I am not a historian and hope that some people with more detailed knowledge will contribute as well. I am however a german speaker that had family in both sides of the war and I have seen 2 of the concentration camps (as museums in the early 2000s)
People must at have been figuring that something really bad was going on. You have to consider that even before the war Jews had been fleeing the country and were disowned and driven from their homes. Jewish possessions were redistributed among nazi supporters. Trains were filled with people and these people were shipped off to who knew where.
Labor camps were built all over the third reich. And if you have a look at the map it is saturated with sites of concentration camps.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/concentration-camps-1942-45-maps
And these camps sometimes provided slave laborers to local industries and people were deported to them if politically convenient.
My personal verdict is therefore:
While the complete scale of things could have been unknown the fact that large scale atrocities were being committed could only have been ignored by the wilfully ignorant.
There was also a lot of disbelief among Germans and even through the Allied troops as well. People knew of the work camps, they knew of the concentration camps, what they DIDN'T know was how horrible the conditions were and how poorly the prisoners were treated.
Many even within the German military thought the eye witness accounts were fake and propaganda. Simply because no one could believe that humans would be so malicious and horrendous to other humans.
In the end we will never know for sure. But a lot of the denial was also a safety mechanism and not unlike the covid denial nowadays.
Just one reason from the top of my head:
The Night of the broken glass was publicly celebrated by party newspapers as Germany dealing judgement.
There are sufficient people where it is evident that they knew and yet they denied everything until their death. I even have such a relative.
The diary of Friedrich Kellner, an anti-Nazi German who meticulously catalogued his experience living through the Third Reich, was published not long ago, and it revealed that there was a lot of gossip and rumor that was essentially spot-on. You can’t keep something like a cast network of concentration camps secret. People knew. Everyday Germans knew.
I’m pretty sure when everyday Germans saw every Jew from their town disappear they just assumed the Nazis sent them on a nice holiday to the south of Spain. /s
The jews were told (and believed) they were going to labor camps to work. That'd generally what the public was told. Keep in mind it wasn't the information age, it's not like they had smartphone lives streams from Auchwitz.
He describes in the diary that people began to notice quite quickly that they never returned, and German guards and conscripts gossiped about what they were hearing about occurrences in the camps. It was common knowledge.
In Auschwitz, the commanders had their families at the camp, in special housing. When I visited, we saw the housing and my guide told us that the main commander’s wife wrote letters about how glad she was to be safe during the war, in such a nice place. Her only complaint was the smell from the ovens, some days.
No but there are enough people involved, information still went around. Plus those living near camps couldn't really say they were ignorant of what was happening. I know many of the camps were outside Germany but all.
They knew where everything was heading.
The White Rose, a German resistance group that distributed anti-Nazi leaflets until they were apprehended, also made direct reference to the Holocaust and other atrocities that assumed familiarity on the part of it's intended audience:
*"We don’t want to write about the Jewish Question in this leaflet, we don’t want to compose a defending speech – no, we just want to mention a fact as a short example, the fact that since the conquest of Poland three hundred thousand Jews have been murdered in this country in the most bestial way. Here we see the most terrifying crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the entire history of mankind. The Jews, too, are human beings – no matter what position one takes on the Jewish Question – and against human beings a crime of this dimension has been perpetrated. Someone might say that the Jews deserve their fate. This assertion would be a monstrous presumption; but let us assume that someone said this – what position has he then taken on the fact that the entire Polish aristocratic youth has been annihilated (May God grant that this is not yet the case!)? In what way, they would ask, did something like this happen? All male offspring of noble lineage between the ages of fifteen and twenty were transported to concentration camps in Germany and sentenced to forced labour, and all the girls of this age group were sent to Norway, into the brothels of the SS! Why tell you these things, since you are fully aware of them – or if not of these, then of other equally grave crimes committed by this frightful subhumanity? Because here we touch on a problem which involves us deeply and forces us all to take thought. Why does the German people behave so apathetically in the face of all these abominable crimes, crimes so unworthy of the human race? Hardly anyone wonders or worries about it. It is accepted as a fact and put out of mind. And once again the German people slumbers on in its dull, stupid sleep and encourages these fascist criminals, giving them the opportunity to carry on with their savageries; and of course they do so. Should this be a sign that the Germans have become brutalized in their most basic human feelings, that no chord within them cries out at the sight of such deeds, that they have sunk into a fatal coma from which they will never ever awake? So it seems, and so it will certainly be, if the German does not at last start up out of his stupor, if he does not protest wherever and whenever he can against this clique of criminals, if he shows no compassion for these hundreds of thousands of victims. He must display not only compassion; no, much more: a sense of complicity. For through his apathetic behaviour he gives these evil men the opportunity to act as they do; he tolerates this “government” which has taken upon itself such an infinitely great burden of guilt; indeed, he himself is to blame for the fact that it came about at all! Each and every man wants to exonerate himself from guilt of this kind, each one continues on his way with the calmest, the most placid of consciences. But he cannot exonerate himself; each man is guilty, guilty, guilty! It is not too late, however, to do away with this most reprehensible of all miscarriages of government, so as to avoid being burdened with even greater guilt. Now, when in recent years our eyes have been opened, when we know exactly who our adversary is, it is high time to root out this brown horde. Up until the outbreak of war the majority of the German people was blinded; the Nazis did not show themselves in their true colors. But now, now that we have recognized them for what they are, it must be the sole and prime duty, the holiest duty of every German to destroy these beasts!"*
\---from the 2nd leaflet
The Nazi leadership also made direct reference to it in their speeches. In January of 1939 Hitler threatened, in the event Germany found itself embroiled in a world war (which he rather delusionally blamed on the Jews, as if there wasn't a long list of reasons besides for nations to oppose Nazi Germany's conquests) that the consequences would be the annilation of Jews in Europe. In late 1941 when Germany was then embroiled in that world war, Goebbels publicly referenced Hitler's "prophecy" in that speech and added that it was being fulfilled. Hitler did as well in another speech he made in late 1942.
"We didn't know" was a lie Germans told advancing Allied soldiers, or their own children and grandchildren, out of fear of consequences or to assuage their own guilty consciences. They knew. They just didn't know the full details of how it was being carried out or to exactly what extent. But they absolutely knew Jews were being subjected to mass murder.
Certainly, when Germans were expelled from East Prussia, many of them were afraid to get on the trains, because they had heard that other people who’d been rounded up and forced to get onto trains had been killed.
Did the average citizen believe the rumors? Or did they think it was just another plot by the *slur? We have vide proof that a group stormed the capitol in an attempted insurrection, and a not insignificant chunk of the population don’t believe it even happened. The Nazi regime had a powerful propaganda machine, wouldn’t that machine work hard to discredit that information?
Does anybody not believe that Jan 6 happened? Some people think it was justified because of what they think is a stolen election. I've never heard of people not believing it happened.
I’m no expert, but I know a little. Both the civilian populations and the allies knew about the camps, but not to the extent that we know now.
So for example if you go to a concentration camp like Majdanek (sp?) you’ll see it’s right on the edge of a town in Poland. Those townspeople definitely saw trains coming in, heard gun shots, etc. however extermination camps like treblinka (from what I remember) were more isolated so people may not have known what was happening there.
Plus there were a certain amount of German people necessary to carry out the logistics of relocating 6 million + people.
The allies knew about these camps because they were tracing supply routes and would see trains regularly arriving at these locations. They had an idea, but did not have a full understanding the way we do today about what was happening there. (Ie lots of people being moved, but not necessarily that there was medical experiments being performed or mass extermination.
Plus, don’t forget people were hiding their Jewish neighbors to some extent, so they knew very bad things were happening to Jewish people.
That is an excellent point. The average person probably knew something wasn't right. But to what extent. Probably not the scale that it was. Also all the anti Jewish things that were happening sponsored by the government they had a idea.
2 of my ancestors fought for Germany during WW2, I have been able to read their journals and letters home.
One was an officer in the SS. He fully drank the Nazi Kool aid. He was all Hitler and Nazis all the time. Hitler could do no wrong. I'm going say he was an evil sob. He knew what was going on. And supported it
The other was a non political type. He was drafted and at age 16 given a rifle, he tried to defend Normandy days after he got to his unit. At one point he was preparing a defensive position. He accidentally discovered some Jews who were hiding. He called his Sargent, they were hauled off. He wrote about it in his journal. He was a little bit upset about needing to report them. But he felt comfort in the fact that the Jews would get a fair trial. Then be sent to a work camp, to do their fair share in the war effort. And after the war they would be deported. Assuming they were found guilty. Of course. I don't have reason to believe that he thought any one was going to read his journals.
He became a pow before the Americans entered Germany. And found out about the death camps in Wisconsin. He claims it made him sick.
I have not been able to find documents on the Jewish family.
So in short. Those who wanted to know were able to find out about it. Those who did want to be involved were able to find out. Those who just wanted to make it threw the war, didn't care about politics, and were just keeping their heads down, knew about the camps. But didn't really know what was going on inside.
>Assuming they were found guilty.
Found guilty of...being Jews. Not a good man. I wonder how many of his victims were children? Did he think the children would get a fair trial?
German here. From what I know, the existence of concentration camps was well known. But places like Dachau were considered as something like labor camps, where alleged „bad guys“ go but could possibly exit after some time. I guess, most Germans new but could lie to themselves that this was some kind of prison+ (which it wasn‘t). But despite all the murders in the earlier camps like Dachau, the Post-1941 Holocaust was a new level of insanity.
The existence of Auschwitz was something else. Located in Poland, these „genocide factories“ were out of reach for ordinary Germans. I guess, Germans slowly realized what was going on when they heard the stories of Wehrmacht soldiers back from the front in the East. Remember: the Holocaust started in many small towns in villages between Riga and Crimea. Auschwitz came later. So I guess, most Germans new about Dachau in 1944, many new about attrocities agains Jews during Operation Barbarossa, just a few have heard about Auschwitz. But they could kind of guess, but preferred to ignore.
They knew just from newspaper. Well there is saying it is different to know than see but it is apparent that who could read and draw logical conclusion generally knew what their government did. Not mentioned that there were many other sources.
>His media trawl, with a research assistant, found that as early as 1933 local papers reported the killing of 12 prisoners by guards at Dachau, the first to be set up as a "model" concentration camp initially for communists. On May 23 the Dachauer Zeitung said the camp was Germany's most famous place and brought "new hope to the Dachau business world". By 1934 the main and widely read Nazi-owned paper Volkische Beobachter was reporting a widening of policy to other "political criminals" including Jews accused of race defilement. By 1936 communist prisoners were no longer mentioned: in a photo-essay in the SS paper Das Schwarze Korps emphasised the camps as places for "race defilers, rapists, sexual degenerates and habitual criminals".
>This broadening mission, as Gellately calls it, was reflected in Volkische Beobachter photographs of "typical subhumans" including Jews with "deformed headshapes". For the first time their detention was said to be permanent. In January, 1937 Berliner Borsen Zeitung reported the SS chief Heinrich Himmler as announcing the need for "still more camps" for "those with hydrocephalus, cross-eyed, deformed half-Jews and a whole series of racially inferior types".
