There were whistleblowers, but there just wasn’t much interest in what they revealed:
(To be clear, that person was a war criminal and fully deserved everything that happened to him)
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That is a difficult claim to prove or disprove. By late 1942 the Allies were made aware by the Polish resistance that Jews and others were being exterminated by the Nazis in Eastern Europe. They also have been criticized for ‘doing nothing’. Yet they were deep in a fight for the very survival of western civilization by that point; Hitler had overrun most of Europe and and it looked as if the Nazis would take Russia. The Allies took no military actions against the death camps during the entire war, a subject of much controversy. That aside, what the Allies could have easily done, and did not, was accept Jewish refugees from Europe, even temporarily. There is a lot of blood on a lot of hands…
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What really bothers me is that they knew, yet they refused to reveal it to the public. It’d make a perfect propaganda piece, but they remained silent, almost as if it was convenient to them in some way.
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The British and American governments did issue a joint proclamation at the end of 1942. It was read in the British House of Commons and even published in the N.Y. Times. It didn’t garner lot of attention though, perhaps because the war itself was already so demoralizing and ghastly people were inured. Or perhaps people didn’t want to believe it. Japan had seized much of the eastern Pacific, including Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines, and threatened Australia and India. Stalingrad was still under German siege. At the risk of being blasé, the fate of European Jewry was low on the priority list.
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Thank you, I didn’t know that.
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It’s not common knowledge even among historians. I took two semesters of Holocaust history in university. Right down to the nitty gritty. Not for the feint of heart, but a course that should be mandatory for every Holocaust denier. After the first official announcement, it wasn’t followed up much; I think there were other stories in newspapers, but they were often buried in the back pages. It’s crazy to think that it wasn’t newsworthy. I don’t think there were any newsreels made about it until the war was over, but I’d have to research that to be sure, so your question about why it wasn’t used as Allied propaganda is a good one. You’ve sparked my curiosity. No doubt there were some pretty racist currents in the State Department. Japanese-Americans were in internment camps. And as previously mentioned they were actively thwarting Jewish immigration. Perhaps there is a connection there. And it wasn’t just the United States. No Allied country that I know of opened their borders to Jews during the war. That is an indictment in and of itself.
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And other less vital bodily fluids, collected from children.
Here’s some actual facts surrounding Mr. Cruz and Cassidy’s proposal.
Both of these assholes need to go.
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This blanket public ignorance was claimed by many in early histories, but it’s not defensible with what we know. Concentration camps were everywhere in Germany, not just the purely-for-killing camps in the territories, and masses of ordinary people would have understood that the people sent to forced labor camps had been sent there to eventually die. Nazi propaganda didn’t lay out the worst of it, but after 1933, ordinary Germans would have taken Hitler saying anything like, “I don’t want any Jews killed,” the same way the majority of modern people would take Trump saying “I want to help refugees.” Hitler had already talked of exterminating Jews, it wasn’t a secret that it was an active goal.
Please don’t soft-pedal general German complicity or make excuses for people who went along with atrocities. It wasn’t “few” Germans.
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I didn’t say people weren’t aware of the concentration camps like Dachau, nor were they completely unaware of what went on there. Before 1939, the camps were used primarily to punish ‘political’ prisoners however. Many were tortured and died of overwork or disease, some were executed, but the vast majority survived, unlike the death camps, where survival was extremely rare. It was a police state don’t forget, with neighbours and relatives informing on each other; that is a near impossible mindset for us in open societies to understand. I think people worked actively not to know, just as they did in Stalin’s Soviet Union or today’s North Korea.
That is not actually true. He never mentioned extermination. Knowing what we know now we of course see clearly what he meant, but we have the benefit of hindsight and a much better understanding of the nature of genocide, which was studied by scholars intensely only after the war. One of the maddening things about the Final Solution was you cannot trace it directly from Hitler’s words or writings. And the Nazi state kept meticulous records on everything. The reason is that the Germans knew they were committing a terrible crime and did everything they could to conceal it. The closest thing we have is Goring’s 1941 orders to Heydrich to oversee the ‘Final Solution’. Of course we know Hitler ordered it and we know the S.S. actively pursued of policy of extermination in the east, revising and improving their methods continually. But the true story is one of a haphazard beginning, which grew organically and systematically into the most efficient state killing ever devised.
