hey what the fuck
this is not true. i dont know why people think this. the nazi soldiers wholeheartedly believed what they were doing was the right thing and that mechanizing genocide just made it easier. they did not think it was bad at all. they also destroyed hundreds of villages on the eastern front and tortured and murdered countless civilians to boost morale.
Some of the most instantly recognizable images of the Holocaust are from something known as the Stroop Report, a Nazi document detailing the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. In that report were images such as this one, which I'm sure you all have seen before:
The only reason we have these images is because souvenir photo albums were produced for Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, chief of the SS police forces in the General Government (occupied Poland), and SS-Gruppenfüher Jürgen Stroop, who wrote the report. The albums were described in the Nuremberg trials as "the finest example of ornate German craftsmanship, leather bound, profusely illustrated, typed on heavy bond paper". The Nazis absolutely bragged about what they were doing, they celebrated the "liquidations" and "eliminations" of Jews, Poles, Romani and other groups, they made souvenirs. The outside world knew what was going on too, maybe not as to the extent of the slaughter, but they knew. There are British intelligence reports from as early as February 1942 noting that there were mass scale killings being conducted on the Eastern Front, and there are newspaper articles all throughout 1942 and 1943 concerning rumours of mass executions taking place. Everyone knew what was going on, the whole "the German people were kept ignorant of the Holocaust" is a post war fabrication authored by former SS members (cf. "the clean Wehrmacht" myth). Fascist groups can't keep quiet about things like this, why would they? It's their entire raison d'etre, why would they admit to being ineffectual?