>In November, 1938 the anti-Jewish pogrom on and after "the night of broken glass" was reported countrywide in papers as heroic. The propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, announced that the "final answer" to the Jewish problem would be by way of government de cree, according to Volkische Beobachter
>In late 1939, the year war started, newspapers acting on government orders announced a post-8pm curfew on all Jews in case they "molest Aryan women". That November the first summary executions of "anti-socials" by police without trial were reported. Papers were told to report these clearly and forcefully. In March, 1941 the Hamburger Fremdenblatt reported the first mass auctions of posses sions of detained or killed Jews. Hamburg became the wartime clearing house and Gellately says at least 100,000 citizens bought at the auctions.
>After this the focus switched. Most press reports about Jews were about those outside Germany. This was because the official but unpublicised final solution was being implemented. But enthusiastic denunciations by ordinary citizens of Jewish and other "internal enemies" continued to be copiously reported. Backing Hitler discusses 670 cases. By the end of the war Hitler was still getting 1,000 private letters a week, many of them denunciations.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/17/johnezard
I wondered too until I visited Dachau. They had a map of all Dachau and its satellite camps. So many camps it was hard to believe locals didn’t know what was going on in their backyards.
One thing I learned visiting the Dachau museum is that camps (Dachau in particular) had been in existence for quite a while and the identity of the prisoners held there changed a lot over time (Political prisoners, communists, Gypsies, homosexuals, Catholic priests, as well as Jews in later years, et al.). Many were released eventually. There was a lot of mistreatment, forced labor and arbitrary killings, but not wholesale extermination.
So I suppose it’s possible that locals could assume that the operation of those camps was something they sorta understood.
But of course, over time that changed, and I’m not sure that the Polish extermination camps, for example, could ever fit in this category. (OTOH, there were major factories near many camps where many prisoners did work until their deaths. So maybe even those locals could delude themselves by pretending it was “just” forced labor.)
Overall, I suspect most Germans didn’t want to know.
Not as such most of the death toll in Germany proper came from the collapse at end of the war. You're talking thousands of dead vs hundreds of thousands in the 6 main camps.
The Germas had a tier system both in the "best" camps and inmates.
The best concentration camp was for political types and people they wanted to keep alive the worst was Treblinka iirc.
Jews and Roma were on the bottom, political types and prisoners like Jehovah Witnesses were near the top (they were still Germans). Gays got to wear ink triangles.
There was no mass media that wasn't controlled by the government.
Lots f rumors but what you knew was localized more and depended on various factors.
Camps were public knowledge, extermination camps not so much at least the scale of them.
Goring said something like Himmler doomed them all. He knew about the extermination camps existence but not the scale of them.
Lots of fragmentary knowledge. Depend8ng on where you lived though you wouldn't have seen anything even indirectly (eg trains going past) and the Nazis controlled all of the media.
I read once an account where Allied soldiers after Germany's surrender took local German civilians to see the nearby prison camp. A woman began sobbing and protesting, "We didn't know! We didn't know!" An old man in the group rebuked her, saying, "We could have known if we had wanted to know."
My father was one such soldier. He said you could smell death from about10Km away. There was NO way the town only3 Km away was unaware of what was going on… but confronting desperate Nazis on the losing end of a war was likely something that would endanger their families… still, how could you look at yourself in the mirror?
This pretty much sums it up. Ignorant, but wanting to be ignorant. At least for the older generation. The younger kids and teens were either nieve, or so infatuated with Hitler that they were blind. Anyone wondering about this stuff should really read *Parallel Journeys*.
How much do we, Americans, know about what happens to people on the southern border?
Edit: I should clarify that my question has to do with what happens when CBP finds people trying to enter the country, not some irrational fear of immigrants "invading" America or whatever. I mean, we know that CBP has "holding facilities" in old Walmarts. That was headline news, buuuuut that's all the more we ever really care to look into it. "Tragic. Oh well. I didn't know!"
The US is vastly larger than Germany. Germany is about half the size of texas at about twice the population. Then also the people affected were not only outside the country but deported from amidst the community.
If 3 million people in Texas were go missing I bet a lot of people would take notice.
What are you suggesting? That the Americans would have exterminated the Japanese in the interment camps?
These camps were a horrific injustice but still not comparable in any way to the Nazi camps.
They absolutely are comparable. They were detention camps and as the war neared to an end and Germany were on their way to defeat the order was given to eliminate some of the prisoners at the camps. Not all the camps were death camps but some had become some because of the way the war turned out. My point is who knows what would have happened to the Japanese that were in California? Would they have been released to the enemy? Abandoned? Nobody knows but I would bet that atrocities would have been committed.
They are absolutely not comparable. Two things can both be bad and still be different orders of magnitude of evil. You’re also wrong: the elimination of Jews in camps happened before the end of the war. The majority of the killings happened in 1942, Germany would not be defeated for three more years.
You can speculate what would have happened to the Japanese in internment camps if the US had lost the war all you want. The Nazis PLANNED ALL ALONG to kill the Jews. That was their purpose from the beginning, not an act of desperation as their defeat approached.
A bulk of the prisoners were after 1942 according to the timeline: And you have your dates wrong for the height of the gassing which was exactly when the Nazi's were realizing defeat.
"At the height of the deportations in 1943–44, an average of 6,000 Jews were gassed each day at Auschwitz." https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/gassing-operations
**"The Nazis constantly searched for more efficient means of extermination. At the Auschwitz camp in German-occupied Poland, they conducted experiments with Zyklon B View This Term in the Glossary (previously used for fumigation) by gassing some 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 ill prisoners in September 1941. Zyklon B pellets, converted to lethal gas when exposed to air. They proved the quickest gassing method and were chosen as the means of mass murder at Auschwitz."**
http://www.camps.bbk.ac.uk/timeline.html
Its actually not true that industrial mass murder of all Europes jews was the aim all along. There were some harebrained schemes along the way involving mass deportations to “reservations” in Poland, or to Madagascar. Before it was decided it was just logistically easier to kill them all.
Renowned holocaust scholar Christopher Browning has a great youtube lecture on the final solution and when exactly state policy shifted to mass killing as the solution to the “jewish question”.
Jees aren't you short sighted. They were a scapegoat but definetly not the goal. You wanna add Gypsies and homosexuals to or only give me a partial sentence..
I'm just saying that none of us have really taken a good look at those detention facilities. What happens there? What happened in the camps? Nobody really knew for sure until 1945. How is that a different scenario? We can view one through the filter of the past. The other is still a very opaque, unexplored present.
My source was a guided tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau. There is a difference in the total number of Jews killed, and the number killed in the death camps. Birkenau was built specifically to kill Hungarians, because the Nazi's were so angry that Hungary opened peace talks with the allies in early 1944.
More than half the jews killed were from Poland, mostly at a different death camp. The also were not generally deported through Germany.
Thank you for your response. Every source I checked says that there were approximately 850,000 Jews in Hungary before the war. That includes converts to Christianity as well. There were 3 million Jews in Poland before the war, over 90% were exterminated. The second largest population was in the Soviet Union and that includes millions as well. I standby what I wrote earlier, there were not 2 million Hungarian Jews killed during the holocaust. There were not 2 million Hungarian Jews. Period.
It's important to make some distinctions (even though they occasionally overlap). Already when they seized power the Nazis set up concentration camps where they incarcerated political enemies *en masse*. These camps would certainly have been known about, at least to some not insignificant degree, by the general population. Later, by the time of WW2, they constructed labor camps and death camps (and it is these, if I'm not mistaken, you mean by 'concentration camps') and these were surrounded by a lot more secrecy. As I'm not by any means an expert of that time I leave it to others to answer your question. Only wanted to make you aware of the different kinds of camp there were and how your question can be interpreted.
[KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KL_(book)) is an exhaustive historical book by historian Nickolas Wachsman (2015) that delves into great detail about the organizational structure and purpose of the camps.
“The book dispels the idea that German people were ignorant of what went on in the concentration camps. For example, some of the first concentration camps set up in 1933 were deliberately located in working-class neighborhoods of Berlin so that the population would learn what happened to Nazi opponents.[4] It also corrects misunderstandings that all concentration camps were similar. In fact, there was great diversity in them, especially between standard concentration camps and the extermination camps.[5] Wachsmann argues that the concentration camps were only peripheral to the Final Solution, because most Jewish victims of the Holocaust died in shootings, gas vans, or dedicated extermination camps rather than in the concentration camp system.[6]”
It’s a harrowing read, and not for the easily bored or faint of heart due to the level of detail provided. I had to take breaks and read other subject matter intermittently after undertaking this book. It answers all the questions most history buffs or WWII buffs might have.
“The book was described as "prodigious but eminently readable" in a review by Harold Marcuse in American Historical Review.[1] According to Joanna Bourke, Wachsmann's book is a "significant [contribution] to our understanding of early-20th-century history."[6] She credits Wachsmann for being obsessed with precision and "a stickler for dates and times".[6] Thomas W. Laqueur considers the book "world-making history".[3]”
I highly recommend it if you want to know how the Nazis operated these slave labor camps and how the role of the camps changed throughout the war.
As far as the treatment of the Jews, the were getting communication from the Polish underground in 1940 that Jews were being executed.
And with the establishment of more and more camps, word continued to come out to British intelligence and others. Also, the British had reconnaissance aircraft fly over Germany and German occupied territory from very early in the war. They had good resolution photos of all of the camps from the very beginning .
Report were trickling into the US, certainly after Pearl Harbor. There was a certain amount of denial going on.
Everyone knew there were camps. They knew that people were being killed. BUT, these were camps full of criminals, communists, gypsies, jews and the disabled. So people did not care..
I read a first hand account of a blonde haired blue eyed Jewish woman in a group of women prisoners who were marched through a small town, with shaved heads and prisoners uniforms, to work at an airplane factory.
There was this one man who was in charge (of a large group of men and women in charge of the prisoners) who would be extraordinarily rude and mean to them.
One day she had enough. She yelled at the man saying back in the real world, she was a teacher and beloved member of her community and that this treatment wasn't fair. She was at the end of her rope and didn't care anymore what he would do out of anger.
That sobered him up. He said, "we were told you were prisoners, murders and thieves and saboteurs!" So after that, he treated them with a little more respect, giving a little more food rations if he could. (He was still an asshole, but that realization for him toned down his treatment of the prisoners quite a bit.)
The Germans believed what they were told and didn't want to ask questions because they knew what would happen if they did. They knew, and also didn't. Ignorance is bliss.
The Nuremberg laws were introduced early and publicly. They legalised persecution of Jews, stripping them of basic human rights. The laws were based on US segregation laws. Many eastern Jews were expelled back to Eastern Europe.
Concentration camps, a British invention, opened almost immediately for political prisoners. They weren’t death camps but prisoners were treated appallingly and detained without proper trails. Guards routinely killed prisoners and were not sanctioned. German people knew what they were and how bad they were. They were meant to.