That is a subject of intense debate in historical circles and is difficult to prove or disprove. Without the experience of living in a totalitarian state, I think we want to be cautious about making too many conclusions. Don’t forget the vast majority of people in Allied countries also didn’t want to believe the death camps existed despite the fact they had been informed after 1942. When the full evidence was finally revealed it came as a great shock to most people. The lesson is we cannot countenance racism and scapegoating of any kind because we now know where it leads. Silence is complicity.
I’m not soft-pedalling anything, rather I believe a full and unvarnished understanding of the Holocaust, and an honest understanding of how genocide can occur, is of the utmost importance if we are to prevent it from happening again.
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Not to mention that all the self-identified Nazis seem to think he’s on their side.
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There’s a huge difference between “not knowing”, and “knowing and not saying”. You obviously recognize that people were acutely aware that they were in a police state that was disappearing people, and people absolutely understood that Jews were being targeted as a class.
People can’t be “hyper-aware that even casually defending Jews meant arbitrary death” and simultaneously “not aware that Jews were being systematically disappeared by the state”.
Just because people in the USSR didn’t openly discuss mass murder by the state, didn’t mean many people didn’t understand it was happening. White-knuckled fearful silence usually indicates the opposite of “I didn’t know what was happening”.
Um, I hope no one thinks this a controversial opinion, but Hitler publicly directed hate and dehumanizing language at Jews…quite a bit? The idea that the average German wouldn’t have deeply understood his basic opinion on the subject is not a good take.
Most people had a general understanding that there was a genocidal project to completely remove Jews from German society, and that project needed the participation of broad swaths of the country. This is true even if individual Gemans never heard the specific name “Auschwitz”, or other details.
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That’s a much more fun edit…
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That is inarguable.
I’m not sure about that. I think there is a bit of hyperbole there. I think we are both trying to get at the nature of how societies can degenerate into genocide, and that’s the important thing. But I am uncomfortable presuming what the average German may or may not have known, or could have done for that matter. A valid question to ask is “what would you have done”? And I don’t have an answer.
That is just stating the obvious.
My understanding of the subject is not a “take” nor an attempt “soft pedal”; I think it is counter-productive to insinuate in that way over differences of historical opinion. Again, I think you are reading back into history somewhat. But we can agree to disagree. Racism was at that time much more widespread, even in the western democracies as I am sure you are aware. Europe had not emerged from a colonial mindset. The direct link from state-sanctioned racism to genocide was not taught in school, nor fully understood by the general public. It seems absolutely crystal clear to us today. Well, some of us.
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Well, Hitler is the only author we have any evidence Trump actually read. (According to Ivana, Trump kept a copy of his speeches by his bedside and read from it.) Every other book Trump claimed to have read, it was pretty clear he hadn’t.
Yeah, but one dude in Antifa punched another dude without sufficient provocation, so obviously they’re a terrorist group!
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Individual theoretical success or failure at resisting Nazi collaboration is kind of beside the point. It’s turning the Holocaust into a sort of personal dilemma. Lots of people who considered themselves moral people, collaborated in genocide. A person can come to the conclusion that under the same circumstances, they’d personally go along with it or not, but that doesn’t make the choice free of moral responsibility or consequence.
Complicity is going along with something, when you have some choice not to.
Most everyday Germans who were not Jews or other targeted minorities had choices. They weren’t choices without risk or hard consequence, but they were choices. We can presume some of the things that an average German would have known, and one of those things is that Jews were being targeted at every level of society. We don’t have to give them the benefit of infinite doubt.
The people preaching hate at Charlottesville are also complicit in propping up anti-Semitism and racism, whatever they tell themselves about why they chose to participate.
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Certainly he is Nazi-adjacent. Close enough for analogy purposes.
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