It was first claimed that German Christians didn’t know about the death camps until after the war. At the time they stated they knew of the concentration camps, but not of the atrocities. We now know obviously that this was untrue. They knew. Jewish people who were stigmatised as

sub-human and race-defilers. They knew that these, like other groups and minorities, were being killed out of hand.

They knew that Adolf Hitler had repeatedly forecast the extermination of every Jew on German soil. They knew these details because they had read about them.

They knew because the camps and the measures which led up to them had been prominently and proudly reported step by step in thousands of officially-inspired German media articles and posters. The reports, in newspapers and magazines all over the country were phases in a public

process of "desensitisation" which worked all too well, culminating in the killing of 6m Jews. The only thing many German Christians may not have known about was the use of industrial-scale gas chambers because, unusually, no media reports were allowed of this "final solution".

That it was done in such a large scale. However, by the end of the war, camps were all over the country and many Germans worked in them. Substantial consent and active participation of large numbers of ordinary German knew. One of the issues is that Germans knew about the

concentration camps, but they asked no questions. The people in them were not of importance to them, they had listened to the propaganda. Nazis "seduced" a passive public. What the Nazis actually did was to unshackle and thereby activate Germans' pre-existing, pent-up bigotry".

As early as 1933 local papers reported the killing of 12 prisoners by guards at Dachau, the first to be set up as a "model" concentration camp initially for communists. By 1934 the main and widely read Nazi-owned paper Volkische Beobachter was reporting a widening of policy to

political criminals" including Jews accused of race defilement. By 1936 communist prisoners were no longer mentioned. The SS paper Das Schwarze Korps emphasised the camps as places for "race defilers, rapists, sexual degenerates and habitual criminals".

These words of “rapists” and “degenerates” were used to desensitize those with already bigoted views. Photographs of "typical subhumans" including Jews with "deformed headshapes". They purposely manipulated photographs. The kind of thing

Fox News has done in the past.
In January, 1937 Berliner Borsen Zeitung reported the SS chief Heinrich Himmler as announcing the need for "still more camps" for "those with hydrocephalus, cross-eyed, deformed half-Jews and a whole series of racially inferior types".

In November, 1938 the anti-Jewish pogrom on and after "the night of broken glass" was reported countrywide in papers as heroic. The propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, announced that the "final answer" to the Jewish problem would be by way of government de cree. The Nazi

regime promised to never lie to the German people. That they will only expose the truths. In late 1939, the year war started, newspapers acting on government orders announced a post-8pm curfew on all Jews in case they "molest Aryan women". That November the first summary

executions of "anti-socials" by police without trial were reported. Papers were told to report these clearly and forcefully. In March, 1941 the Hamburger Fremdenblatt reported the first mass auctions of possessions of detained or killed Jews.

Hamburg became the wartime clearing house and Gellately says at least 100,000 citizens bought at the auctions.