Repeat to Fade wrote:Hardly since years later a third of Germans would still agree with the idea.
Seriosuly, what poll is this based on? 30% today?
They couldn't, didn't and didn't need to hide it. The fact that they didn't publicise it doesn't mean the population wasn't aware and in support of it, it also doesn't support the idea that it was in anyway secret.
I'm sorry, Repeat to Fade, but what you are saying just isn't accurate. The SS and SD definately wanted the specifics of the final solution kept secret. They even had had propaganda videos showing "model" concentration camps to dispell growing rumours by 1944.
To say that they didn't bother hiding the holocaust is inaccurate.
You make it sound like the Reich Chancellry issued a Press Release.
Then why after the war did we seemingly absolve them of this guilt and allow the myth to be perpetuated that they were innocent unknowing bystanders?
Well, there are two questions here; #1. to what extent do you hold an entire people responsible for the actions of their leadership class (even if we say everyone who voted for the Nazis knew about and supported for the holocaust, you are left with less than 50% of the voting and general population)? and #2. to what extent do you hold a country responsible for the actions of the generations that came before them?
Now, whatever you think of the above, I think neither really factored in. The Allies and Soviets (belatedly) decided to prop up a de-Nazified Germany, clearly emphasizing a difference between the average "German", the Nazis, and the military leadership in the very final stages of the war (March and April 1945). They both sought to destroy the military and political leadership, but win over the German public.
The real reason for this is that both Allies and Soviets by this point were becoming paranoid about each other and thought that very soon they'd be fighting a war. Germany became the frontline of this propaganda war, with the Allies being no different from the Nazis to the Soviets and the Soviets being no different from the Nazis to the Allies.
You win a war by winning people to your cause, absolving them of guilt and convincing them that they were oppressed and they are about to be again.
Really, if you want to see a much more obscene version of this, look at Italy. While Italy had a much more violent and widespread resistence to the fascists, the fact is that any history worth anything knows that Mussolini was extremely popular, and Italians looked the other way when he brutalized Libya and Ethiopia. IT was only when Allied bombers appeared overhead and the Italian miltiary machine (if it can even be called that) collapsed that his popularity started tanking.
Yet if you read Italian History these days, much more so in Italy, Mussolini's rise to power is portrayed as something opposed by the majority of Italians, who are portrayed as the ones to topple him. EVEN THOUGH it was the King of Italy and disgruntled fascists who toppled him because of the success of Commonwealth and later Allied troops in humiliating Italy's armies.
Now it doesn't take a genius to imagine why Italian politicians and the general population wanted this; they wanted to rewrite history so they were a) on the winning side and b) not responsible for precipitating the deaths of millions. The question is, why did we the allies allow them to get away with this? SIMPLE. Italy was, moreso than any other NATO member, on the verge of democratically becoming a Soviet State. So we were quite willing to look the other way when they started spouting this nonsense as long as the nonsense binded them to NATO as opposed to the Comintern.
- WHD