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Rumors of the Holocaust: Expressing an Unspeakable Knowledge

Central European Jews rounded up for deportation from the Łódź Ghetto. From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via Muzeum Sztuki w Lodzi. Public Domain.

On September 16, 1942, the Gestapo pounded on the apartment door of Fritz Hunziker, an employee of the Swiss General Consulate in Vienna. Entering Hunziker’s home, the agents searched his belongings, arrested the man, and drove him to the Gestapo’s Vienna headquarters. There, they interrogated Hunziker about a series of allegedly treasonous activities. According to the Gestapo, Hunziker had visited an acquaintance, Dagobert Sekullic, at his riding school in the autumn of 1941. They further alleged that, at the meeting, Sekullic had handed Hunziker a letter to put in his diplomatic luggage and take to Switzerland, where, beyond the grasp of Germany’s postal censors, it could be posted to Sekullic’s cousin in the U.S.A. 

As the Gestapo argued in a report to Vienna’s Sondergericht (“Special Court”), Sekullic’s letter “contained gross misrepresentations of the German measures against the Jews.”1 Sekullic had related in his letter how his ex-wife, the “baptized Jew Maria,” was “expecting an imminent deportation to the [German-occupied] Eastern territories.” Furthermore, Sekullic had disseminated the unfounded “Greuelnachricht” (atrocity tale) that, upon deportation, “the Jews’ heads are shaved, that a ‘J’ is also burned into their wrist, that of those who have been abducted so far, not a single message has been received and that one only knows that these people endure terrible tortures until they are finally redeemed [erlöst] forever.”2 As far as the Gestapo was concerned, Sekullic’s letter was nothing more than a deliberate attempt to spread false rumors in the hope that they would  be picked up by American propagandists. Vienna’s Sondergericht, therefore, tried both Sekullic and Hunziker for “Heimtücke” (treason) on the grounds that their dissemination of “atrocity tales” represented a slanderous and dangerous “attack against the [Nazi] state and Party.”3 Sekullic was sentenced to five months in prison; Hunziker, with his diplomatic status, was extradited to Switzerland on December 12, 1942.4

Although a minor episode in the history of Nazi surveillance and terror, Hunziker’s case is illustrative of several points that are crucial to the history of knowledge under National Socialism, especially as it pertains to emergent knowledge of the Holocaust. Drawing from an ongoing research project on the history of informal communication under National Socialism,5[1] this contribution explores the role of rumor in the development and articulation of knowledge on the Holocaust as it was unfolding. As the following passages will show, the concept of “rumor” is a particularly fruitful tool for probing contemporaries’ understandings of the Holocaust. On the one hand, rumors became a vehicle for deliberating and spreading a yet uncertain knowledge, revealing nuances of what kinds of information were disseminated, received, believed, and altered. On the other hand, the salience of particular rumors can reveal the social and emotional tensions that emerged as individuals, in diverse situations, came to understand Nazi rule. In the context of repression and mass violence, rumors ultimately played a multifaceted and ambivalent role as they became a means of both conveying and obfuscating the truth of Nazi Germany’s ongoing crimes.

Across Nazi-controlled Europe, antisemitic persecution, violence, and murder occurred in broad daylight, in front of millions of people and often through their direct involvement and complicity.6 Nevertheless, this violence was seldom openly addressed. To be clear, Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels, repeatedly publicly proclaimed the Third Reich’s ultimate goal of “erasing” all Jewish life.7 However, concrete instances of antisemitic violence or murder were hardly mentioned directly by Nazi officials, who at most used euphemisms, such as “evacuation” and “special treatment” (“Sonderbehandlung”), to describe their victimization of Europe’s Jews.8 Determined to retain control over the information that spread about the atrocities they had initiated, Nazi officials drew from the Reich’s newly formulated apparatuses of surveillance and legal repression to crack down on those who spoke too openly about ongoing instances of violence and killing.9 The news that these individuals shared — even when factually true — was then discredited as mere “rumor,” the falsified fantasies of “dangerous” propagandists.

