re: #48 lostlakehiker

But they didn’t justify it, nor even admit it. Not to their own populace at large, and certainly not to the wider world.

Yes they did. Everyone in Germany knew what was going on.

THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

…

The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, “Germanizing” prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.

In Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps and so-called Jew houses, while Hamburg held 1,300 sites.

Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.

“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.”

Postwar Germany did a very good job of whitewashing the average citizen’s involvement and culpability in the atrocities that took place, creating a pretense that like Sgt Schultz they “knew nothing.” However recent research and documentation has put lie to those denials, they knew.