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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.