What was going on in those camps in Germany was not common knowledge, and the general population had no idea what was going on. I have been to Dachau and did the "tour" thru the facility, including reading letters from senior officers to higher senior officers. Some of those letters indicated just how difficult it was to get the soldiers involved to actually participate in the killing. One way was to offer the individuals who resisted doing the killing to either join in the killing or join in the "killed".

There was nothing nice about the nazi camps or what took place their.

As I have posted elsewhere, when we visited Dachau there was this incredible feeling of darkness as we went through the gate, and it persisted as long as we were there.

The German wife of a buddy of mine at Ft. Carson told of an incident involving Dachau. There were signs posted all around the place warning of no trespassing, and to stay away. Those signs were some 300 meters from the fences. All the windows in the buildings were painted over so nobody could look in.

One day there was an air strike by the allies that blew out some of the windows. A local resident, walking by, saw some of what was inside. He was so shaken that he visited a local gastehaus, got tipsy and started talking about what he had seen.

He later left to go home, but never got there, and was never seen or heard from again. That object lesson affected a lot of folks around that area. Compared to the total population of German, very few civilians ever had any idea/clue what was going on in those camps.

I have family in Germany who were affected by the war and I have absolute confidence in what we have talked about with respect to the concentration camps. The general population did not know.

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What was going on in those camps in Germany was not common knowledge, and the general population had no idea what was going on

I've met Germans who spout the same thing.

Then again, I don't believe them.

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Originally posted by RHINOWSO:

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What was going on in those camps in Germany was not common knowledge, and the general population had no idea what was going on

I've met Germans who spout the same thing.

Then again, I don't believe them.

Probably time to ask your fellow Americans if they knew about the internment of the Japanese during WWII.

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Originally posted by senza nome:

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Originally posted by RHINOWSO:

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What was going on in those camps in Germany was not common knowledge, and the general population had no idea what was going on

I've met Germans who spout the same thing.

Then again, I don't believe them.

Probably time to ask your fellow Americans if they knew about the internment of the Japanese during WWII.

Are you saying they did know, or did not know? This is a genuine question.

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Originally posted by jhe888:
Are you saying they did know, or did not know? This is a genuine question.

I'd expect that most people were (and are) ignorant of what their governments were doing.

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“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history,” Toland wrote in his book, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography. “He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”

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Originally posted by Elk Hunter:

As I have posted elsewhere, when we visited Dachau there was this incredible feeling of darkness as we went through the gate, and it persisted as long as we were there.

Yes. I visited Dachau in 1982. It's very sobering and hard to shake the feeling that evil is still present there. It's almost palpable.

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Originally posted by senza nome:

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Originally posted by jhe888:
Are you saying they did know, or did not know? This is a genuine question.

I'd expect that most people were (and are) ignorant of what their governments were doing.

The general attitude in this country at that time (Post 12/07/1941) was anything done to the Japanese was OK. My father told me he knew men went to recruitment centers in days following Pearl Harbor attack and said they wanted to enlist and "Kill Japs".

Regarding treatment of POW's by the Japanese during WWII, why not read up on the massacre of captured Australian Pilots in WWII.

recently saw a show where an archaeologist works at a camp in Poland, her work helped find where mass graves were located and the layout of the camp...

the show was interesting, but the people who did the killing and were there to keep the killing machine going were very disturbed...

Never forget.

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Originally posted by GWbiker:
The general attitude in this country at that time (Post 12/07/1941) was anything done to the Japanese was OK. My father told me he knew men went to recruitment centers in days following Pearl Harbor attack and said they wanted to enlist and "Kill Japs".

Are you equating "Kill Japs" with killing a child because he/she is Japanese? You think perhaps there just might be a moment or two of "Shit, it's just a kid!"?

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Regarding treatment of POW's by the Japanese during WWII, why not read up on the massacre of captured Australian Pilots in WWII.

... how about the rape of Nanking?

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Originally posted by senza nome:

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Originally posted by GWbiker:
The general attitude in this country at that time (Post 12/07/1941) was anything done to the Japanese was OK. My father told me he knew men went to recruitment centers in days following Pearl Harbor attack and said they wanted to enlist and "Kill Japs".

Are you equating "Kill Japs" with killing a child because he/she is Japanese? You think perhaps there just might be a moment or two of "Shit, it's just a kid!"?

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Regarding treatment of POW's by the Japanese during WWII, why not read up on the massacre of captured Australian Pilots in WWII.

... how about the rape of Nanking?

Uh, please try to pick a direction in your debate?

I've read very extensively on the Holocaust, from "casual" to deep scholarly works, over the past 15 or so years.

The Reinhardt death camps, Belczec, Treblinka, and Sobibor existed to kill people en masse. Not much is left at all of the sites, but people are amazed at how small they were given the hundreds of thousands murdered and disposed of. It is pretty incredible how much effort they expended to make those camps disappear.

Auschwitz was the hybrid death and work camp, though it had myriad subcamps, most of which were dedicated to slave labor for the war effort.


Healthy men and women were often spared to work, but women with small children were usually kept with their young children and sent to death because the drama of separating them was not worth it. And they perfected the selection, separation, death, and body disposal effort with oodles of practice and planning.


As for did the Germans know about it? find this fascinating. The myth that the Wehrmacht, including the leadership, were mostly innocent (as in "it was as only the wicked SS") been blown apart for a few decades. Most knew or had heard of the Einsatzgruppen shooters and death camps, even if most never saw it. And those soldiers went on leave to see their families.

