[cicero91]

@william dougherty: that's what i tried to say all the time...

[William_H_Dougherty]

@william dougherty: that's what i tried to say all the time...

You must be smarter than me .

I tend to think anybody can be reasoned with, despite repeated evidence to the contrary. Ah well...

- WHD

[cicero91]

You must be smarter than me ;).

I tend to think anybody can be reasoned with, despite repeated evidence to the contrary. Ah well...

- WHD

this is what you allege
in fact, it might be difficult to proove all emerged knowlegde when witnesses dying more and more and the dirct reference gets lost...

[Thunderhawk]

There was a lot of labour brought into Germany from Eastern Europe, many of them came through or were from areas that had the death camps and Einsatzgruppen activities. Those labourers would spread the word amoungst themselves and eventually such stories would get out to the general public. Such stories would probably be ignored considering who they came from, just as allied leaflets were dismissed as enemy propaganda, but they would be out there.

Soldiers talk amoungst themselves. Rumour would spread within the ranks and when they returned home on leave some would tell their families or the girls they hooked up with.


If a person chooses to not believe any story that vilifies their own side, such action would probably be considered denial. But if they naturally believe such stories to be false and then dismiss them as inane, is that still denial or does it become ignorance?

[William_H_Dougherty]

There was a lot of labour brought into Germany from Eastern Europe, many of them came through or were from areas that had the death camps and Einsatzgruppen activities. Those labourers would spread the word amoungst themselves and eventually such stories would get out to the general public. Such stories would probably be ignored considering who they came from, just as allied leaflets were dismissed as enemy propaganda, but they would be out there.

It is reasonable to suggest that there were rumours of all this abounding, but you have to realize that the State was also trying to counter these rumours as well.

Many Germans thought that the Einsatzgruppen/Vorkcommandos were a special anti-partisan force, and that the "Death Camps" were just larger versions of the run of the mill "Concentration Camps", no different (German Propaganda would allege) from the Internment Camps in North America for citizens of Japanese, Italian, and German descent.

Soldiers talk amoungst themselves. Rumour would spread within the ranks and when they returned home on leave some would tell their families or the girls they hooked up with.

When the Gestapo paid particular attention to what a) soliders told their families and b) families told their soldiers? You are right that the rumours would have spread within the military ranks, but the wehrmacht was really a closed off social club. Once within it, you could get away with talking a certain amount of $h!t against the State, but the second you wrote some of that down in a letter to your family you'd find yourself in a criminal battalion. Additionally, all these soldiers would have heard are rumours, because the Heer took pains after the 1939 Invasion of Poland to adopt a "see no evil" approach to holocaust (they couldn't wait to hand over control of territories to the SS so that because they wanted to wash their hands of any responsibility for unsoldierly treatment of civilians).

If a person chooses to not believe any story that vilifies their own side, such action would probably be considered denial. But if they naturally believe such stories to be false and then dismiss them as inane, is that still denial or does it become ignorance?

A little bit of column a, a little bit of column b. As I have argued all along, what they did know should have been enough. I'm merely positing that they didn't know the entirity of the details behind the holocaust, as some have been suggesting here.

- WHD

[zinga]

It's funny. Since the end of the war historians have been trying to figure out how such a highly educated people could follow Hitler. If they were so highly educated, you can assume that they had at least a passing knowledge of Mein Kampf and the speeches of Hitler. You don't have to read between the lines to understand that Hitler wasn't sending Jews to re-education camps and attempting mass conversions.

[El Gilroy]

Unless every German alive during that time that I've met so far (and I met a lot of Germans) is a very good liar, they knew absolutely nothing about the existence, and even less about the actual nature, of the camps.

[Rich]

Sorry but most people don't care about trivia? When half a million children Iraqi were murdered under American led sanctions do you think most American or British people gave a fuck? If they even heard of the claims at all, the vast majority couldn't be arsed to find out whether it was true. They had far more important issues to think about, economic issues like the price of gas and profound moral issues, like had their president stuck his hand up his secretaries skirt? When the US invaded Iraq in 2003 a huge percentage of Americans though that Iraq was behind 9/11. This was a democracy with free speech and a free press. Germany on the other hand was a totalitarian police state. The gas chambers didn't get into full swing until 1942. Stressed and distracted as the average turn of the millennium American was, do you not think WWII Germans had a just little more to worry about. I'm sure there main concern was that they might lose war, and that millions of Russians, Poles and God knows who would be marauding through Germany, mercy and civil rights were not likely to be high on the invaders agenda. When the claims about what is now known as the holocaust were first made by the western allies, most people on the far left in the west disbelieved them. How Germans were meant to get to the facts God only knows. We live in the age of the internet, face book and multiple 24 news channels, buts still difficult to work out today what's going on Libya. Lets remember all sorts of wild claims had been made about German atrocities in WWI.

Now lets engage our brains here. Suppose as a German you did have a suspicion that, your government was cold bloodily murdering hundreds of thousands of even millions of people. Unless you're a total fucking retard, you're going to keep your mouth firmly shut, unless you fancy joining those alleged victims. The Nazis set about indoctrinating young people as soon as they arrived in power. This meant by then of the war anyone under the age of 25 was likely to have spent time in the Hitler youth. Young people are easily indoctrinated, but what's more it creates a situation where parents can't even trust their own children.

[Smilin' Dave]

If they were so highly educated, you can assume that they had at least a passing knowledge of Mein Kampf and the speeches of Hitler. You don't have to read between the lines to understand that Hitler wasn't sending Jews to re-education camps and attempting mass conversions.

Well, Mein Kampf sold fairly poorly and its believed that a lot of Nazis probably bought the thing and never read it, so it might not be too far a stretch to suggest they didn't really know much about its content. Similarly Hitler was very specific about what was actually going on in his speeches. For example I'm pretty sure Jews getting sent to camps didn't get mentioned much mention, if any at all.

What's this about mass conversion?

[Xotica]

When American soldiers liberated the Ohrdruf concentration camp in Germany (the first such camp discovered), what they reported was so disturbing that General Eisenhower came to see for himself. Eisenhower in turn then ordered Bradley and Patton to come to Ohrdruf immediately. In his memoirs, Bradley recounts that after touring the camp, Patton vomited repeatedly behind a wooden shed.

Eisenhower could not believe that the residents of Wiemar knew nothing of what was going on as they claimed, so he ordered all of the German townspeople to tour the camp and view the carnage. Not only that, Eisenhower was so incensed that he ordered these civilians to collect and bury hundreds of rotting corpses stacked and strewn throughout the camp, and to close the open mass graves.