders of Germany’s past, like in Greece when people put a Hitler mustache on a picture of Merkel, or show her with a swastika. As if any other country in the world has dealt better with its dark past than Germany.

Photo: VE Day Celebrations on Bay Street, Canada. By John H. Boyd [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AVE_Day_celebrations_on_Bay_Street_1945.jpg