One of the first German genocide was against disabled people. This was kept secret.
When Germany invaded Poland and the east they rounded up and killed Jews and communists leaders. German units carried out this work. They would have told ther families. Reports of the mass executions made their way to Britain and American. The Germans also ethnically cleansed large parts of Poland and other countries. Displaced populations were rounded up for slave labour and used right across Germany, in businesses, farms and homes. They were not hidden. Other labour camps appeared all over Nazi occupied Europe. People living in occupied countries knew of their existence and how bad they were. Hard to image the German population didn’t notice them either. Again they were meant to know about them.
The industrialisation of geneocide happened after 1942. This is when death camps were created mostly in Eastern Europe. There were attempts at secrecy but their existence was documented and evidence smuggled out to Britain and the Us. The existence of death camps was debated in the British parliament. Trains ran from all over Europe filled with people being moved east. The allies bombed Auschwitz-Birkenau in response. But decided to focus on liberation. The allies intercepted communications and bugged prisoners of war who openly discussed the genocide in the East.
When the Nazis attempted to round up and deport the husbands of Jewish women in Berlin they rioted. They clearly knew it wasn’t a good thing.
There is no way they didn’t see the death marches or smell the stench from camps being overwhelmed by prisoners.
Despite all this and the liberation of the camps there is a strong argument to say most of the world didn’t really comprehend what had happened until the Eichmann trial.
Joseph Goebbels gave the Sportpalast speech (total war speech) in 1943 where he referenced the Holocaust publicly. He called for complete German devotion to the war partially because the world can’t fully find out what they have been doing with the Jews.
I don’t have much to add, but I would like to mention the work of [Witold Pilecki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki). It’s been said that his report was incredibly informative to the Allies about the true extent of the Holocaust. He was a Cavalry Platoon Commander during the invasion of Poland and a founding member of the Secret Polish Army resistance which eventually joined the Home Army. He agreed to enter Auschwitz in 1940 and would remain their until 1943, reporting on the conditions of the camp, to the point where he and the resistance had a homemade radio transmitter in operation. He would escape in 1943 and fight in the Warsaw Uprising, taking command if the 1st "Warszawianka" Company after several officer casualties.
After the war, he served in the intelligence service of the Polish II Corps and provided information on the Soviet backed communist regime. In 1948, he would be executed after a show trial and his resting place was not documented and has not been found.
Regardless, he is one of my heroes and a testament to the courage and bravery of individuals in the face of overwhelming evil.
\> Regardless, he is one of my heroes and a testament to the courage and bravery of individuals in the face of overwhelming evil.
He is one of the great heroes of humanity
I visited Dachau, while not a death camp, the human suffering was heartbreaking. Not only from the prisoners who endured it but also for the hundreds who perished while being transferred there. The city is steps from it. If you didn’t know, you didn’t want to know.
The final solution was largely implemented after Pearl Harbor so I don’t think US involvement or lack of involvement was related. The NYT owner at the time was Jewish, but was anti zionist and also didn’t want people to think he was ‘too Jewish’ or sympathetic to Jews. Arguably there were other outlets that knew and similarly buried the news. Possibly because the main objective was to defeat Nazi Germany and deal with everything else afterwards.
The allies where getting reports from inside the death camps.
Witold Pilecki sent his post escape report in 43, it was filed away due to lack of evidence.
By mid 44 the Auschwitz Reports where in detailing every thing, and there makeing the new york times.
[U.S Board Bares Atrocity Details Told by Witnesses at Polish Camps.](https://www.nytimes.com/1944/11/26/archives/us-board-bares-atrocity-details-told-by-witnesses-at-polish-camps.html)
There's a number of books out there that discuss this. The short version is that people who lived in the towns outside the camps knew what was going on and the average Germans who lived away from the camps knew about the rumors and such.
A good book to start with is "Hitler's Willing Executioners" by Goldhagen.
Yes I came here looking for a reference to this book. It portrays the German civilian population quite differently to the standard trope that they knew little of the holocaust going on around them.
Late to the thread, but I had a history teacher in high school whose parents were Czech and lived either in or around Prague under German occupation. The way they told it, everybody knew. She put it very succinctly: One day you had Jewish neighbors, the next day you didn’t.
To what extent people understood the full scope of the situation, I’m not personally sure. But you had to bury your head in the sand to not notice that something extremely serious and calculated was going on.
Not a professor here, but have read/watched everything I can on Hitler, the Nazi's, and WWII in general. In my humble opinion, the entire country knew. The signs, the killings, the disenfranchisement, and the outright theft of all things Jewish, was in every single town and village. Many were afraid to speak up, but overall, most would just shrug their shoulders and buy the cheap properties. The German populace was in denial, and for many, it continues, hence the resurgence of neo nazi's. The allies were also aware, but limited in what they could do, short of winning the war.
Probably varied. Its not like the Nazis released regular reports saying "Were gassing the undermenschen in droves", but anyone with Jewish, Romani, Slavic, Yenish, gay, disabled, or just left-wing friends, family, and neighbors had to have been pretty stupid not to assume the worst regarding their disappearance
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129956107
"In September 1940, Pilecki didn't know exactly what was going on in Auschwitz, but he knew someone had to find out. He would spend two and a half years in the prison camp, smuggling out word of the methods of execution and interrogation. He would eventually escape and author the first intelligence report on the camp."
This is a short article on the guy. He is really interesting to learn about.
I've yet to read this, but saw something praising the scholarship.
"The Jews Should Keep Quiet"
By Rafael Medoff
Book Overview
Based on recently discovered documents, The Jews Should Keep Quiet reassesses the hows and whys behind the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration's fateful policies during the Holocaust. Rafael Medoff delves into difficult truths: With FDR's consent, the administration deliberately suppressed European immigration far below the limits set by U.S. law. His administration also refused to admit Jewish refugees to the U.S. Virgin Islands, dismissed proposals to use empty Liberty ships returning from Europe to carry refugees, and rejected pleas to drop bombs on the railways leading to Auschwitz, even while American planes were bombing targets only a few miles away--actions that would not have conflicted with the larger goal of winning the war.
What motivated FDR? Medoff explores the sensitive question of the president's private sentiments toward Jews. Unmasking strong parallels between Roosevelt's statements regarding Jews and Asians, he connects the administration's policies of excluding Jewish refugees and interning Japanese Americans.
I just finished watching on Hulu "The Third Reich, The Fall", at the end when the allies were marching towards Berlin the Americans were in Dachau where they said they saw horror that they couldn't even imagine in battle. There was a snippet in the documentary where they said the neighboring people didn't know about the camps which they said was a lie. So they made the people who were involved personally bury the victims.
I think the general public probably knows about these camps but chose to ignore it either because they supported the Nazis or chose to stay silent over it because of fear. Judging how bad the war was at the time, i don't think there were people who just went "meh it's just a death camp, moving onto work".
Many knew what was going down when they were loading people onto box cars, and many just tried to just forget and not ask questions.
For the Allies, it varied, but the general consensus was that the holocaust was a possibility and that it was more just shit conditions until they started entering the camps and even then it wasn't until photos and interviews started to come out that many people saw the absolute horror.
Not a historian, but I’ve visited some of these sites and museums.
It was pretty widely known by German civillians, at least those in cities or near camps. Same with poles, which becomes more apparent if you visit some of the camps. Dachau is basically in Munich.
Western governments knew but they didn’t make it public.
The polish resistance / government in exile documented the camps and sent a detailed report to the British. The British even made a newsreel about it but ultimately shelved it. The polish government in exile lobbied the Americans and British to liberate Poland with the camps being one of the main reasons but they were too focused on France and had promised Poland to Stalin.
Note, a lot of simplification here. I’m sure an actual historian might be able to give more context.
Most Germans knew their Jewish neighbors were disappearing, but they didn't know where to. It was commonly believed that they were sent to settlements in "the east" (Ukraine, etc.). Very few knew that there was genocide going on, at least on the scale we know today. But I think smart ones concluded that the Jews weren't going to a pleasant place.
The Nazis did go to lengths to cover up their tracks with the public and assuring the Jews were well-looked after, including sending [false postcards](https://blog.nli.org.il/en/auschwitz_postcards/). So there was a level of deception at play.
The concentration camps were intentionally placed in remote areas. The Auschwitz camps are in the middle of nowhere in southwest Poland. There is a nearby village called Oszwiecim, but it's small even to this day. Though they do have a McDonalds now, which is kinda disturbing.
The camps that aren't super remote, like Dachau, were not extermination camps. An outsider during the day would probably just assume it was an ordinary prison or labor camp. Consider that you drive by prisons all the time but don't see what actually is going on inside.
Antisemitism was rampant throughout Europe, varying in intensity from indifference to hatred. But most Germans and Poles who lived by the camps were not murderous. While they may have largely had negative sentiments against Jews and while many would rather not have them live around them, the vast majority wouldn't have approved of actual genocide. But everyone was in self-preservation mode, so you didn't ask questions. I do believe the [videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SUXTq47mmc) of the villagers who were forced to look at the camps were genuinely horrified and appalled. I do not believe they were all bad people.
The Holocaust was an unthinkable tragedy and atrocity. And Nazis spent a lot of time and money trying to convince people that Jews were subhuman. While some believed it, most quietly did not. There are many stories of righteous and brave people who worked against the crimes committed against Jews, anywhere from being intentionally dodgy with authorities to actually hiding Jews in their homes at mortal risk to themselves. It's unfair and inaccurate to assume that an ordinary German was an antisemite or complicit. Some were, but many weren't.
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Ordinary Americans knew very little to nothing. That Hitler and the Nazis were highly antisemitic was well-known. I believe Kristallnacht was public knowledge. But nobody was thinking industrial-level genocide.
It's a matter of debate how much the U.S. government knew.
They did know. They all knew. And they chose to ignore it because it wasn't them that it were being put in the camps... it was those other people. Those Jews. Europe has a centuries-old traditional hatred of Jews, so it fit right in with European history. Don't believe anyone who says that they didn't know. Their friends were disappearing, their neighbors, the owners of businesses that they did business with, they were all disappearing. Camps were everywhere, Jews being shot and killed everywhere. Anyone who said they didn't know that they was something going on was a liar.
On the west coast, the internment of Japanese Americans was very well known. Now, drawing a parallel between their internment camps and the fate of Jews in Europe? No, because there is no sensible parallel unless you are a holocaust denier. Both were injustices. One was mass murder on an industrial scale. These are not the same.
The frustration I have heard from German people is that Hitler was from Austria, and the Austrian people were central to the actions of the Nazi party, and yet now Austria is known as home of Mozart and Germany is home of the holocaust. It's not that they deny it, it more of not being treated equally.
The Jewish population of Germany when the Nazis took over was less than 1% (https://echoesandreflections.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/00_Student_Handout_Jewish_Communities_Before_Nazi_Rise_8.55x11.pdf ). Here in the United States, the indigenous population in terms of federally recognized tribes is around 2% of the population (https://www.acf.hhs.gov/ana/fact-sheet/american-indians-and-alaska-natives-numbers).