Official attempts at undermining communications on Nazi Germany’s unfolding crimes hardly shut down speculation, however. As the Hunziker case illustrates, both individuals directly targeted by antisemitic violence and those who surrounded them talked about what was happening. Due to Nazi repression and the sheer inconceivability of the scale of Nazi Germany’s crimes, these conversations often occurred in whispers, in a mode of supposition, terror, and disbelief. Rumor, here, too, became crucial. In an informational environment dominated by censorship, surveillance, propaganda, and the upending of prior social networks and certainties, rumors became a prime vehicle for collectively deliberating the realities of Nazi rule.10 Rumors transported knowledge on Nazi crimes as they were occurring, often offering very truthful depictions of what was happening to Europe’s Jews, while circumventing the Third Reich’s own propagandistic distortions and silences.

Rumors were already an important mode of communication during the early phases of the Holocaust. In October 1939, Nazi Germany began its first deportation experiments, bringing several thousand Jews from cities such as Vienna and Mährisch-Ostrau to an alleged “Jewish reservation” near Lublin, in German-occupied Poland.11 Though promised a new homestead in an autonomous “Jewish state” by the Nazi authorities, the Jewish deportees soon speculated that they were facing something more sinister. In one deportation train, headed from Hamburg to Lublin, rumors quickly circulated that Lublin spelled the Jews’ demise. As one survivor recalled in 1940, the deportees in his train carriage whispered that there would be “no Jewish state”; Lublin would rather be “a different ghetto, an all-Jewish concentration camp … a giant camp for dying.”12 Their premonitions would hold true: located in the German-occupied “General Government,” the territories around Lublin would soon form an epicenter of Nazi Germany’s “final solution.”13

Under National Socialism, rumors became a powerful tool of deliberation. As the historian Amos Goldberg has shown in relation to the Warsaw ghetto, persecuted Jews found rumors to be a central means for making sense of a terrifying situation, a way to share information crucial to survival, and a mode of sociability. However, in their tenuous relationship to an empirically verifiable “truth,” rumors acted as a double-edged sword.14 Especially as the situation for Jews grew increasingly dire — as rumors of mass deportations and killings reached them, with no real means of escape — even persons previously dedicated to sober erudition gave in to a “reenchanted world, magical thinking and delusion,” in which “information was understood not at face value but rather allegorically, as concealing a hidden, optimistic reality.” Even factually accurate news thus became subject to fabulation, providing individuals with the materials to build a “mental prison … of hope.”15 Reflecting on the availability of information on antisemitic persecution during the Holocaust, Goldberg’s conclusion is clear: “It is not that they [the Jews] lacked the information … They knew everything they needed to know in order to understand what was in store for them.” However, in their particular communicative cosmos, “rumor culture operated to misinterpret … in a positive light, in order to instill hope. It was therefore not beyond the Jews’ human capacity to imagine what was happening; rather, it was beyond their human will to imagine it.”16

Rumors played a crucial role for historical actors as they spread and deliberated information on ongoing Nazi atrocities. However, rumors also offer a powerful analytical tool for historians. On the one hand, rumors allow for explorations of the collective “mentalities” and stores of knowledge from the past; on the other, they enable new avenues of historiographical inquiry.17 Research into the relationship between rumors and emergent knowledge of the Holocaust thus has offered crucial insight into this knowledge’s tenuous, collective nature and complex emotional valencies.18 Furthermore, studies of rumor have forced us to re-evaluate what, exactly, we mean by “Holocaust knowledge.” As Alon Confino argued in A World Without Jews, in 1942, especially — when the mass killings reached a new, gruesome apex following the Wannsee Conference — “the Reich was swamped by information, rumors, tales, and anecdotes of what was happening to the Jews.” This information passed not only between party functionaries but among “simple folk with no special access to information”: everywhere, both Jews and non-Jews spoke in hushed tones of mass executions, disappearances, and “extermination centers” like Auschwitz.19 However, as Confino perspicaciously claimed, this does not mean that individuals knew “about the ‘Holocaust’ in the same way we know about it today.” What we know today as the “Holocaust” had not yet unfolded in its entirety and is the product of decades of careful historiographical reconstruction. Accordingly, any postwar quest into what contemporaries knew needs to detach itself from a retrospective, teleological conception of what the term “Holocaust” ultimately came to represent. Contemporaries, such as Germany’s non-Jewish majority, “did not know of the ‘Holocaust’, but they did know of the massive slaughter of the Jews.”20 What contemporaries could know, when they knew, and how they came to know about the Holocaust as it was unfolding is, therefore, best studied from the perspective of our historical actors — a perspective captured aptly by phenomena such as rumors.

