As early as 1933, at the start of Hitler’s reign, the Third Reich established about 110 camps specifically designed to imprison some 10,000 political opponents and others, the researchers found. As Germany invaded and began occupying European neighbors, the use of camps and ghettos was expanded to confine and sometimes kill not only Jews but also homosexuals, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and many other ethnic groups in Eastern Europe. The camps and ghettos varied enormously in their mission, organization and size, depending on the Nazis’ needs, the researchers have found . . .
When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing — first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.
and this:
Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.
“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.”
which doesn’t surprise me one bit. It’s still atrocious and terrifying, that so many people have either lied about them or somehow blocked them to such a degree they don’t even know they were lying. (I think it’s the former, for the record.)
From what I’ve read, concentration camps were common knowledge, along with the fact that that’s where all the Jews and an awful lot of everybody else had gone. The fact that some of the camps were extermination camps, though, might have been less widely known. Horribly, that’s the only aspect that was really new; not-necessarily-always-fatal-by-design concentration camps were a known convention used by Britain and Germany before WWI – though only in Africa.
I can believe that there was probably a lot of doublethink going on, though: when you know that it’s not safe to notice things, ask questions, or remember things, your brain adapts; lie to yourself, pretend to believe it, and gradually you will.