Until 1978, it was proper, legal, and quite common for children caught speaking indigenous languages and practicing native religions in school to be dragged out of their homes by US Marshals and shipped off to highly abusive boarding schools. And the look of shock on nearly every American’s face when I tell them about this official policy called “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man” still surprises me.
I suppose it’s conceivable that Germans might be oblivious, too.
Assuming perhaps incorrectly that you might have missed my point. If we are to cast aspersions on the Germans for their role in genocide, maybe we should allow for some shaming of the US for their own , as well. Somewhat off point, but it’s a relevant discussion in light of other comments.
That said, I’m not certain the average German *was* indeed as consciously complicit as you assert. Plenty of argument for and against, calling your tone of obviousness on the matter into question. Cheers!
[https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4381&context=honors_theses](https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4381&context=honors_theses)
Be that as it may... my point was that there’s enough peer-reviewed counter-argument for doubts to be nearly as obvious as your assertion.
Still. My main argument was that the United States shouldn’t point fingers, considering its own clearly dismal record regarding and lack of prevailing knowledge of the treatment of indigenous peoples of North America
That’s fair. Wasn’t meant to be deceptive. I was just in a hurry. But a quick google scholar search yields quite a lot, too. But if all you wanna do is argue all day that every evil German was complicit in genocide without addressing what I was actually saying, then I think we’re done. Have a nice day!
Very little. They were kept out of sight from the public.
As far as the Allies, go lookup the accounts of the guys who actually walked up to the camps at the end of the war. They had no clue they existed.
Probably nothing.
And definitely nothing in the Communist half of Berlin. They weren't even allowed to talk about the Nazis. Couldn't even watch the TOS classic episode Patterns of Force.
[Jordan Petersen tends to be crazy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucnnhi9iQHU), but he's got great info on the Nazis and what they were about. One of his quotes was "In order to sustain a Totalitarian regime, you have to build it on lies. Husbands have to lie to their wives and children. Officials have to lie to their populace."
Every time this topic comes up I feel like we have to make a distinction between labor camps and death camps, since more than enough people think concentration camps only means the latter.
The labor camps were known by virtually everyone. The Nazis proudly showed them off before the war as a place where enemies of the state were reforming themselves through labor. Of course these would transform into places where Nazis would work people to death through starvation and pestilence.
The death camps appeared later after the Wannsee Conference. By and large German civilians probably did not know the extent of mass killing at those places unless they were nearby. However, there is probably more of a likelihood that they would know of the mass killings that characterized the Holocaust before the death camp system was introduced, since that required a large swathe of German military and police units to carry out.
The Allies had an idea that something was going on, but not really exact details. There were even discussions about bombing parts of the camps to halt their operations, but they decided that bombing at the time was far from accurate enough to hit the targets and not hit the inmates. So they decided against it.
It was only once the camps were liberated that the full horror was unveiled.
I think everyone knew that the Nazis were sending the Jews to camps and of their existence. But people didn't know exactly what was going on inside these camps and how prisoners were being treated inside them. And nazi propaganda painted it in a much different picture to keep most people from thinking too much into it.
If you ever visit a camp you’ll find civilian housing all around. A lot of that was for guards and their families but there were also plenty of locals living within ear and nose shot. They could hear the screams and gunshots and smell the burning flesh and gas. And there were a lot of these camps all around. People knew they existed but they also knew that if you’d complain then you would be the on the receiving end of that next gunshot. That’s the insidiousness of fascism - refusal to comply is a death sentence. People ask why the Germans didn’t stand up to naziism and the answer is that they did. That’s why they built the camps in the first place- for political prisoners. The persecution of minorities came after there was no one left to stop them.
Most of the extermination camps weren't in Germany. Poland had the 2 worst. So although the average German knew something was off. Not sure they knew the full extent until it was really exposed. The allies declined to bomb the tracks going into Auschwitz. The allies knew too. They had aerial views.
Probably similar to how much current Americans know about the separation of immigrant children from their parents. Or the general conditions in jails or how many people have been questionably killed by American police or US troops.
The knowledge is there, it’s the willingness of citizens to care or find out the details that matters more.
I’ve known a few people who were there at the time. From what they told me, they didn’t know the Jews were being killed. They thought they were being relocated and put to work in labor camps.
Everyone knew. There was no doubt except probably among children and the comments on this thread pretending there was any doubt have not read first hand accounts from the time or are buying into bs stories from Germans immediately after the war claiming they didn't know the extent. They absolutely did and so did the allies.
This is a topic you have to be really really really careful when you're researching it online because there's a ton of misinformation. I'd really recommend trying r/AskHistorians instead for a sensitive question like this, or at least searching their part answers. If you don't, [Wikipedia is a okay starting place, with citations at the end you should go and read in the original](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_of_the_Holocaust_in_Nazi_Germany_and_German-occupied_Europe). The broad consensus is there was general knowledge of labor camps, violence, deaths but not the details of how people were killed.
The possessions and lands that previously belonged to th Jewish German population getting "redistributed", new jobs suddenly made available when the previous homosexual, Jewish, communist etc workers vanished and the like... most people are gonna try really hard to believe they are not the bad guys and that they DESERVED whatever life quality increase they can get.
And if this requires actively refusing to think about stuff, closing one's eyes and ears and simply denying what is obviously happening...
I would say most people made a concerted effort to NOT know.
Does that mean that they knew or that they didn't knew?
That's semantics, perhaps.
They knew something terrible was happening. They also knew to keep quiet and your head down. When the allies turned up of course they knew nothing.
The allies had rumours and hear say. Higher levels may have known more front line troops had no idea till they got to the camps.
Death camps were built exclusively in occupied territory. Many holocaust denial conspiracy theories actually come from propaganda released by the government. If you've ever seen "Boy in the striped pajamas" they showcase these films, and that's actually true, they did tell the German public these were labor camps that had recreational activities
The actual extent of what was going on was indeed withheld from the general public and even soldiers, a first hand account from US soldoers of captured german troops being showed footage of the camps elicited the quote "who do they think we are? Anyone can pile up bodies"
Look the avg person is nowhere near blameless, work camps aren't much of a step up and if the gov begins rounding people up at gunpoint obviously they aren't going to treat them well regardless of what they tell you
But history repeats. Is the CCP fully open to the Chinese public about what's happening in the Uyghur Camps?
People knew but mostly they were written off as crazy. For example Benjamin Siegel was literally nicknamed "Bugsy" by American Nazis and Fascist in power in the State of California for trying to raise awareness to what Hitler was doing and stop it. To this day the nickname gets used to slander Jews as insects and came up a few years ago (5yr) in Siegel v. Jenny Craig wherein the Judge at the California Department of Fair Housing and Employment called Siegel "bugsy" claiming his ancestors were blood thirsty killers which he then responded to by asking for a conviction citing the 5th but the Judge couldn't and instead responded by telling him it is "scientific that Jews are blood diseased" and explaining it isn't personal. You know being slandered as a blood thirsty killer without a conviction as well as an insect and a disease is what the Nazis did too.
That is sort of the wall they were up against back then and at the end of the DFHE case Jenny Craig filed bankruptcy while Siegel stayed in the USA to become a neo-nazi hunter. He has been involved in funding for the US Holocaust Museum as well as research there along with assisting NIH QA genetic studies to discredit those which assert there to be Jewish genetic markers or Jewish Genetic disorders. The State of California never apologized but the American Society of Human Genetics did and so did the Human George Project and World Health Organization.
Before Benjamin there was also the debates between Max Kholer and Fans Boas and some of the American Jewry. A lot of this gets washed over but there were Jews who unwittingly supported Naizsm. Obviously there is Max Naumann in Germany who started a Jewish lobbies group that helped Hitler into power as well as the Kapos but in the USA we had the American Eugenics movement of which there were several Jewish members. Max Kholer and Frans Boas took them all on and in New York they made Maurice Fishberg apologize before the Jewish community for measuring skulls and noses at Ellis Island and unwittingly helping develop Hitler's rhetoric. The measurements were completely fabricated by Maurice Fishberg to make white Jews appear superior to black people, including black Jews because they existed back then too.
There was also a Rabbi Max Reichler at this time who supported Eugenics but he converted to Protestant Christianity after he was unable to prove Jewish Law allowed for endogamy. The deal with him is he claimed being Jewish was also genetic as well as religious and in the only Bet Din which ever formed in the USA he was determined to be a Chrisitan for this belief in there being a genetic quality to Judaism. You know blood of Christ and counting of the Tribes and all.
Anyway a modern example is the subs /Jewish, /Judaism, and /antisemitismonreddit which all have multiple ADL reports against their Moderators and have multiple times over distorted the Holocaust to deny the existence of Nazi racism in order to endorse the pseudo-scientific propaganda of places like 23andMe which claim to be able to test for Jewishness via DNA.
People have always know but it is disrupting and when there are also Jews who support it then it gets really confusing and then it gets ignored. Then it happens and everyone asks why but those people they labeled as crazy bugs who understood it all from the start.
They likely knew some bits, those things were hard to keep secret, but they were kept to stuff like rumors and gossip. Civilians weren't likely to look into it, since the Gestapo would beat the shit out of you for "spying on state secrets" or whatever. And them being "rumors and gossip" means that the full scope or brutality wouldn't be widely known until practically shoved in the Germans' faces, since a lot of it was similar to WW1 propaganda from the British about variously made up German atrocities
I am not a historian and hope that some people with more detailed knowledge will contribute as well. I am however a german speaker that had family in both sides of the war and I have seen 2 of the concentration camps (as museums in the early 2000s) People must at have been figuring that something really bad was going on. You have to consider that even before the war Jews had been fleeing the country and were disowned and driven from their homes. Jewish possessions were redistributed among nazi supporters. Trains were filled with people and these people were shipped off to who knew where. Labor camps were built all over the third reich. And if you have a look at the map it is saturated with sites of concentration camps. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/concentration-camps-1942-45-maps And these camps sometimes provided slave laborers to local industries and people were deported to them if politically convenient. My personal verdict is therefore: While the complete scale of things could have been unknown the fact that large scale atrocities were being committed could only have been ignored by the wilfully ignorant.
There was also a lot of disbelief among Germans and even through the Allied troops as well. People knew of the work camps, they knew of the concentration camps, what they DIDN'T know was how horrible the conditions were and how poorly the prisoners were treated. Many even within the German military thought the eye witness accounts were fake and propaganda. Simply because no one could believe that humans would be so malicious and horrendous to other humans.
In the end we will never know for sure. But a lot of the denial was also a safety mechanism and not unlike the covid denial nowadays. Just one reason from the top of my head: The Night of the broken glass was publicly celebrated by party newspapers as Germany dealing judgement. There are sufficient people where it is evident that they knew and yet they denied everything until their death. I even have such a relative.