In this context, the emotional aspects of what can be known once again become particularly significant. “Knowledge” in relation to the Holocaust was not something that occurred on a purely rational, intellectual level. Rather, as Confino has posited, “sensibilities and emotions that are crucial but cannot be expressed openly” similarly formed part and parcel of what our historical actors understood about Nazi Germany’s ongoing crimes. For Germany’s majority society, rumors became one way of speaking about “that which happened [that] could not be named.” Rumors also became an expression of guilt. For example, in 1943, as Allied bombs descended upon German cities, rumors emerged that the air raids were a form of “Jewish” retaliation for the crimes that had been committed against them.21 Far from being unknowable and unknown, Nazi atrocities against the Jews had given rise to a collective but transgressive form of knowledge expressed through the modality of rumor. For historians, antisemitic rumors about “Jewish” retaliation thus serve as “evidence in the hand … that Germans palpably sensed that something horrendously immoral was happening to the Jews.”22

What, then, is the purpose of studying rumors in relation to the Holocaust? To begin with, for our historical actors, rumors played a critical role in the articulation of a nascent understanding of the Holocaust. In an environment of surveillance, censorship, and persecution, rumors became a particularly pertinent avenue of collective deliberation, in which publicly inarticulable and previously unimaginable truths could be contemplated and conveyed. However, in their tenuous relationship to an empirically verifiable “truth,” rumors could also play an ambiguous role. Labeling truthful accounts of Nazi persecution as false “rumors” — and opening them to criminal prosecution — became one tactic by Reich officials to discredit and obfuscate uncomfortable truths about their own complicity. For those directly targeted by antisemitic persecution, moreover, rumors could be particularly duplicitous: on the one hand, a source of information crucial to their survival, rumors, on the other, also deceived, raised false hopes, and became a further instrument of discrimination.Yet, as a growing historiographical literature has shown, rumors also offer an important tool for the historian. Rumors can reveal who knew what, when, how, and from whom; they help us recreate historical actors’ own parameters for credibility and authenticity; and, in their collective dimension, they show how different societies negotiated various cadences of emergent Holocaust knowledge, beyond what we, today, identify as “the Holocaust.” Thus, analyzing rumors sheds new light not just on what, exactly, individuals knew; it also offers fresh perspectives on the social and emotional dimensions of the Holocaust as it was perpetrated, observed, experienced, communicated, and — ultimately — remembered by myriad societies under Nazi rule.

Caroline Mezger is a historian at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ) in Munich, as well as a recent Visiting Research Scholar at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. Since 2019, she has led the Leibniz Junior Research Group project “‘Man hört, man spricht’: Informal Communication and Information ‘From Below’ in Nazi Europe” (INFOCOM). In September 2025, she will assume a new position as Maîtresse de conférences (Associate Professor) at the EHESS in Paris.