As for civilians, that is much harder to assess, as the Nazis worked pretty hard to isolate, cover-up, and spread misinformation about the "evacuation of the Jews to the east" and the final solution. And folks tend to turn a blind eye or ear to atrocities they knew of or suspected and did nothing about. I'd say it seems likely many if not most adult Germans had heard about it from soldiers on leave, etc., and they sure as shit knew the Jews were persecuted systematically and disappeared.

Since i have relatives in Lublin Poland i’ve Visited Majdanek a couple of times. They kept it in good condition and my uncle actually designed the memorial there.Sad place, even as close to the city as it is you can hear a pin drop. No birds chirping, terrible what people can do to others. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...k_concentration_camp

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Originally posted by GWbiker:
Uh, please try to pick a direction in your debate?

Yeah, he's all thrust but no vector.

I visited Mauthausen several years ago. They had Dutch Jews, gypsies, Franco's Spanish civil war POW's, Jehovah Witnesses, Russian POW's, career criminals. The camp is impressive, as it is a granite fortress. The prisoners worked in a massive granite quarry. The camp was located just outside the town and the trains rolled through with the condemned. They knew what was going on there.

When I lived in Germany, I met a couple of sweet little old ladies who insisted they knew nothing of the camps. But they lived in the Black Forest area—to my knowledge nothing like that near there.

To the point of how hard it is to murder so many people: in Russia we met a (stunning) young woman engaged to a young American guy living in Siberia. She told us her grandmother had to go help her son shoot people because it was so strenuous to do it all the time. This would have been most likely in the late 30’s.

Well, some of the later camps were straight-up death camps, an evolution of everything they had learned in Poland and at home at the early KZ’s in Germany. Notably, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec. Treblinka was mostly eradicated by the time of liberation but was where people arrived by train, were offloaded and raced down a narrow fenced area with fake houses and straight into a bath house. They were piled in pits within an hour of arrival and cremated en masse. Franz Stangl took over the command of the camp from the guy who was in command while it was founded and turned it from a stinking mess of pits and turned it into a clean, efficient murder factory and basically created the new paradigm for the disposal of all the people the Nazi state wanted to get rid of and his work was copied elsewhere. Had the war continued, there would have been many such camps.

There’s a few documentary series on Netflix, but one of the ones specifically dealing with the death camps and the “Final Solution” in detail is “Einsatsgruppen: The Nazi Death Squads” and worth a watch. It’s not an easy watch, but as adults in this day and age, we all need to know these things.

I’ll say this: I can only shake my head in wonder at anyone who wants to, in any away, try to draw an equivalency to what I talk about above to the US interning Japanese Americans.

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Originally posted by zipriderson:
Why did the Nazis not simply kill all of the Jews upon arrival into the camps? Why keep them alive, and periodically choose who was fit to live and who wasn't? I'd think the labor couldn't have been that valuable.

A morbid thought, I know. Pretty clear even those spared death in those camps were in terrible shape - physically, mentality, etc. Just seems the regime easily could have killed everyone, rather than operating and maintaining the prison camps for years, to the extent they did.

Who the hell sits around and Monday morning QBs the most efficient way to commit genocide?

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Probably time to ask your fellow Americans if they knew about the internment of the Japanese during WWII.

The rounding up of Japanese, mostly American citizens is a stain on the rest of what we did during WW2.
However to compare their treatment to that of the victims of the Nazi's is completely bogus. There were no extermination camps. The intent was to control them until the war ended, not to eliminate their race from our country.
The Japanese were rounded up due to a misguided attempt to stop a fifth column type attack and spying, mostly in the western US. Their property was seized and they were likely kept in sometimes harsh living conditions.
Other Japanese Americans were allowed to serve, but only against the Germans.
My grandfather was a German born naturalized US citizen that served in the North African and European theater, not sent to the Pacific. I get the double standard.
I doubt any of the Japanese American victims of a mostly racist action would be willing to trade places with a Jew headed to Auschwitz.

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Originally posted by RHINOWSO:

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What was going on in those camps in Germany was not common knowledge, and the general population had no idea what was going on

I've met Germans who spout the same thing.

Then again, I don't believe them.

Do you speak German?

How much time have you spent in Germany?

I was there for 11 years, and developed close relationships with a lot of Germans, including WW2 vets, senior German police officers, NCOs in the newly created German army who had served in the Wehrmacht during WW2. Various officials in the German government. Granted those camps were not a typical conversation topic, but enough to know that the average Germans had no idea about those camps.

Whether you believe it/them or not is your choice. What I know about this topic is because I spent a lot of time over there, toured Dachau, read the letters to and from the commandant from and from his seniors in the army. Those letters were official, gleaned from captured records when Dachau was taken by allied forces.

On at least 2 occasions the Germans with whom I was discussing this topic broke down in tears while talking about it. I never met one who admitted being at any of those camps, but I met a lot who were just common people during the war, and they knew nothing about the camps or what happened in them.

While your experience is valid and I appreciate you relaying them here, you hardly touch a percent of the population, much less a significant number.

Not to mention I doubt anyone would admit "Yes, I knew they were killing Jews, Poles, and Russian POWs"to an American. It's a population that hid Nazi's after the war and helped them escape justice for decades.

And there are plenty of historians who provide compelling cases of the complicity of the German population.