To say that the Germans were the only ones responsible for the Holocaust would be a mistake. They had plenty of willing helpers in the occupied countries and outside the occupied territory. Regardless of what some governments say nowadays, that their nations had no part to play in the biggest genocide ever committed, they are only fooling themselves. Their revision of history will inevitably come back to haunt them.
However, one can also not deny that most Germans must have known what was happening around them. Maybe they ignored it out of fear or ignorance, but they would have known something wasn’t right. At the end of the war and shortly afterward, the Allied Forces forced German civilians to witness the crimes done in their name, and then they were forced to bear witness to the bodies of those murdered and had not been cremated.
In the photo above, the U.S. Army discovered the Nazi atrocities.
Four German civilians involuntarily carry a casket containing the body of a Polish Jew—killed by Nazi SS troops—to its final resting place following orders of U.S. Military Government officers. Crosses line the path marking the resting place for German soldiers killed on various war fronts.
American soldiers of the U.S. 7th Army forced boys, believed to be Hitler Youth, to examine the boxcars containing bodies of prisoners starved to death by the SS.
Under orders from the U.S. Army, Austrian civilians dig mass graves for corpses found in Gusen.
In the above photograph, the Nordhasuen residents are digging mass graves for murdered prisoners at a concentration camp. The photo was taken in April 1945 by a member of the U.S. Army, which liberated the camp.
Burgsteinfurt residents mandatorily watch the film, Atrocities, the Evidence about the Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald Concentration Camps. 30 May 1945.
Some citizens had no remorse. The woman in the photograph above was ordered to leave because of her laughter during the film Atrocities, the Evidence.
An overwhelmed German girl walks past the exhumed bodies of some of the 800 slave workers murdered by the SS guards near Namering, Germany. The bodies had been exhumed and laid here so that townspeople could see the work of their leaders. They buried the bodies again a few days later. 17 May 1945.
Sources
https://www.annefrank.org/en/timeline/172/german-citizens-see-the-consequences-of-war-crimes/
https://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/gallery/Confront.htm#77021
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