This is explicitly portrayed in Band of Brothers. They make the locals come and help the inmates, in fact.
As a quick aside the Spanish got in there with the reconcentrados in Cuba first. Although the English term gained popularity during the Boer War, granted.
Incidentally even after the camps were liberated there were many Germans who simply didn’t believe what they were told by the Allies. Having been raised in a Nazi system they believed it was simply all for ‘show’ and to demonise the defeated German people. This belief sadly continues to this day with certain idiots who don’t have the excuse of years of Nazi indoctrination.
@ Little Nemo; there were even SS men who balked at killing Germanised Jews, as opposed to Ostjuden in the occupied territories. Ukrainian extremists were brought in, so that’s another group outside Germany who knew what was happening; [
]('Ukrainians guards took part in extermination' - The Jerusalem Post)
In the East, they also used soviet prisonners or racial deportees to dig up and cremate the bodies from mass graves
I’m recalling a documentary discussion of Wansee and the development of gas chambers. They mentioned that the army was tasked occasionally with extermination jobs in some locales of eastern Europe. The SS Squads were developed because the “morale was low” when the regular army had to murder women and children. Basically, it seems regular soldiers, armed, en masse were not above serious complaining when ordered to do evil jobs. If I were one of their officers, I’d pass on my concerns about troop unrest to the powers above, lest I end up like the US lieutenants in Vietnam.
The SS squads were an initial solution, but they proved incredibly inefficient (both time and money, as well as throughput, so to speak) - small groups driving all over the countryside and shooting large numbers one at a time, plus the effort of digging mass graves.
The “ideal” solution was the gas chambers - march large numbers into a solid room, then also they could guarantee they were all dead before emptying the room. The SS apparently tried several different methods - engine exhaust, for example - before settling on the appropriate(???) poison. There’s a second level of evil that would describe people who work at making mass murder “efficient”.
Concentration camps and prisoner camps were a “normal” thing by WWII. Callous disregard for well-being, occasional severe beatings and deaths, slaughter in the midst of military action, even bombing of civilian areas - these were known atrocities in WWII and may have happened on both sides. When the war disrupted food supplies and such, nobody was surprised if prisoners were the first to go hungry. Racial/ethnic prejudice and religious intolerance were almost normal until the holocaust. I think a lot of people, though, would have trouble believing that something like the holocaust happened, that people could be as evil as that.
This is probably not a topic upon which there can be general agreement even as the Holocaust is a fairly recent historical event.
One thing’s for sure: word got around. Word of mouth,–admittedly not the best way to transmit or receieve news–spread the news of the Holocaust, especially within the Jewish communities of Europe.
It’s true that many German Jews didn’t believe what was going on, but in eastern Europe, where life was tougher, and especially tougher for Jews, it was easier to believe.
Letters would be another way of getting the news out.
To return to word of mouth: it’s true a lot of what one just “hears” is gossip, or what we (Americans) now call urban legend. Even so, when one hears the same stories from different people, people who don’t know one another, people of different religious backgrounds, occupations, and the tales told bear a startling resemblance to one another, what once might have sounded like gossip, gross exaggeration, someone with a bone to pick, starts to sound credible.
I think too, in a western evironment of open discussion, free speech and free press, and (somewhat) open government - we don’t really grasp the situation in a totalitarian regime. No information is forthcoming; everything is rumor. The most bizarre things become wild rumors.
(Recall reading about rumors in Soviet Russia - apparently there were persistent rumors the government was about to withdraw the currency and replace it with “red rubles” and “green rubles” and you would not be able to buy alcohol with red rubles. Apparently this rumor peaked every time an official expressed concern in Prvda about alcoholism).
So people probably retold all sorts of stories to trusted acquaintances - possibly many were true, some were wildly off base, and each got less accurate with retelling. Without official confirmation, who knew what to believe? The live Jews they did see were slave labour doing road repairs, working in factories, etc. I suspect the average citizen could not wander near the camps, and probably did not want to draw attention to themselves.