In his address from the broadcast series Deutsche Hörer! of 27 September 1942, the émigré writer Thomas Mann took a stand against the Nazi atrocities against the European Jews. With surprising openness, he described the extermination plans of the German rulers, the implementation of which he regarded as being in full motion. He stated that a precise and authentic report had been received about the killing of some 11.000 Polish Jews using lethal gas. It also stated, Mann continued, that the victims were taken to a special execution field near Konin in the Warsaw district, placed in air-tight cars and turned into corpses within a quarter of an hour. The killing methods and victim numbers he mentioned provide an impression of what was possible for people with open eyes to find out even from the far remove of foreign exile. The Holocaust had transitioned from being a seemingly rhetorical posture by the Nazi state into a reality executed with industrial perfidiousness.

Faced with this knowledge, the Nobel laureate, who saw himself as a representative of the true German cultural and intellectual tradition, reacted with horror: “And you Germans wonder why, with indignation even, the civilised world is considering with what remedial methods these German generations, whose brains have been formed by Nazism, these morally vacuous and malformed killers, can be made into human beings?”