  1. On the Nazi “Sondergerichte” and their prosecution of “treasonous” utterances, see Annemone Christians, Das Private vor Gericht: Verhandlungen des Eigenen in der nationalsozialistischen Rechtspraxis (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2020), 241, 247–49.[]
  2. Letter from Gestapo Vienna to Sondergericht Vienna, “Fritz Hunziker … Anzeige wegen Vergehens gegen das HG. und die Verordnung über den Nachrichtenverkehr” (28.9.1942), 1–2, Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes [DÖW] 17496.[]
  3. Letter (28.9.1942), 1–2. On the Heimtücke laws of 1934, see Christians, Das Private vor Gericht, 247.[]
  4. Letter from Gestapo Vienna to Sondergericht Vienna (14 Dec. 1942), DÖW 17496.[]
  5. Since 2019, I have been leading the research project “‘Man hört, man spricht’: Informal Communication and Information ‘From Below’ in Nazi Europe” (INFOCOM), funded by the Leibniz Association, project number J47/2018. This contribution draws from my own ongoing book project, tentatively titled Rumor and Displacement: A History of Forced Migration under the Third Reich, 1938–1948.[]
  6. The precise circumstances varied depending on the particular context of Nazi rule and occupation. See, for instance, Gaëlle Fisher and Caroline Mezger, “Introduction – The Holocaust in the Borderlands: Interethnic Relations and the Dynamics of Violence in Occupied Eastern Europe,” European Holocaust Studies 2 (2019): 15–20.[]
  7. See, for instance, Joseph Goebbels on “the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe,” in “Die Juden sind schuld!,” Das Reich (16 Nov. 1941).[]
  8. On “veiled” and “concealed” communication under Nazism, see the fascinating study by Iris Forster, Euphemistische Sprache im Nationalsozialismus: Schichten, Funktionen, Intensität (Bremen: Hempen, 2009), 46–49.[]
  9. On these apparatuses, see Caroline Mezger, “Informelle Kommunikation im nationalsozialistischen Europa: Vigilanz, Unsicherheit und die Aushandlung gesellschaftlicher Wahrheiten, 1939–1945,” Mitteilungen des SFB 1369 Vigilanzkulturen 5, no. 2 (2024): 10–119.[]
  10. On this premise, see Caroline Mezger, “‘Man hört, man spricht’: Informal Communication and Information ‘From Below’ in Nazi Europe” (INFOCOM) – Ein neues Forschungsprojekt des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 68, no. 3 (2020): 481–90.[]
  11. On this “Nisko project,” see Andrea Löw, “Hilferufe aus dem besetzten Polen: Briefe deportierter Wiener Juden vom Herbst 1939 bis zum Frühjahr 1940,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 60, no. 4 (2012): 603–33; Jonny Moser, Nisko: Die ersten Judendeportationen (Vienna: Edition Steinbauer, 2012).[]
  12. Essay by M. Moldwaer, quoted in Winfried R. Garscha, “Achtzig Jahre Ungewissheit: Die Nisko-Aktion 1939 und ihre verschollenen Opfer,” in Nisko 1939: Die Schicksale der Juden aus Wien, ed. Christine Schindler (Vienna: Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, 2020), 30.[]
  13. The Persecution and Murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1933–1945, Volume 9: Poland: General Government August 1941–1945, ed. Klaus-Peter Friedrich (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldernbourg, 2024).[]
  14. My research rests on the premise that rumors’ contents may be empirically “true” or “false”; however, they spread because they reflect, at a very minimum, a certain historical or social “truth.” See Caroline Mezger, “Rumor and Displacement: Informal Communication, Propaganda, and the 1939 ‘Option’ in South Tyrol,” The Journal of Modern History 96, no. 1 (2024): 124.[]
  15. Amos Goldberg, “Rumor Culture among Warsaw Jews under Nazi Occupation: A World of Catastrophe Reenchanted,” Jewish Social Studies 21, no. 3 (2016): 113–15.[]
  16. Goldberg, “Rumor Culture,” 113–14.[]
  17. On this, see the classic text by Marc Bloch, “Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre,” Revue de synthèse historique 7 (1921): 13–35.[]
  18. Consider Goldberg, “Rumor Culture.”[]
  19. Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 218–19. Confino here cites sources such as Victor Klemperer’s diary. []
  20. Confino, A World Without Jews, 219.[]
  21. Confino, A World Without Jews, 221. Also see: Monica Black, A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020), 22–23.[]
  22. Confino, A World Without Jews, 222.[]

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Caroline Mezger (August 18, 2025). Rumors of the Holocaust: Expressing an Unspeakable Knowledge. History of Knowledge. Retrieved November 7, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14hhc


Caroline Mezger

Caroline Mezger is a historian at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ) in Munich, as well as a recent Visiting Research Scholar at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. Since 2019, she has led the Leibniz Junior Research Group project “‘Man hört, man spricht’: Informal Communication and Information ‘From Below’ in Nazi Europe” (INFOCOM). In September 2025, she will assume a new position as Maîtresse de conférences (Associate Professor) at the EHESS in Paris.

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