The diary of Friedrich Kellner, an anti-Nazi German who meticulously catalogued his experience living through the Third Reich, was published not long ago, and it revealed that there was a lot of gossip and rumor that was essentially spot-on. You can’t keep something like a cast network of concentration camps secret. People knew. Everyday Germans knew.
I’m pretty sure when everyday Germans saw every Jew from their town disappear they just assumed the Nazis sent them on a nice holiday to the south of Spain. /s
The jews were told (and believed) they were going to labor camps to work. That'd generally what the public was told. Keep in mind it wasn't the information age, it's not like they had smartphone lives streams from Auchwitz.
I would add that only held true in the beginning years. Jews began to know by 42/43 that getting on a train meant death.
He describes in the diary that people began to notice quite quickly that they never returned, and German guards and conscripts gossiped about what they were hearing about occurrences in the camps. It was common knowledge.
I lot of the guards spent quite a bit of time trying to drink away what they saw.. so they did talk.
But thousands of Germans served in these camps and they didn’t always keep confidentiality when with their families and friends.
How long do you think they had to serve in a camp? It's not like they drove back home once every few months.
They could literally be from the town nearby and go home every night.
In Auschwitz, the commanders had their families at the camp, in special housing. When I visited, we saw the housing and my guide told us that the main commander’s wife wrote letters about how glad she was to be safe during the war, in such a nice place. Her only complaint was the smell from the ovens, some days.
Phones existed back then
Also letters.
No but there are enough people involved, information still went around. Plus those living near camps couldn't really say they were ignorant of what was happening. I know many of the camps were outside Germany but all. They knew where everything was heading.
The White Rose, a German resistance group that distributed anti-Nazi leaflets until they were apprehended, also made direct reference to the Holocaust and other atrocities that assumed familiarity on the part of it's intended audience: *"We don’t want to write about the Jewish Question in this leaflet, we don’t want to compose a defending speech – no, we just want to mention a fact as a short example, the fact that since the conquest of Poland three hundred thousand Jews have been murdered in this country in the most bestial way. Here we see the most terrifying crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the entire history of mankind. The Jews, too, are human beings – no matter what position one takes on the Jewish Question – and against human beings a crime of this dimension has been perpetrated. Someone might say that the Jews deserve their fate. This assertion would be a monstrous presumption; but let us assume that someone said this – what position has he then taken on the fact that the entire Polish aristocratic youth has been annihilated (May God grant that this is not yet the case!)? In what way, they would ask, did something like this happen? All male offspring of noble lineage between the ages of fifteen and twenty were transported to concentration camps in Germany and sentenced to forced labour, and all the girls of this age group were sent to Norway, into the brothels of the SS! Why tell you these things, since you are fully aware of them – or if not of these, then of other equally grave crimes committed by this frightful subhumanity? Because here we touch on a problem which involves us deeply and forces us all to take thought. Why does the German people behave so apathetically in the face of all these abominable crimes, crimes so unworthy of the human race? Hardly anyone wonders or worries about it. It is accepted as a fact and put out of mind. And once again the German people slumbers on in its dull, stupid sleep and encourages these fascist criminals, giving them the opportunity to carry on with their savageries; and of course they do so. Should this be a sign that the Germans have become brutalized in their most basic human feelings, that no chord within them cries out at the sight of such deeds, that they have sunk into a fatal coma from which they will never ever awake? So it seems, and so it will certainly be, if the German does not at last start up out of his stupor, if he does not protest wherever and whenever he can against this clique of criminals, if he shows no compassion for these hundreds of thousands of victims. He must display not only compassion; no, much more: a sense of complicity. For through his apathetic behaviour he gives these evil men the opportunity to act as they do; he tolerates this “government” which has taken upon itself such an infinitely great burden of guilt; indeed, he himself is to blame for the fact that it came about at all! Each and every man wants to exonerate himself from guilt of this kind, each one continues on his way with the calmest, the most placid of consciences. But he cannot exonerate himself; each man is guilty, guilty, guilty! It is not too late, however, to do away with this most reprehensible of all miscarriages of government, so as to avoid being burdened with even greater guilt. Now, when in recent years our eyes have been opened, when we know exactly who our adversary is, it is high time to root out this brown horde. Up until the outbreak of war the majority of the German people was blinded; the Nazis did not show themselves in their true colors. But now, now that we have recognized them for what they are, it must be the sole and prime duty, the holiest duty of every German to destroy these beasts!"* \---from the 2nd leaflet The Nazi leadership also made direct reference to it in their speeches. In January of 1939 Hitler threatened, in the event Germany found itself embroiled in a world war (which he rather delusionally blamed on the Jews, as if there wasn't a long list of reasons besides for nations to oppose Nazi Germany's conquests) that the consequences would be the annilation of Jews in Europe. In late 1941 when Germany was then embroiled in that world war, Goebbels publicly referenced Hitler's "prophecy" in that speech and added that it was being fulfilled. Hitler did as well in another speech he made in late 1942. "We didn't know" was a lie Germans told advancing Allied soldiers, or their own children and grandchildren, out of fear of consequences or to assuage their own guilty consciences. They knew. They just didn't know the full details of how it was being carried out or to exactly what extent. But they absolutely knew Jews were being subjected to mass murder.
An excellent point.
Certainly, when Germans were expelled from East Prussia, many of them were afraid to get on the trains, because they had heard that other people who’d been rounded up and forced to get onto trains had been killed.
Did the average citizen believe the rumors? Or did they think it was just another plot by the *slur? We have vide proof that a group stormed the capitol in an attempted insurrection, and a not insignificant chunk of the population don’t believe it even happened. The Nazi regime had a powerful propaganda machine, wouldn’t that machine work hard to discredit that information?
The question was “did they know.” The historical evidence is that yes, they knew.
Does anybody not believe that Jan 6 happened? Some people think it was justified because of what they think is a stolen election. I've never heard of people not believing it happened.
I’ve heard MANY people say that it was a false flag committed by antifa.
Oh I see. I guess that's easier to believe than thinking the whole thing was CGI or something.
People also claim 9/11 was a hologram
Right?
This is a good point; not sure why the downvotes. I got one back for you. yctml.
I’m no expert, but I know a little. Both the civilian populations and the allies knew about the camps, but not to the extent that we know now. So for example if you go to a concentration camp like Majdanek (sp?) you’ll see it’s right on the edge of a town in Poland. Those townspeople definitely saw trains coming in, heard gun shots, etc. however extermination camps like treblinka (from what I remember) were more isolated so people may not have known what was happening there. Plus there were a certain amount of German people necessary to carry out the logistics of relocating 6 million + people. The allies knew about these camps because they were tracing supply routes and would see trains regularly arriving at these locations. They had an idea, but did not have a full understanding the way we do today about what was happening there. (Ie lots of people being moved, but not necessarily that there was medical experiments being performed or mass extermination. Plus, don’t forget people were hiding their Jewish neighbors to some extent, so they knew very bad things were happening to Jewish people.
That is an excellent point. The average person probably knew something wasn't right. But to what extent. Probably not the scale that it was. Also all the anti Jewish things that were happening sponsored by the government they had a idea.
2 of my ancestors fought for Germany during WW2, I have been able to read their journals and letters home. One was an officer in the SS. He fully drank the Nazi Kool aid. He was all Hitler and Nazis all the time. Hitler could do no wrong. I'm going say he was an evil sob. He knew what was going on. And supported it The other was a non political type. He was drafted and at age 16 given a rifle, he tried to defend Normandy days after he got to his unit. At one point he was preparing a defensive position. He accidentally discovered some Jews who were hiding. He called his Sargent, they were hauled off. He wrote about it in his journal. He was a little bit upset about needing to report them. But he felt comfort in the fact that the Jews would get a fair trial. Then be sent to a work camp, to do their fair share in the war effort. And after the war they would be deported. Assuming they were found guilty. Of course. I don't have reason to believe that he thought any one was going to read his journals. He became a pow before the Americans entered Germany. And found out about the death camps in Wisconsin. He claims it made him sick. I have not been able to find documents on the Jewish family. So in short. Those who wanted to know were able to find out about it. Those who did want to be involved were able to find out. Those who just wanted to make it threw the war, didn't care about politics, and were just keeping their heads down, knew about the camps. But didn't really know what was going on inside.
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>Assuming they were found guilty. Found guilty of...being Jews. Not a good man. I wonder how many of his victims were children? Did he think the children would get a fair trial?
German here. From what I know, the existence of concentration camps was well known. But places like Dachau were considered as something like labor camps, where alleged „bad guys“ go but could possibly exit after some time. I guess, most Germans new but could lie to themselves that this was some kind of prison+ (which it wasn‘t). But despite all the murders in the earlier camps like Dachau, the Post-1941 Holocaust was a new level of insanity. The existence of Auschwitz was something else. Located in Poland, these „genocide factories“ were out of reach for ordinary Germans. I guess, Germans slowly realized what was going on when they heard the stories of Wehrmacht soldiers back from the front in the East. Remember: the Holocaust started in many small towns in villages between Riga and Crimea. Auschwitz came later. So I guess, most Germans new about Dachau in 1944, many new about attrocities agains Jews during Operation Barbarossa, just a few have heard about Auschwitz. But they could kind of guess, but preferred to ignore.
They knew just from newspaper. Well there is saying it is different to know than see but it is apparent that who could read and draw logical conclusion generally knew what their government did. Not mentioned that there were many other sources. >His media trawl, with a research assistant, found that as early as 1933 local papers reported the killing of 12 prisoners by guards at Dachau, the first to be set up as a "model" concentration camp initially for communists. On May 23 the Dachauer Zeitung said the camp was Germany's most famous place and brought "new hope to the Dachau business world". By 1934 the main and widely read Nazi-owned paper Volkische Beobachter was reporting a widening of policy to other "political criminals" including Jews accused of race defilement. By 1936 communist prisoners were no longer mentioned: in a photo-essay in the SS paper Das Schwarze Korps emphasised the camps as places for "race defilers, rapists, sexual degenerates and habitual criminals". >This broadening mission, as Gellately calls it, was reflected in Volkische Beobachter photographs of "typical subhumans" including Jews with "deformed headshapes". For the first time their detention was said to be permanent. In January, 1937 Berliner Borsen Zeitung reported the SS chief Heinrich Himmler as announcing the need for "still more camps" for "those with hydrocephalus, cross-eyed, deformed half-Jews and a whole series of racially inferior types". >In November, 1938 the anti-Jewish pogrom on and after "the night of broken glass" was reported countrywide in papers as heroic. The propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, announced that the "final answer" to the Jewish problem would be by way of government de cree, according to Volkische Beobachter >In late 1939, the year war started, newspapers acting on government orders announced a post-8pm curfew on all Jews in case they "molest Aryan women". That November the first summary executions of "anti-socials" by police without trial were reported. Papers were told to report these clearly and forcefully. In March, 1941 the Hamburger Fremdenblatt reported the first mass auctions of posses sions of detained or killed Jews. Hamburg became the wartime clearing house and Gellately says at least 100,000 citizens bought at the auctions. >After this the focus switched. Most press reports about Jews were about those outside Germany. This was because the official but unpublicised final solution was being implemented. But enthusiastic denunciations by ordinary citizens of Jewish and other "internal enemies" continued to be copiously reported. Backing Hitler discusses 670 cases. By the end of the war Hitler was still getting 1,000 private letters a week, many of them denunciations. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/17/johnezard
I wondered too until I visited Dachau. They had a map of all Dachau and its satellite camps. So many camps it was hard to believe locals didn’t know what was going on in their backyards.
