http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,439168,00.htmlGermans knew of Holocaust horror about death camps
<snip>Gellately began his inquiry after finding a press report -published as routine - of a woman reported to the Gestapo for "looking Jewish" and allegedly having sex with a neighbour. "For decades my generation had been told that so much of the terror had been carried out in complete secrecy," he writes.
His media trawl, with a research assistant, found that as early as 1933 local papers reported the killing of 12 prisoners by guards at Dachau, the first to be set up as a "model" concentration camp initially for communists. On May 23 the Dachauer Zeitung said the camp was Germany's most famous place and brought "new hope to the Dachau business world". By 1934 the main and widely read Nazi-owned paper Volkische Beobachter was reporting a widening of policy to other "political criminals" including Jews accused of race defilement. By 1936 communist prisoners were no longer mentioned: in a photo-essay in the SS paper Das Schwarze Korps emphasised the camps as places for "race defilers, rapists, sexual degenerates and habitual criminals".
This broadening mission, as Gellately calls it, was reflected in Volkische Beobachter photographs of "typical subhumans" including Jews with "deformed headshapes". For the first time their detention was said to be permanent. In January, 1937 Berliner Borsen Zeitung reported the SS chief Heinrich Himmler as announcing the need for "still more camps" for "those with hydrocephalus, cross-eyed, deformed half-Jews and a whole series of racially inferior types".
In November, 1938 the anti-Jewish pogrom on and after "the night of broken glass" was reported countrywide in papers as heroic. The propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, announced that the "final answer" to the Jewish problem would be by way of government de cree, according to Volkische Beobachter
In late 1939, the year war started, newspapers acting on government orders announced a post-8pm curfew on all Jews in case they "molest Aryan women". That November the first summary executions of "anti-socials" by police without trial were reported. Papers were told to report these clearly and forcefully. In March, 1941 the Hamburger Fremdenblatt reported the first mass auctions of posses sions of detained or killed Jews. Hamburg became the wartime clearing house and Gellately says at least 100,000 citizens bought at the auctions.
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