Reply #20: that's basically what I meant... [View All]

your statement "honestly, the horrific discovery was that they were killing them directly rather than merely putting them in circumstances sure to kill them," is exactly what I meant when I wrote "no one believed the Jews would be systematically executed in death camps." I wasn't saying no one believed people were dying in concentration camps or that being sent to a "work camp" was a de facto death sentence, but rather that no one truly believed (or wanted to believe) there would be camps whose sole purpose was to exterminate prisoners as efficiently as possible. Many people of course knew about the concentration camps as far as their being "work and re-education camps," but the idea that they would just kill their prisoners outright was out of the question.

Even many devout Nazis were shocked when they learned of the details of the Final Solution, if for no other reason than it seemed incredibly stupid to kill all these people off without at least getting some free slave labor out of them. It's like if two people had a box of oranges and one squeezed every last drop of juice out of each one before tossing it in the garbage, while the other just threw the whole box in the trash and said, "Done!" The first thing that would come to the other's mind would be "what kind of idiot wastes all that juice?"

So, a whole swath of the population on both sides were shocked at the systematic killings, whether from not believing someone (let alone a whole government) could be so evil or from not believing that Hitler's hatred of the Jews went so deep that he'd hobble the German war machine if need be in order to wipe them from the Earth.