That’s nation-state apologia. They just ignored all the evidence because genocide wasn’t even defined yet in International Humanitarian Law, they just didn’t care. Remember that even the US had concentration camps inside the US for foreigners, almost all of them Japanese people. They just felt this was a normal thing armies did to control populations deemed risky (see the ghettoisation of black communities, history of segregation and the systematic wipe out of indigenous tribes). They knew, armies even went directly to the locations of the concentration camps, they already knew where almost all of them were. Like, inside Germany it was not entirely a secret either. German officials boasted about the whole thing in international forums and in propaganda.
The term Genocide, even, was coined by a polish-Jewish lawyer in 1942, Raphael Lemkin precisely because of what was known at the time of what the Nazis were doing against Jewish people and his own experiences surviving the Holocaust.
apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
I mean a Polish resistance fighter willingly infiltrated Auchswitz in 1941 and broke out in 1943 with incontrovertible evidence. They just weren’t taken seriously.
Cyberflunk@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
what a phenomenal story, holy shit