Abbie Hookey
Why do these sources seem to show conflicting evidence about the attitude of the German people to Nazi policies towards the Jews?
Sources L and M show contrasting evidence about the attitude of the German people to Nazi polices towards the Jews.
Source L is a short section from a book of memoirs, which is a book of memories written by Trudi Eulenburg. In this source Trudi Eulenburg describes how she and her family were treated because they were Jewish and how all of her family and friends didn’t speak or care to know her. She also tells us that no one had any sympathy for them even though none of this was there fault. This source shows us that Trudi Eulenburg believed that all the German people were anti-Semitic and were very easily influenced by the propaganda and lies which was being spread throughout Germany. The Germans believed that the Jewish people were to blame for all the poverty, all the failures and basically anything bad that had happened in Germany since the end of the First World War in 1919. There are many reasons why Trudi Eulenburg felt like this and one of the reasons is because the brownshirts and normal none Jewish German citizens went round smashing shops windows that belonged to Jews, in her case however her and her fathers shop was left alone but when they arrived there they were told they could never return to the shop and was to sell all the items at whatever price the buyer offered. Secondly the Germans were lead to believe that the Jews were nothing but people who robbed Germany of there money jobs, education and they were set out the destroy Germany. There are a number of reasons why this source may be a bit unreliable, for example Trudi Eulenburg is going to be bias because of how she was treated by the Nazis and the non Jewish, German society and she would most likely only right about them being horrible and how she was mistreated. So when writing the book she will miss out some of the nice bits because if she wrote a book on the Nazis being nice it wouldn’t make as much money whereas if she writes a book on them mistreating the Jewish people it will make more money. Another reason why this source is unreliable is because it was published in the early 1980’s which is nearly 40 years after the events had happened and she may have forgotten certain details or exaggerated some of the details to once again make more money in increased sales.
