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this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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No Stupid Questions
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My grandma worked for the Nazis near a bad concentration camp near the end of WW2. She knew that it was "bad" in the camp. And when she got some really malnourished "rapists and murderers" to help with moving some furniture she didn't associate them with the camp.
The worst she experienced was a Jewish secretary being murdered by her boss because he "lost his temper". Happened while she was away so she didn't know more.
And by her account most of the guys were huge idiots. And still she only found out about the real extent of the camps after the war.
The Germans abandoned the Minsk ghetto before the end of the war and left about five thousand piled up charred bodies in the middle of town because it wasn't a real death camp and they didn't have cremation ovens, so that's what you're grandmother apparently didn't notice.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/minsk
She lived in the non-Jewish parts outside of the proper city and worked in an ex-Sowjet party building. When she arrived it still had Trotzki, Lenin and Stalin statues. And even then she couldn't move freely and had to give the correct passwords when moving from one part of the city to another.
And still life went on in Minsk. Most people there just had to keep on living. Farmers still regularly brought wares. Even theatres and cinemas were still working even when good food was scarce and expensive.
She did mention seeing fires at night in the distance. That was officially attributed to the rebels. That was easy to believe for her since some of her colleagues died from hidden bombs.
The closest she came to the actual crimes was when she got a new bed from the storage where all the furniture from the murdered people were stored. Though back then those were from "defeated Russians".
With the way she didn't shy away from describing atrocities she did see (before the Nazis, from family members and of course during the war) I believe that she did not know what was happening in the ghetto. The way she wrote she didn't even know when she wrote it that these people were killed right in the city. She (and me before you showed me) thought there was a camp near the city. But not a whole part of the city itself.
I'd honestly like to see an editorialised edition of her memoirs published that showed what really happened around her. To put it all into perspective.
Minsk was invaded by the Germans in 1941 and then re-invaded by the Soviets in 1944 with large bombing campaigns on both sides. Literally 85% of the city was flattened during the war with about 90,000 civilian casualties and close to half a million military casualties during that period, and that doesn't even count the people killed by the Nazis in the ghetto.
Sounds like your grandmother is either telling stories or she was a tourist that didn't spend much time there.
Edit:
Here is a map where you can see that the ghetto and camps represented like half the entire city and all the German military buildings are within one or two city blocks of it. They make this information readily available specifically because of people like your grandmother who pretended this shit didn't happen the way it did:
https://www.jchb.org/neveragain-minsk-ghetto-map/
But she did not pretend it didn't happen. Where are you getting that from? She just never saw it, or at least the full extent. She did see starved prisoners. She saw the furniture at the opera. Just because the killings happened in a part of the city she wasn't allowed to visit doesn't mean they didn't happen.
And propaganda was trying their darnedest to keep it that way for most people. Even high ranking officers were boasting about how they were just about to beat the Sowjets the day before they retook the city.
She is telling the same story that most Nazis told, so its not really that hard to grasp.
Whelp, guess that means we can be sure to find out about mass killings in El Salvador or Alligator Alcatraz or wherever right away because it will be so obvious.
You think they could shoot 5,000 people in the middle of your city in the middle of the day and you wouldn't notice?
Lol, no, sorry to say that, but your grandma was a collaborationist and she most certainly knew what was happening, she surely just pretended otherwise to escape judgement.
She was naive. She asked a friend who was about to have an audience with Hitler to tell him about how undersupplied the camp in Minsk is. Because in her mind surely the Führer wouldn't let these people needlessly suffer. Hitler told the friend not to listen to "those rumors".
No one is THAT stupid without a significant amount of denial or complicity, and both state imply knowing, deep down, what's happening. If she called the victims "rapists and murderers", she simply was a nazi.
She did not call them rapists and murderers. That's what they told her. That's the lie they told people outside of the camps to justify any cruelty. In this instance the extended lie was that they were coming from some other "normal" prison and not from the camp.
Ok, my bad, I thought she called them "rapists and murderers".
I just re-read that. The official story they got was that they were from a Sowjet prison. Not even a German one.