| It's absolutely false that "nobody really knew about such camps". https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/07/how-horrific-things-c... https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/10903 > Throughout World War II, the American media published and broadcast timely, detailed, and accurate accounts of what was happening to the Jews in Europe. The New York Times alone printed nearly 1,200 articles about what we have now come to call the Holocaust, about one every other day. > The articles in the Times and elsewhere described the propagation of anti-Semitic laws in German allied countries; death from disease and starvation of hundreds of thousands in ghettos and labor camps; mass executions in Nazi-occupied Russia; and mass gassings in Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek. The articles also indicated that these were not isolated incidents, but part of a systematic campaign to kill all the Jews in Europe. > And yet, at the end of the war and for decades afterward, Americans claimed they did not know about the Holocaust as it was happening. How was it possible for so much information to be available in the mass media and yet simultaneously for the public to be ignorant? > The reason is that the American media in general and the New York Times in particular never treated the Holocaust as an important news story. From the start of the war in Europe to its end nearly six years later, the story of the Holocaust made the Times front page only 26 times out of 24,000 front-page stories, and most of those stories referred to the victims as “refugees” or “persecuted minorities.” In only six of those stories were Jews identified on page one as the primary victims. |
Also - I wouldn't meant to indicate that 'nobody knew that Jews were having trouble in Germany' - but rather the true horrors of the situation.
The 'final solution' was not fully on until the world was fully at war, essentially. Millions of people are dying all over the world ... and Americans started fighting and dying on mass (i.e. front page news, and everyone knows someone personally who's dead) - this is going to be the visceral thing people are concerned with. The 'holocaust' is only a chapter of that.
There was no reference point for 'death camps' - since American Japanese were interned in camps - I suggest that's probably what many were thinking of.
And before the war, during the 1930's ... this was an international issue. Very few of the proles are concerned with international affairs. Internment of the Jews in the 1930's I think would be comparable to victims of African wing of ISIS etc. It's tragic, but it's not something we reference every day.
And of course - farmers and townsfolk don't read the NYT! There was no 'mass media' as we know it. No television. Unless it was on some kind of national broadcast, constantly, it was not going to be in the hearts and minds of regular people.
And of course, once the 'final solution' was scaled up - Americans were doing something about it, they were literally fighting and dying while liberating such camps (!). So I'm doubtful of the premise that Americans 'knew but didn't care' while they were quite actively working against the Nazis.