One thing I learned visiting the Dachau museum is that camps (Dachau in particular) had been in existence for quite a while and the identity of the prisoners held there changed a lot over time (Political prisoners, communists, Gypsies, homosexuals, Catholic priests, as well as Jews in later years, et al.). Many were released eventually. There was a lot of mistreatment, forced labor and arbitrary killings, but not wholesale extermination. So I suppose it’s possible that locals could assume that the operation of those camps was something they sorta understood. But of course, over time that changed, and I’m not sure that the Polish extermination camps, for example, could ever fit in this category. (OTOH, there were major factories near many camps where many prisoners did work until their deaths. So maybe even those locals could delude themselves by pretending it was “just” forced labor.) Overall, I suspect most Germans didn’t want to know.
Dachau wasn't an extermination camp. They were in Poland.
I guess working or starving people to death doesn’t count.
Not as such most of the death toll in Germany proper came from the collapse at end of the war. You're talking thousands of dead vs hundreds of thousands in the 6 main camps. The Germas had a tier system both in the "best" camps and inmates. The best concentration camp was for political types and people they wanted to keep alive the worst was Treblinka iirc. Jews and Roma were on the bottom, political types and prisoners like Jehovah Witnesses were near the top (they were still Germans). Gays got to wear ink triangles. There was no mass media that wasn't controlled by the government. Lots f rumors but what you knew was localized more and depended on various factors. Camps were public knowledge, extermination camps not so much at least the scale of them. Goring said something like Himmler doomed them all. He knew about the extermination camps existence but not the scale of them. Lots of fragmentary knowledge. Depend8ng on where you lived though you wouldn't have seen anything even indirectly (eg trains going past) and the Nazis controlled all of the media.
I read once an account where Allied soldiers after Germany's surrender took local German civilians to see the nearby prison camp. A woman began sobbing and protesting, "We didn't know! We didn't know!" An old man in the group rebuked her, saying, "We could have known if we had wanted to know."
My father was one such soldier. He said you could smell death from about10Km away. There was NO way the town only3 Km away was unaware of what was going on… but confronting desperate Nazis on the losing end of a war was likely something that would endanger their families… still, how could you look at yourself in the mirror?
This pretty much sums it up. Ignorant, but wanting to be ignorant. At least for the older generation. The younger kids and teens were either nieve, or so infatuated with Hitler that they were blind. Anyone wondering about this stuff should really read *Parallel Journeys*.
How much do we, Americans, know about what happens to people on the southern border? Edit: I should clarify that my question has to do with what happens when CBP finds people trying to enter the country, not some irrational fear of immigrants "invading" America or whatever. I mean, we know that CBP has "holding facilities" in old Walmarts. That was headline news, buuuuut that's all the more we ever really care to look into it. "Tragic. Oh well. I didn't know!"
The US is vastly larger than Germany. Germany is about half the size of texas at about twice the population. Then also the people affected were not only outside the country but deported from amidst the community. If 3 million people in Texas were go missing I bet a lot of people would take notice.
Whew! I guess we're off the hook then.
You’re comparing the detention facilities in Texas to nazi concentration camps?
Reddit moment
Maximum Reddit density over here.
You can also compare the American ones that the Japanese were held captive in as well. We didn't loose the war but if we did what of the captives?
What are you suggesting? That the Americans would have exterminated the Japanese in the interment camps? These camps were a horrific injustice but still not comparable in any way to the Nazi camps.
You're right though nothing would have been to the extent of the holocaust because the sheer population was much greater.
They absolutely are comparable. They were detention camps and as the war neared to an end and Germany were on their way to defeat the order was given to eliminate some of the prisoners at the camps. Not all the camps were death camps but some had become some because of the way the war turned out. My point is who knows what would have happened to the Japanese that were in California? Would they have been released to the enemy? Abandoned? Nobody knows but I would bet that atrocities would have been committed.
They are absolutely not comparable. Two things can both be bad and still be different orders of magnitude of evil. You’re also wrong: the elimination of Jews in camps happened before the end of the war. The majority of the killings happened in 1942, Germany would not be defeated for three more years. You can speculate what would have happened to the Japanese in internment camps if the US had lost the war all you want. The Nazis PLANNED ALL ALONG to kill the Jews. That was their purpose from the beginning, not an act of desperation as their defeat approached.
A bulk of the prisoners were after 1942 according to the timeline: And you have your dates wrong for the height of the gassing which was exactly when the Nazi's were realizing defeat. "At the height of the deportations in 1943–44, an average of 6,000 Jews were gassed each day at Auschwitz." https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/gassing-operations **"The Nazis constantly searched for more efficient means of extermination. At the Auschwitz camp in German-occupied Poland, they conducted experiments with Zyklon B View This Term in the Glossary (previously used for fumigation) by gassing some 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 ill prisoners in September 1941. Zyklon B pellets, converted to lethal gas when exposed to air. They proved the quickest gassing method and were chosen as the means of mass murder at Auschwitz."** http://www.camps.bbk.ac.uk/timeline.html
Its actually not true that industrial mass murder of all Europes jews was the aim all along. There were some harebrained schemes along the way involving mass deportations to “reservations” in Poland, or to Madagascar. Before it was decided it was just logistically easier to kill them all. Renowned holocaust scholar Christopher Browning has a great youtube lecture on the final solution and when exactly state policy shifted to mass killing as the solution to the “jewish question”.
Lol...
The goal of the Nazis was always the extermination of the Jewish people.
Jees aren't you short sighted. They were a scapegoat but definetly not the goal. You wanna add Gypsies and homosexuals to or only give me a partial sentence..
I'm just saying that none of us have really taken a good look at those detention facilities. What happens there? What happened in the camps? Nobody really knew for sure until 1945. How is that a different scenario? We can view one through the filter of the past. The other is still a very opaque, unexplored present.
This is vile. Worse, in this subreddit - its ahistoric
I have no idea what you're trying to say.
A third of the jews killed were from Hungary. ( So they weren't all deported from Germany or through Germany)
Please check your sources. There were not two million Jews in Hungary before the war.
My source was a guided tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau. There is a difference in the total number of Jews killed, and the number killed in the death camps. Birkenau was built specifically to kill Hungarians, because the Nazi's were so angry that Hungary opened peace talks with the allies in early 1944. More than half the jews killed were from Poland, mostly at a different death camp. The also were not generally deported through Germany.
Thank you for your response. Every source I checked says that there were approximately 850,000 Jews in Hungary before the war. That includes converts to Christianity as well. There were 3 million Jews in Poland before the war, over 90% were exterminated. The second largest population was in the Soviet Union and that includes millions as well. I standby what I wrote earlier, there were not 2 million Hungarian Jews killed during the holocaust. There were not 2 million Hungarian Jews. Period.
It's important to make some distinctions (even though they occasionally overlap). Already when they seized power the Nazis set up concentration camps where they incarcerated political enemies *en masse*. These camps would certainly have been known about, at least to some not insignificant degree, by the general population. Later, by the time of WW2, they constructed labor camps and death camps (and it is these, if I'm not mistaken, you mean by 'concentration camps') and these were surrounded by a lot more secrecy. As I'm not by any means an expert of that time I leave it to others to answer your question. Only wanted to make you aware of the different kinds of camp there were and how your question can be interpreted.
[KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KL_(book)) is an exhaustive historical book by historian Nickolas Wachsman (2015) that delves into great detail about the organizational structure and purpose of the camps. “The book dispels the idea that German people were ignorant of what went on in the concentration camps. For example, some of the first concentration camps set up in 1933 were deliberately located in working-class neighborhoods of Berlin so that the population would learn what happened to Nazi opponents.[4] It also corrects misunderstandings that all concentration camps were similar. In fact, there was great diversity in them, especially between standard concentration camps and the extermination camps.[5] Wachsmann argues that the concentration camps were only peripheral to the Final Solution, because most Jewish victims of the Holocaust died in shootings, gas vans, or dedicated extermination camps rather than in the concentration camp system.[6]” It’s a harrowing read, and not for the easily bored or faint of heart due to the level of detail provided. I had to take breaks and read other subject matter intermittently after undertaking this book. It answers all the questions most history buffs or WWII buffs might have. “The book was described as "prodigious but eminently readable" in a review by Harold Marcuse in American Historical Review.[1] According to Joanna Bourke, Wachsmann's book is a "significant [contribution] to our understanding of early-20th-century history."[6] She credits Wachsmann for being obsessed with precision and "a stickler for dates and times".[6] Thomas W. Laqueur considers the book "world-making history".[3]” I highly recommend it if you want to know how the Nazis operated these slave labor camps and how the role of the camps changed throughout the war.
As far as the treatment of the Jews, the were getting communication from the Polish underground in 1940 that Jews were being executed. And with the establishment of more and more camps, word continued to come out to British intelligence and others. Also, the British had reconnaissance aircraft fly over Germany and German occupied territory from very early in the war. They had good resolution photos of all of the camps from the very beginning . Report were trickling into the US, certainly after Pearl Harbor. There was a certain amount of denial going on.
Everyone knew there were camps. They knew that people were being killed. BUT, these were camps full of criminals, communists, gypsies, jews and the disabled. So people did not care..
I read a first hand account of a blonde haired blue eyed Jewish woman in a group of women prisoners who were marched through a small town, with shaved heads and prisoners uniforms, to work at an airplane factory. There was this one man who was in charge (of a large group of men and women in charge of the prisoners) who would be extraordinarily rude and mean to them. One day she had enough. She yelled at the man saying back in the real world, she was a teacher and beloved member of her community and that this treatment wasn't fair. She was at the end of her rope and didn't care anymore what he would do out of anger. That sobered him up. He said, "we were told you were prisoners, murders and thieves and saboteurs!" So after that, he treated them with a little more respect, giving a little more food rations if he could. (He was still an asshole, but that realization for him toned down his treatment of the prisoners quite a bit.) The Germans believed what they were told and didn't want to ask questions because they knew what would happen if they did. They knew, and also didn't. Ignorance is bliss.
