Given the nature and the scale of the work of the Einsatzgruppen, it was inevitable that the mass murder of Jews in the East would become known amongst the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, even if only a minority of them may have actually witnessed the killings. News of such events would inevitably filter back home to Germany, either in soldiers’ letters or when they returned on leave.
On 28th October Friedrich Kellner, a government employee in the district court at Laubach, western Germany, recorded in his diary1:
A soldier on vacation here said he witnessed a terrible atrocity in the occupied parts of Poland.