Okay this is a threadjacking from Transportation.
So I’ll look for some more sources, but I saw it in a documentary in my undergrad. I think it was a National Geographic, I’ll look and get back on that. But if you talk to old people, the holocaust was not exactly a secret. People know or at least had an idea about what was happening to their loved ones. You might say, but if Washington new, why didn’t they do something? They were fully aware, it was not our policy at the time to go invade other countries to help people.
People were aware of the fascism to a certain extent, but it wasn’t until the invasion that the allies discovered the scale and cruelty of it. The US wasn’t in a position militarily to do anything about it in the mid-late 30’s and this is part of why it wasn’t part of our policy, plus Japan was of larger concern at the time.
Remember the Allies didn’t know whether June 6, 1944 would succeed, something i’ve also heard older folks mention.
(WW2 History Buff)
There was an interesting interview on Fresh Air last year about the holocaust. Looking at wikipedia seems to confirm most of it. Ghettos and concentration camps were in use in the '30’s, but the mass killings didn’t really start until '42. (some had occured in late '41) Mind you, many died in forced labor or at the hands of death squads in Poland and Lithuania.
And now we’re about to become the socialists with the help of good graphic design propaganda, just like Germany 70 years before, minus the violence. Woohoo! =(