Reply #33: The Final Solution was kept a secret by the Nazis... [View All]

[Violet_Crumble]

At times it was a clumsily kept secret, but it was never publicly admitted to in Germany or elsewhere. The Nazis didn't feel any shame over what they were doing, but they didn't trust the German people to understand why it was happening, and they were almost obsessive about public opinion at the time. While participants at the Wannsee Conference would have been in no doubt about what was to happen, the non-Nazi civilian leaders would have been a reasonably small number of high-level civil servants who passed the orders down the line to their underlings...

I know less about Italy under Mussolini than I should, but I thought Mussonlini's form of fascism wasn't nearly as fanatically racist as that of the Nazis. While nasty creatures, not all fascists were into genocide. And the Final Solution was genocide and not just the persecution and discrimination that fascists were renowned for. What I object to and what is historically inaccurate is the recent posts in this thread accusing Arab leaders of being in cahoots with the planning and/or execution of the Final Solution. Admiring fascism would be a claim I think would be sound, but to claim assistance in the Final Solution is something totally different...

There's a book I read last year called 'The Terrible Secret' by Walter Laquer. It gives an excellent look at how and when people found out about the Final Solution, what the reaction was to what they were hearing, and what if anything was done. He covered the German people, neutral and occupied European countries, Britain, the US, and Jewish communities outside of Europe. I don't recall him covering Arab countries, but I was kind of focused on some of the other ones I mentioned, so I probably missed entire chunks of book in the process...

Violet...