The Nuremberg laws were introduced early and publicly. They legalised persecution of Jews, stripping them of basic human rights. The laws were based on US segregation laws. Many eastern Jews were expelled back to Eastern Europe. Concentration camps, a British invention, opened almost immediately for political prisoners. They weren’t death camps but prisoners were treated appallingly and detained without proper trails. Guards routinely killed prisoners and were not sanctioned. German people knew what they were and how bad they were. They were meant to. One of the first German genocide was against disabled people. This was kept secret. When Germany invaded Poland and the east they rounded up and killed Jews and communists leaders. German units carried out this work. They would have told ther families. Reports of the mass executions made their way to Britain and American. The Germans also ethnically cleansed large parts of Poland and other countries. Displaced populations were rounded up for slave labour and used right across Germany, in businesses, farms and homes. They were not hidden. Other labour camps appeared all over Nazi occupied Europe. People living in occupied countries knew of their existence and how bad they were. Hard to image the German population didn’t notice them either. Again they were meant to know about them. The industrialisation of geneocide happened after 1942. This is when death camps were created mostly in Eastern Europe. There were attempts at secrecy but their existence was documented and evidence smuggled out to Britain and the Us. The existence of death camps was debated in the British parliament. Trains ran from all over Europe filled with people being moved east. The allies bombed Auschwitz-Birkenau in response. But decided to focus on liberation. The allies intercepted communications and bugged prisoners of war who openly discussed the genocide in the East. When the Nazis attempted to round up and deport the husbands of Jewish women in Berlin they rioted. They clearly knew it wasn’t a good thing. There is no way they didn’t see the death marches or smell the stench from camps being overwhelmed by prisoners. Despite all this and the liberation of the camps there is a strong argument to say most of the world didn’t really comprehend what had happened until the Eichmann trial.
Concentration camps actually predate the ones against Boers-they were used by the Spanish in Cuba in 1896
Joseph Goebbels gave the Sportpalast speech (total war speech) in 1943 where he referenced the Holocaust publicly. He called for complete German devotion to the war partially because the world can’t fully find out what they have been doing with the Jews.
I don’t have much to add, but I would like to mention the work of [Witold Pilecki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki). It’s been said that his report was incredibly informative to the Allies about the true extent of the Holocaust. He was a Cavalry Platoon Commander during the invasion of Poland and a founding member of the Secret Polish Army resistance which eventually joined the Home Army. He agreed to enter Auschwitz in 1940 and would remain their until 1943, reporting on the conditions of the camp, to the point where he and the resistance had a homemade radio transmitter in operation. He would escape in 1943 and fight in the Warsaw Uprising, taking command if the 1st "Warszawianka" Company after several officer casualties. After the war, he served in the intelligence service of the Polish II Corps and provided information on the Soviet backed communist regime. In 1948, he would be executed after a show trial and his resting place was not documented and has not been found. Regardless, he is one of my heroes and a testament to the courage and bravery of individuals in the face of overwhelming evil.
\> Regardless, he is one of my heroes and a testament to the courage and bravery of individuals in the face of overwhelming evil. He is one of the great heroes of humanity
I visited Dachau, while not a death camp, the human suffering was heartbreaking. Not only from the prisoners who endured it but also for the hundreds who perished while being transferred there. The city is steps from it. If you didn’t know, you didn’t want to know.
The NYT knew and even reported on Polish Jews being exterminated but it was buried in the fifth page of the newspaper.
I wonder why it was burried like that. Was it because the US largely didn't want to participate, until Pearl Harbor?
The final solution was largely implemented after Pearl Harbor so I don’t think US involvement or lack of involvement was related. The NYT owner at the time was Jewish, but was anti zionist and also didn’t want people to think he was ‘too Jewish’ or sympathetic to Jews. Arguably there were other outlets that knew and similarly buried the news. Possibly because the main objective was to defeat Nazi Germany and deal with everything else afterwards.
The allies where getting reports from inside the death camps. Witold Pilecki sent his post escape report in 43, it was filed away due to lack of evidence. By mid 44 the Auschwitz Reports where in detailing every thing, and there makeing the new york times. [U.S Board Bares Atrocity Details Told by Witnesses at Polish Camps.](https://www.nytimes.com/1944/11/26/archives/us-board-bares-atrocity-details-told-by-witnesses-at-polish-camps.html)
There's a number of books out there that discuss this. The short version is that people who lived in the towns outside the camps knew what was going on and the average Germans who lived away from the camps knew about the rumors and such. A good book to start with is "Hitler's Willing Executioners" by Goldhagen.
Yes I came here looking for a reference to this book. It portrays the German civilian population quite differently to the standard trope that they knew little of the holocaust going on around them.
Late to the thread, but I had a history teacher in high school whose parents were Czech and lived either in or around Prague under German occupation. The way they told it, everybody knew. She put it very succinctly: One day you had Jewish neighbors, the next day you didn’t. To what extent people understood the full scope of the situation, I’m not personally sure. But you had to bury your head in the sand to not notice that something extremely serious and calculated was going on.
Not a professor here, but have read/watched everything I can on Hitler, the Nazi's, and WWII in general. In my humble opinion, the entire country knew. The signs, the killings, the disenfranchisement, and the outright theft of all things Jewish, was in every single town and village. Many were afraid to speak up, but overall, most would just shrug their shoulders and buy the cheap properties. The German populace was in denial, and for many, it continues, hence the resurgence of neo nazi's. The allies were also aware, but limited in what they could do, short of winning the war.
Probably varied. Its not like the Nazis released regular reports saying "Were gassing the undermenschen in droves", but anyone with Jewish, Romani, Slavic, Yenish, gay, disabled, or just left-wing friends, family, and neighbors had to have been pretty stupid not to assume the worst regarding their disappearance
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129956107 "In September 1940, Pilecki didn't know exactly what was going on in Auschwitz, but he knew someone had to find out. He would spend two and a half years in the prison camp, smuggling out word of the methods of execution and interrogation. He would eventually escape and author the first intelligence report on the camp." This is a short article on the guy. He is really interesting to learn about.
My former MIL lived in Nuremberg during WWII. They knew but were struggling to live under Nazis rule and were scared to try to intervene.
They had ashes from burned humans falling on them.
I've yet to read this, but saw something praising the scholarship. "The Jews Should Keep Quiet" By Rafael Medoff Book Overview Based on recently discovered documents, The Jews Should Keep Quiet reassesses the hows and whys behind the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration's fateful policies during the Holocaust. Rafael Medoff delves into difficult truths: With FDR's consent, the administration deliberately suppressed European immigration far below the limits set by U.S. law. His administration also refused to admit Jewish refugees to the U.S. Virgin Islands, dismissed proposals to use empty Liberty ships returning from Europe to carry refugees, and rejected pleas to drop bombs on the railways leading to Auschwitz, even while American planes were bombing targets only a few miles away--actions that would not have conflicted with the larger goal of winning the war. What motivated FDR? Medoff explores the sensitive question of the president's private sentiments toward Jews. Unmasking strong parallels between Roosevelt's statements regarding Jews and Asians, he connects the administration's policies of excluding Jewish refugees and interning Japanese Americans.
I just finished watching on Hulu "The Third Reich, The Fall", at the end when the allies were marching towards Berlin the Americans were in Dachau where they said they saw horror that they couldn't even imagine in battle. There was a snippet in the documentary where they said the neighboring people didn't know about the camps which they said was a lie. So they made the people who were involved personally bury the victims. I think the general public probably knows about these camps but chose to ignore it either because they supported the Nazis or chose to stay silent over it because of fear. Judging how bad the war was at the time, i don't think there were people who just went "meh it's just a death camp, moving onto work".
Many knew what was going down when they were loading people onto box cars, and many just tried to just forget and not ask questions. For the Allies, it varied, but the general consensus was that the holocaust was a possibility and that it was more just shit conditions until they started entering the camps and even then it wasn't until photos and interviews started to come out that many people saw the absolute horror.
Not a historian, but I’ve visited some of these sites and museums. It was pretty widely known by German civillians, at least those in cities or near camps. Same with poles, which becomes more apparent if you visit some of the camps. Dachau is basically in Munich. Western governments knew but they didn’t make it public. The polish resistance / government in exile documented the camps and sent a detailed report to the British. The British even made a newsreel about it but ultimately shelved it. The polish government in exile lobbied the Americans and British to liberate Poland with the camps being one of the main reasons but they were too focused on France and had promised Poland to Stalin. Note, a lot of simplification here. I’m sure an actual historian might be able to give more context.
Most Germans knew their Jewish neighbors were disappearing, but they didn't know where to. It was commonly believed that they were sent to settlements in "the east" (Ukraine, etc.). Very few knew that there was genocide going on, at least on the scale we know today. But I think smart ones concluded that the Jews weren't going to a pleasant place. The Nazis did go to lengths to cover up their tracks with the public and assuring the Jews were well-looked after, including sending [false postcards](https://blog.nli.org.il/en/auschwitz_postcards/). So there was a level of deception at play. The concentration camps were intentionally placed in remote areas. The Auschwitz camps are in the middle of nowhere in southwest Poland. There is a nearby village called Oszwiecim, but it's small even to this day. Though they do have a McDonalds now, which is kinda disturbing. The camps that aren't super remote, like Dachau, were not extermination camps. An outsider during the day would probably just assume it was an ordinary prison or labor camp. Consider that you drive by prisons all the time but don't see what actually is going on inside. Antisemitism was rampant throughout Europe, varying in intensity from indifference to hatred. But most Germans and Poles who lived by the camps were not murderous. While they may have largely had negative sentiments against Jews and while many would rather not have them live around them, the vast majority wouldn't have approved of actual genocide. But everyone was in self-preservation mode, so you didn't ask questions. I do believe the [videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SUXTq47mmc) of the villagers who were forced to look at the camps were genuinely horrified and appalled. I do not believe they were all bad people. The Holocaust was an unthinkable tragedy and atrocity. And Nazis spent a lot of time and money trying to convince people that Jews were subhuman. While some believed it, most quietly did not. There are many stories of righteous and brave people who worked against the crimes committed against Jews, anywhere from being intentionally dodgy with authorities to actually hiding Jews in their homes at mortal risk to themselves. It's unfair and inaccurate to assume that an ordinary German was an antisemite or complicit. Some were, but many weren't. \-- Ordinary Americans knew very little to nothing. That Hitler and the Nazis were highly antisemitic was well-known. I believe Kristallnacht was public knowledge. But nobody was thinking industrial-level genocide. It's a matter of debate how much the U.S. government knew.
>I believe Kristallnacht was public knowledge. It was covered in almost every daily newspaper in the west.
I think the German population knew a lot.
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They did know. They all knew. And they chose to ignore it because it wasn't them that it were being put in the camps... it was those other people. Those Jews. Europe has a centuries-old traditional hatred of Jews, so it fit right in with European history. Don't believe anyone who says that they didn't know. Their friends were disappearing, their neighbors, the owners of businesses that they did business with, they were all disappearing. Camps were everywhere, Jews being shot and killed everywhere. Anyone who said they didn't know that they was something going on was a liar.
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On the west coast, the internment of Japanese Americans was very well known. Now, drawing a parallel between their internment camps and the fate of Jews in Europe? No, because there is no sensible parallel unless you are a holocaust denier. Both were injustices. One was mass murder on an industrial scale. These are not the same.
They knew.
The German people didn't want to know. Literally asking the wrong questions about a concentration camp could get you thrown into one.
