None of the authors uses that conclusion to render easy moral judgments, nor to argue that the population fervently embraced the regime’s lethal anti-Semitism (pace Daniel Goldhagen’s now largely discredited Hitler’s Willing Executioners). But both indirectly and explicitly, these books make clear that just as the Final Solution itself is now understood to inform so many aspects of Nazi Germany, so too the Germans’ knowledge of the murder of the Jews influenced and altered the history of the Third Reich and the war it started.

Three decades of scholarship (a good deal of it undertaken by Kershaw, as well as by the historian David Bankier, in his innovative study The Germans and the Final Solution) reveal that from the very onset of the war, it was impossible not to know the Jews’ fate. Soldiers and officers wrote home of mass shootings (one letter explicitly details the massacre of 30,000 Jews in a single town), and when they returned on leave, they spoke of the murders in private and in public. Reports of the killing squads, which detailed the number of murders, were routinely routed to midlevel bureaucrats in various departments in Berlin. The “White Rose” student resistance movement in Munich declared in its 1942 manifesto that 300,000 Jews had been killed in Poland, a crime “unparalleled in the whole of history.” News of Auschwitz—the death camp within the borders of the expanded German state, exchange 2258 on the German telephone system—reached the diarist Victor Klemperer in March 1942, and by that October he was describing it as “a swift-working slaughter-house”; another diarist recorded hearing an official of the SS security service on a suburban train brag about the number of victims killed at that camp every week. When the BBC beamed detailed descriptions of the workings of the death camps to Germany in 1942, the Viennese diarist Ludwig Haydn said that “with regard to the mass murder of Jews, the broadcast merely confirms what we know here anyhow.”

The Final Solution, too vast in scale and scope to be comprehended fully, was also too vast to be kept secret, as Evans explains:

Railway timetable clerks, engine drivers and train drivers and other staff on stations and in goods yards could all identify the trains and knew where they were going. Policemen rounding up the Jews or dealing with their files or their property knew as well. Housing officials who reassigned the Jews’ dwellings to Germans, administrators who dealt with the Jews’ property—the list was almost endless … The mass murder of the Jews thus became a kind of open secret in Germany from the end of 1942 at the very latest.

Summing up the evidence he has weighed and sifted for 30 years, Kershaw concludes:

Hard information, not just vague rumor, was being brought back to the Reich and was available. Its extent was considerable, the information itself often impressive in its detail. Only those anxious to shut their ears … could have been utterly ignorant. And only the willfully ignorant could have imagined a drastically different fate for the Jews than was actually in store for them.

Germans responded to this knowledge in various but all-too-predictable ways. True, Nazi rule had penetrated and altered popular attitudes, so by 1939 most Germans believed that Jews should be segregated or removed from the “folk community.” But the anti-Semitism of most Germans stopped far short of genocide—only a small minority overtly approved of the Nazis’ war against the Jews. Of course, an even smaller number publicly condemned Nazi policy and were prepared to help the Jews: whatever their private feelings, most Germans responded outwardly with indifference, and with an attitude nicely characterized by Bankier as knowing “enough to know that it was better not to know more.” Although certainly not a commendable stance, it’s hardly surprising. For one thing, as Kershaw writes, “the vast majority of Germans had plenty of other things on their mind.” The Final Solution reached its height just as Germany’s military fortunes began to ebb. Severe wartime privations, ever-mounting death tolls, growing anxiety about the fate of loved ones engaged in a savage and increasingly desperate struggle on an ever-retreating Eastern Front, the disintegration of everyday life caused by an ever-intensifying Allied bombing offensive against Germany’s cities—all crimped human empathy, to say nothing of collective action.