The US population wasn't totally anti-Hitler at first, mostly because Hitler didn't go full evil until pretty far into the War.
The early parts of fascism looked good. Germany was growing economically when the US was shrinking in the Great Depression.
The early mistreatment of minorities was swept under the rug. Remember, in 1935 the United States could probably be described as a lite-apartheid state. Jim Crowe wasn't all that different than Nuremburg laws.
The deathcamps came only after the war started. And it is pretty clear nobody believed the actual horrors going on in them.
It's easy to say that the world kept their eyes shut, but even Jews on train cars to Auschwitz didn't know they were going to an extermination camp.
But Germany was a first world, educated, fairly liberal country. If the holocaust could happen there, it could happen anywhere on earth.
> As for the implementation of the "Final Solution" and the murder of other undesirable elements, the situation was different. The Nazis attempted to keep the murders a secret and, therefore, took precautionary measures to ensure that they would not be publicized. Their efforts, however, were only partially successful. Thus, for example, public protests by various clergymen led to the halt of their euthanasia program in August of 1941. These protests were obviously the result of the fact that many persons were aware that the Nazis were killing the mentally ill in special institutions.
> As far as the Jews were concerned, it was common knowledge in Germany that they had disappeared after having been sent to the East. It was not exactly clear to large segments of the German population what had happened to them. On the other hand, there were thousands upon thousands of Germans who participated in and/or witnessed the implementation of the "Final Solution" either as members of the SS, the Einsatzgruppen, death camp or concentration camp guards, police in occupied Europe, or with the Wehrmacht.
> The mass of ordinary Germans did know about the evolving terror of Hitler's Holocaust, according to a new research study. They knew concentration camps were full of Jewish people who were stigmatised as sub-human and race-defilers. They knew that these, like other groups and minorities, were being killed out of hand.
> They knew that Adolf Hitler had repeatedly forecast the extermination of every Jew on German soil. They knew these details because they had read about them. They knew because the camps and the measures which led up to them had been prominently and proudly reported step by step in thousands of officially-inspired German media articles and posters according to the study, which is due to be published simultaneously in Britain and the US early next month and which was described as ground-breaking by Oxford University Press yesterday and already hailed by other historians.
IMO that is a lot of should have known, and maybe that is true.
But there is a reason the Jews didn't really fight back. They had no idea at the scale of death going on. They figured they were really being resettled in the east.
The reports of extermination camps were considered just rumor or propaganda.
Agreed that the US wasn't initially anti-Hitler. Something that was particularly appealing to US businessmen was that Hitler was crushing the unions and destroying workers rights. (the NSDAP had "workers" in its name, but was deliberately anti-workers).
The early parts of fascism looked good. Germany was growing economically when the US was shrinking in the Great Depression.
The early mistreatment of minorities was swept under the rug. Remember, in 1935 the United States could probably be described as a lite-apartheid state. Jim Crowe wasn't all that different than Nuremburg laws.
The deathcamps came only after the war started. And it is pretty clear nobody believed the actual horrors going on in them.
It's easy to say that the world kept their eyes shut, but even Jews on train cars to Auschwitz didn't know they were going to an extermination camp.
But Germany was a first world, educated, fairly liberal country. If the holocaust could happen there, it could happen anywhere on earth.