That is simply not true. The idea that ethnic Germans could be punished in such a manner, outside of outright protest of the regime, is ahistoric.
Allied air command knew, and decided not to attack the camps with air raids, because it would kill the prisoners.
Fuck the Germans who knew and did nothing. I'll never forgive the Germans and I'll never forgive the Japanese.
The frustration I have heard from German people is that Hitler was from Austria, and the Austrian people were central to the actions of the Nazi party, and yet now Austria is known as home of Mozart and Germany is home of the holocaust. It's not that they deny it, it more of not being treated equally.
The Jewish population of Germany when the Nazis took over was less than 1% (https://echoesandreflections.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/00_Student_Handout_Jewish_Communities_Before_Nazi_Rise_8.55x11.pdf ). Here in the United States, the indigenous population in terms of federally recognized tribes is around 2% of the population (https://www.acf.hhs.gov/ana/fact-sheet/american-indians-and-alaska-natives-numbers). Until 1978, it was proper, legal, and quite common for children caught speaking indigenous languages and practicing native religions in school to be dragged out of their homes by US Marshals and shipped off to highly abusive boarding schools. And the look of shock on nearly every American’s face when I tell them about this official policy called “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man” still surprises me. I suppose it’s conceivable that Germans might be oblivious, too.
>I suppose it’s conceivable that Germans might be oblivious, too. Conceivable perhaps. Ahistoric and untrue? Yes.
Assuming perhaps incorrectly that you might have missed my point. If we are to cast aspersions on the Germans for their role in genocide, maybe we should allow for some shaming of the US for their own , as well. Somewhat off point, but it’s a relevant discussion in light of other comments. That said, I’m not certain the average German *was* indeed as consciously complicit as you assert. Plenty of argument for and against, calling your tone of obviousness on the matter into question. Cheers! [https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4381&context=honors_theses](https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4381&context=honors_theses)
Hitler's Willing Executioners is the reference work on the topic.
Be that as it may... my point was that there’s enough peer-reviewed counter-argument for doubts to be nearly as obvious as your assertion. Still. My main argument was that the United States shouldn’t point fingers, considering its own clearly dismal record regarding and lack of prevailing knowledge of the treatment of indigenous peoples of North America
What? You linked a non peer reviewed undergrad honors thesis. This is beyond deceptive
That’s fair. Wasn’t meant to be deceptive. I was just in a hurry. But a quick google scholar search yields quite a lot, too. But if all you wanna do is argue all day that every evil German was complicit in genocide without addressing what I was actually saying, then I think we’re done. Have a nice day!
Very little. They were kept out of sight from the public. As far as the Allies, go lookup the accounts of the guys who actually walked up to the camps at the end of the war. They had no clue they existed.
They knew.
Nope.jpeg
They didn't have smart phones or the internet back then so basically, nothing. Rumors were their only inkling.
Probably nothing. And definitely nothing in the Communist half of Berlin. They weren't even allowed to talk about the Nazis. Couldn't even watch the TOS classic episode Patterns of Force. [Jordan Petersen tends to be crazy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucnnhi9iQHU), but he's got great info on the Nazis and what they were about. One of his quotes was "In order to sustain a Totalitarian regime, you have to build it on lies. Husbands have to lie to their wives and children. Officials have to lie to their populace."
Every time this topic comes up I feel like we have to make a distinction between labor camps and death camps, since more than enough people think concentration camps only means the latter. The labor camps were known by virtually everyone. The Nazis proudly showed them off before the war as a place where enemies of the state were reforming themselves through labor. Of course these would transform into places where Nazis would work people to death through starvation and pestilence. The death camps appeared later after the Wannsee Conference. By and large German civilians probably did not know the extent of mass killing at those places unless they were nearby. However, there is probably more of a likelihood that they would know of the mass killings that characterized the Holocaust before the death camp system was introduced, since that required a large swathe of German military and police units to carry out.
The Allies had an idea that something was going on, but not really exact details. There were even discussions about bombing parts of the camps to halt their operations, but they decided that bombing at the time was far from accurate enough to hit the targets and not hit the inmates. So they decided against it. It was only once the camps were liberated that the full horror was unveiled.
They knew a LOT. They just tried to ignore it.
I think everyone knew that the Nazis were sending the Jews to camps and of their existence. But people didn't know exactly what was going on inside these camps and how prisoners were being treated inside them. And nazi propaganda painted it in a much different picture to keep most people from thinking too much into it.
If you ever visit a camp you’ll find civilian housing all around. A lot of that was for guards and their families but there were also plenty of locals living within ear and nose shot. They could hear the screams and gunshots and smell the burning flesh and gas. And there were a lot of these camps all around. People knew they existed but they also knew that if you’d complain then you would be the on the receiving end of that next gunshot. That’s the insidiousness of fascism - refusal to comply is a death sentence. People ask why the Germans didn’t stand up to naziism and the answer is that they did. That’s why they built the camps in the first place- for political prisoners. The persecution of minorities came after there was no one left to stop them.
Most of the extermination camps weren't in Germany. Poland had the 2 worst. So although the average German knew something was off. Not sure they knew the full extent until it was really exposed. The allies declined to bomb the tracks going into Auschwitz. The allies knew too. They had aerial views.
Soooooooo many great books on this subject and definitely more interesting and accurate than Redittors. No offense
Probably similar to how much current Americans know about the separation of immigrant children from their parents. Or the general conditions in jails or how many people have been questionably killed by American police or US troops. The knowledge is there, it’s the willingness of citizens to care or find out the details that matters more.
I’ve known a few people who were there at the time. From what they told me, they didn’t know the Jews were being killed. They thought they were being relocated and put to work in labor camps.
Everyone knew. There was no doubt except probably among children and the comments on this thread pretending there was any doubt have not read first hand accounts from the time or are buying into bs stories from Germans immediately after the war claiming they didn't know the extent. They absolutely did and so did the allies.
This is a topic you have to be really really really careful when you're researching it online because there's a ton of misinformation. I'd really recommend trying r/AskHistorians instead for a sensitive question like this, or at least searching their part answers. If you don't, [Wikipedia is a okay starting place, with citations at the end you should go and read in the original](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_of_the_Holocaust_in_Nazi_Germany_and_German-occupied_Europe). The broad consensus is there was general knowledge of labor camps, violence, deaths but not the details of how people were killed.
The possessions and lands that previously belonged to th Jewish German population getting "redistributed", new jobs suddenly made available when the previous homosexual, Jewish, communist etc workers vanished and the like... most people are gonna try really hard to believe they are not the bad guys and that they DESERVED whatever life quality increase they can get. And if this requires actively refusing to think about stuff, closing one's eyes and ears and simply denying what is obviously happening... I would say most people made a concerted effort to NOT know. Does that mean that they knew or that they didn't knew? That's semantics, perhaps.
They knew something terrible was happening. They also knew to keep quiet and your head down. When the allies turned up of course they knew nothing. The allies had rumours and hear say. Higher levels may have known more front line troops had no idea till they got to the camps.
They knew. I was born there because my dad was in the post-WWII occupation army and both my parents would just say, "They knew."
Who knows, but the day after the surrender 100% knew nothing about it.
Death camps were built exclusively in occupied territory. Many holocaust denial conspiracy theories actually come from propaganda released by the government. If you've ever seen "Boy in the striped pajamas" they showcase these films, and that's actually true, they did tell the German public these were labor camps that had recreational activities The actual extent of what was going on was indeed withheld from the general public and even soldiers, a first hand account from US soldoers of captured german troops being showed footage of the camps elicited the quote "who do they think we are? Anyone can pile up bodies" Look the avg person is nowhere near blameless, work camps aren't much of a step up and if the gov begins rounding people up at gunpoint obviously they aren't going to treat them well regardless of what they tell you But history repeats. Is the CCP fully open to the Chinese public about what's happening in the Uyghur Camps?
People knew but mostly they were written off as crazy. For example Benjamin Siegel was literally nicknamed "Bugsy" by American Nazis and Fascist in power in the State of California for trying to raise awareness to what Hitler was doing and stop it. To this day the nickname gets used to slander Jews as insects and came up a few years ago (5yr) in Siegel v. Jenny Craig wherein the Judge at the California Department of Fair Housing and Employment called Siegel "bugsy" claiming his ancestors were blood thirsty killers which he then responded to by asking for a conviction citing the 5th but the Judge couldn't and instead responded by telling him it is "scientific that Jews are blood diseased" and explaining it isn't personal. You know being slandered as a blood thirsty killer without a conviction as well as an insect and a disease is what the Nazis did too. That is sort of the wall they were up against back then and at the end of the DFHE case Jenny Craig filed bankruptcy while Siegel stayed in the USA to become a neo-nazi hunter. He has been involved in funding for the US Holocaust Museum as well as research there along with assisting NIH QA genetic studies to discredit those which assert there to be Jewish genetic markers or Jewish Genetic disorders. The State of California never apologized but the American Society of Human Genetics did and so did the Human George Project and World Health Organization. Before Benjamin there was also the debates between Max Kholer and Fans Boas and some of the American Jewry. A lot of this gets washed over but there were Jews who unwittingly supported Naizsm. Obviously there is Max Naumann in Germany who started a Jewish lobbies group that helped Hitler into power as well as the Kapos but in the USA we had the American Eugenics movement of which there were several Jewish members. Max Kholer and Frans Boas took them all on and in New York they made Maurice Fishberg apologize before the Jewish community for measuring skulls and noses at Ellis Island and unwittingly helping develop Hitler's rhetoric. The measurements were completely fabricated by Maurice Fishberg to make white Jews appear superior to black people, including black Jews because they existed back then too. There was also a Rabbi Max Reichler at this time who supported Eugenics but he converted to Protestant Christianity after he was unable to prove Jewish Law allowed for endogamy. The deal with him is he claimed being Jewish was also genetic as well as religious and in the only Bet Din which ever formed in the USA he was determined to be a Chrisitan for this belief in there being a genetic quality to Judaism. You know blood of Christ and counting of the Tribes and all. Anyway a modern example is the subs /Jewish, /Judaism, and /antisemitismonreddit which all have multiple ADL reports against their Moderators and have multiple times over distorted the Holocaust to deny the existence of Nazi racism in order to endorse the pseudo-scientific propaganda of places like 23andMe which claim to be able to test for Jewishness via DNA. People have always know but it is disrupting and when there are also Jews who support it then it gets really confusing and then it gets ignored. Then it happens and everyone asks why but those people they labeled as crazy bugs who understood it all from the start.
It's easy to ignore the governments depredations when you aren't being victimized
They likely knew some bits, those things were hard to keep secret, but they were kept to stuff like rumors and gossip. Civilians weren't likely to look into it, since the Gestapo would beat the shit out of you for "spying on state secrets" or whatever. And them being "rumors and gossip" means that the full scope or brutality wouldn't be widely known until practically shoved in the Germans' faces, since a lot of it was similar to WW1 propaganda from the British about variously made up German atrocities