The immediate reaction of German POWs upon being forced by the US Army to watch to the uncensored footage of the concentration camps shot by the US Signal Corps.
People often forget that most of the German troops had no idea about what was going on, they weren’t all fanatic Nazis bent on genocide, they were just regular soldiers who answered the call when their country went to war.
Actually, recent research has seriously called into question how ignorant not only German soliders, but German civilians were of what was going on. There were more than 42,500 institutions where victims of the Holocaust were held prisoner, tortured, murdered, sterilized against their will, experimented on, and forced into slavery and prostitution. 42,500. Many of these were people German troops came into direct contact with on a regular basis. Many of those troops were directly involved in imprisoning people, torturing them, and killing them. It’s not as if Hitler personally corralled people into gas chambers.
Millions of people aren’t systematically discriminated against, segregated, forced into ghettos and servitude, and made the subject of vitriolic national rhetoric for over a decade—and then vanish from that society—without anyone knowing. I’m calling bullshit. Even outside Germany, people knew what was happening. Maybe some people didn’t realize the extent to what was going on, but I’m guessing (an educated guess corroborated by mountains of research) most people had a pretty good idea and didn’t feel all that bad about it until they got caught.
So no. It’s bullshit that millions of people are enslaved and tortured and killed and even though it was in the German press and it was carried out by thousands of German troops and witnessed by German civilians and people all over the world were aware, to some degree, of what was happening, and German soliders and civilians were totally innocent when it came to what happen. No fucking way.