General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: We are at war. You can pretend we can be one country again, but we can't. [View all]nadinbrzezinski
(154,021 posts)and could not conceive of it. There were different levels of awareness, just like every other genocide.
The people carrying it out, knew. Their families, especially those who lived at the camps, knew.
The people who bordered the concentration camps, had a knowledge that something was happening, from probably real knowledge to just something bad.
The owners of things like the chemical companies that used slave labor, knew.
Von Braun, knew... the V-2 program used slave program.
The train conductors knew.
The average man or woman in the street not meeting any of these conditions, or married to any of the people in the above group... let me ask you a question, before the whistle blowing at Abu Graib did you think for certain anything like that was going on? For the record, when it came out, I was not shocked, saddened, but not shocked. The transports to the East were done under the same kind of state secrecy.
But in the 1930s the number of people who knew was smaller, and since people did come out of the reeducation camps... I suspect to inoculate those who might think worst thoughts, and at the same time terrify them... that is why I said what I said about the 1930s.
By the 1940s, which is the basis of the thesis by the way, the universe of people who knew was larger.
As to government officials, as early as 1941 the US Government knew about it, from folks who actually made their way to the West... and we chose not to do a thing. Some say we chose not to believe it. Some have accused the US Government of unwilling participation in the holocaust. Suffice it to say antisemitism was rampant in the 1940s in the US... should we make that charge too? It was known all the way to the President. And so did the Churchill Government, by the by.