AskHistorians

The details were all on media blackout.

Most of the big death camps were deliberately located in the "east," mainly in Poland. This kept them out of "civilized" Germany, where they could raise a stink. Nazi ideology viewed all Slavs, including Poles, as sub human, but with various degrees of sub-humanness, depending on their ridiculous criteria. That gave them a "justification" for locating the mass murder in Eastern Europe.

Of course, your average German knew that all the local Jews in his local area had disappeared in a process at some point. But if he kept his nose out of the ugly business, he didn't need to be bothered with the particulars of what happened to them.

For a while the Nazi party was advertising it was going to set up a Jewish colony in Madagascar, or some other nonsense. Meanwhile, the true nature of the Final Solution was never publicly announced, and Adolf Hitler never signed his name to any policy paper or order on it.

Late in the war, when they were losing ground fast, the Nazis took many steps to destroy records and evidence of their atrocities. They very well knew that what they were doing was wrong.

In contrast, the US federal government publishes statistical reports with total numbers of immigration arrests, detentions, and deportations, including by country. Individual immigration detainees can be located to a specific facility at any time using a government website, where they can be contacted by telephone and where they have the constitutional right to meet with their attorney. And while there are a bunch of problems with the website working right or glitching out, it usually is reported to work correctly much of the time. And while many immigration lawyers have alleged that ICE is shuffling their clients around the country to make it hard to reach them, these specific problems do get attention and usually some resolution from the courts.

In short, while the current US deportation campaign is inhumane, immoral, and illegal (in some ways at least), it is not comparable in any way, shape, or manner to the Holocaust. There is enough public transparency into the federal government's operations, and enough people watching, to know that.

To my knowledge the ones living near the camps did, because of the forced labor etc.

But otherwise there was a lot of willful ignorance and many Jews that were rounded up believed they would be just deported and packed accordingly.

(not a historian though)

Not a historian. Just a German who talked with his grandfather about it.

He was underage and not very informed overall. His father had taught him not to question authority, so he ignored the information that was there. He later said though that he could have, he should have known and should have been able to pick up on it. He said he didn't know the full extend while he was still at home, only cared that Jews were "being deported" elsewhere and that they had to live in really bad conditions in the Ghettos, which he (being a Nazi himself at the time) supported.

When he was drafted and shipped eastwards to fight the Russians, he said it became harder to ignore the signs and the talk in the areas where it was taking place. But when he arrived at the eastern front he had no thoughts for that anymore as he was more occupied with rationalizing the war crimes he was witnessing (and likely partaking in, though he never confirmed or denied) with the 6th Army. This somehow shook him, because he (being only 19) had envisioned a heroic and noble war which this was decidedly not and that clashed with his upbringing to show unquestioning loyalty and absolute obedience to Germany and its government, especially during wartime.

My grandma worked as a civil servant in Russia near one of the worst camps. She saw a huge store room where all the furniture and stuff of the Jews were kept. She was told they were from citizens who had fled.

When her department moved to another building they got some ultra thin mangled "prisoners" to help with the move. They were told that these prisoners were murderers and rapists so it was ok that they were malnourished.

A few weeks later the war had ended (and she was back in Germany) and she got the news of what was really going on, basically next door.

She was a naïve young woman back then.

Once a friend of hers was about to have an audience with Hitler and she asked her to tell him about the bad situation in the city. She didn't know the half of how "bad" it really was. Her perspective was that supplies were really low and that the general populace was suffering. Surely the almighty Führer would be able to do something to change things. The response from him was that "they shouldn't heed those crazy conspiracy stories".

There were two types of camps - Concentration Camps and Extermination Camps.

Concentration camps were a widely known thing to exist in Germany even before the onset of war in 1933 and were even documented in German newspapers. And German citizens knew very well that they existed and that Jewish people were being relocated outside the country or the camps.

The SS also started working towards taking control of the concentration camps and begun turning them into extermination camps before the war. Though they were relatively smaller in comparisons (2100 prisoners vs 100,000), but those numbers increased about tenfold before the war broke out.

There were also journals and writings from people in the late 30s where they wrote how they knew that people were being sent to the extermination camps to be killed but they didn't know the method of killing (gas) yet. Not to mention news clippings of the Hamburg bombing in 1943 which was viewed as retribution against Germans for crime against Jews (so they knew crimes were happening).

And that the extermination camps and the "legal" system that supported it had enveloped not just the federal government but municipal and local governments as part of it's legalizing system (similar to how colonial outposts and their judiciary would legalize colonization as just business).

Most historians agree that people knew and if they didn't, then it was willful ignorance to try and ignore what the government was doing.

The average German, like the modern American, voted for it.