And still, even here in Germany, people played victim, the perpetrators just weren’t the people who “freed” us. There was (and still is to some extent) a “we didn’t know about anything about the holocaust, we’re all victims of the evil Nazis” mentality. This was, of course, most prominent in the years after the war because being a Nazi suddenly had consequences. And it’s obviously not true. While a majority of the population might not have known about death camps or the exact conditions in the camps, they certainly knew about the persecution of the jewish community.
Of course, our history classes do now teach about that (meaning that we did know, even though we liked to pretend we didn’t).
And still, even here in Germany, people played victim, the perpetrators just weren’t the people who “freed” us. There was (and still is to some extent) a “we didn’t know about anything about the holocaust, we’re all victims of the evil Nazis” mentality. This was, of course, most prominent in the years after the war because being a Nazi suddenly had consequences. And it’s obviously not true. While a majority of the population might not have known about death camps or the exact conditions in the camps, they certainly knew about the persecution of the jewish community.
Of course, our history classes do now teach about that (meaning that we did know, even though we liked to pretend we didn’t).