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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

Not justifying what they did but thought that most people did not know what the Germans were doing until after the war was over. Then they found out about the real purpose of the concentration camps and the ovens.[/quote]

Well, no. Many Germans may not have known everything. But if there was a German who didn't know anything, it was only because they willfully refused to know. [/quote]

The killing camps were not in Germany but in Poland and Ukraine (were much of Europe's Jewish population lived). What happened in these camps became widely known only after WWII. Germans could or even should have noticed the disappearance of Jewish neighbors and colleagues, especially in cities with sizeable Jewish populations. But many Jews also emigrated (forced), and unless one was familiar with their circumstances, it may not always have been clear why someone wasn't there any more. 
    
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I don't have any patience with this argument, really. Most Germans did not know all of the details. But they definitely knew that something bad was going on. People disappeared into the East and never came back. And soldiers came home from the East and told people what was happening.[/quote]

They surely knew "something bad" was going on. There was the Kristallnacht, Jews were removed from government service and liberal professions, Jewish shops closed, Jewish properties were sold off by Nazis, and the former owners were not there no more.

The broad population did not know though that Jews went to killing camps. This was a revelation to the German civilian public as much as to the allied secret services after WWII. German soldiers had little to do with the camps; they were run by the Nazi bureaucracy, not the army. [/quote]

Well to be fair it's almost impossible to say what "everybody" knew or what most people "should" have known. And then to add to that, it can be hard to parse out whether people heard rumors that they later ignored out of disbelief or fear. But there is a great deal of documentary evidence suggesting that various aspects of the Final Solution (the ghettos, the work camps "out East," the fact that the old, very young, and sick were being killed at these camps, the mobilized killing squads on the Eastern front, etc.) were known to a fairly large number of people, including regular Germans AND top officials in our government.

I think what tended to surprise the world at large afterwards was the sheer magnitude of the operation when all of these different pieces were finally put together.[/quote]

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