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this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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It's important to remember: few outside of Germany knew that concentration camps existed, certainly not the scale of them or how appalling the conditions were. Consider the amount of information that Gandhi could reasonably have about activity in Germany and Europe. As far as he was concerned, the evil empire dominating his country was just having a costly spat with the evil empire dominating another country, sacrificing the welfare of his people for those of their neighbours in Europe.
The creation of concentration camps was widely advertised in Nazi propaganda, as a show of force to intimidate dissidents. It was the later death camps that were secret: the ones that were designed for no purpose but to do murder at industrial scale.
It wasn't an actual secret. All the Wehrmacht officers knew, all the people in the towns nearby knew, all the cops knew, all the Ally leadership knew.
If the Ally leadership knew, why didn't they use that information as propoganda for their war efforts?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_bombing_debate
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abandonment_of_the_Jews
For whatever reason, they didn't even think it was worth bombing the rail systems that fed the camps.
Roosevelt didn't care. Churchill in particular publicly endorsed Aryan race theory before the war so "not caring" is the most charitable interpretation.
Allied leadership was very wary of running into the issue they did in WW1 - where the exaggeration of German war crimes discredited the propaganda apparatus of Britain. As they became more aware of the nature and extent of the death camps, Allied leadership opted to document evidence for the postwar tribunals rather than engage in a war of accusation and denial against Nazi Germany which could have seriously damaged the short-term credibility of their propaganda efforts.
Whether this was the right choice is another question entirely.
I don't think it was confirmed until they were starting to get liberated, was it? Like it was probably predicted they were there, but that's a pretty tough allegation to put out there and then be wrong on, victors or not.
Polish partisans had been telling Allied Command about them for years.
Iirc there was even an absolute madlad of a Jewish Polish war hero who let himself get sent to a death camp so he could gather evidence and escape to get better evidence.
good point
Bullshit. People knew, they aren't dumb. The polish underground reported on them regularly and even had operatives inside them. People living around them knew they were death camps. You cannot commit such slaughter and somehow magically hide it.
Average people simply didn't have access to information at the scale we now enjoy at that time. Leaders of countries and militaries might know, but unless it was being reported by wire services and in local newspapers, the average person would have had no rational way of finding out about it.
People in Poland knew. That's what I'm certain of. I know because my grandparents mentioned it and they were "average people", far away from the camps.
Okay, people in the US generally didn't though. How is the information going to get to them, when mail took months, phone calls were not realistically possible, and telegraphs were incredibly expensive? Unless it's getting reported by the major news outlets, the majority of people in the US simply didn't have access to that information. Given the propaganda that was coming from both sides at the time, reports might not have even been very believable to the average citizen.