Concentration camps yes, but Death Camps with gas chambers and crematoria, not intended to hold people for any longer than it took to “exterminate” them, were new. Even slave-labor camps of the sort where inmates were starved and worked to death were frowned upon, not considered normal. That’s why the Nazi lied, and created false camp films for propaganda.
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.
Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
dustyData@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Agree, but it was just how normalized internment camps were (Hitler claimed he got inspired by US ideas of population control). Even though there weren’t executions, the conditions were so bad that at least 1800 out of 120 thousand people died.
Deceptichum@quokk.au 11 hours ago
Based.
Honestly it sounds like we need to go back to his definition of genocide. So many have since been led to believe it can only look like a Zyklon B shower.