Nacht Und Nebel - Rationale

Rationale

The reasons for Nacht und Nebel were many:

• The program made it far more difficult for other governments or humanitarian organizations to accuse the German government of specific misconduct because it obscured whether or not internment or death had even occurred, let alone the cause of that internment or death. It thereby kept the Nazis from being held accountable.
• It allowed across-the-board, silent defiance of international treaties and conventions: one cannot apply the limits and terms of humane treatment in war if one cannot locate a victim or discern that victim's fate.
• Additionally, it lessened German subjects' moral qualms about the Nazi regime, as well as their desire to speak out against it, by keeping the general public ignorant of the regime's malfeasance and by creating extreme pressure for service members to remain silent.

The German Gestapo had a decree, “Nacht und Nebel,” which means “Night and Fog.” This policy, enforced in the occupied countries, meant that whenever someone was arrested, the family would learn nothing about their fate. The persons arrested, sometimes only suspected resistors, were secretly sent to Germany and perhaps to a concentration camp. Whether they lived or died, the Germans would give out no information to the families of the suspects. This was done to enhance the avoidance of arrest and to keep the populations quiet out of an atmosphere of mysterious terror and fear.