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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

This is definitely a hindsight is 20/20 moment.

In an age where radio was new, where televisions were even newer, where transcontinental news took hours, days or even weeks to travel, the knowledge that the Nazis were engaging in mass murder was not readily available.

When allied troops liberated the concentration camps they filmed everything that they saw because they were concerned that without footage no one would believe them. Why? Because it was a shock, a shock so unbelievable in writing that only video and photographic evidence would suffice.

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Reports about what's happening in concentration camps had been coming to Allied intelligence agencies since 1941 ([1]) but obviously they did not include any video footage, so they were hard to believe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilecki%27s_Report

Mass Media was also... Not a thing. At least nothing like we understand it to be today.

In hindsight being 20/20 it's hard to comprehend the blurred optics of the past era.

Moreover, the blood libel of WW1 was still a fresh memory, and so many who did hear about Nazi atrocities were skeptical.

The world would be different today if not for the photographic and video evidence.

Information about mass murders may have been lacking, but the general antisemitic attitudes were certainly no secret at any point.

Either way, that's not really my point. There are probably better "eccentrics" to compare Elon Musk to, that aren't so dramatically worse than Elon Musk. Perhaps Howard Hughes? There are some problems with that one too, but I think the rift between Elon Musk and Howard Hughes is probably narrower than that between Elon Musk and Henry Ford.

Wait, are you saying that people didn't notice that Nazis were mass-killing people until 1945? What had they been doing since 1939?

Yup. In fact, there are various stories of people in late 1930s who tried to get the word out to the wider world about what's starting to happen in Germany, and they were generally ignored. The world truly didn't learn about the camps until Nazi Germany was conquered.

Possibly, but the knowledge that the Nazis were engaging in mass murder has been readily available once they declared war on the rest of the Europe and went through with it. You didn't have to wait until discovering some camps to change your notions of them.

That's a bit of revisionist history. It wasn't the age of Twitter. Until the discovery of the camps, this was just a world war. The other side was seen as just a regular enemy (+/- usual war propaganda), not as genocidal maniacs.

The Nazis were in power for six years before 1939 and existed as a political movement since 1920.

And they started mass-murdering people in 1939. The news were full of it.

Most of Henry Ford’s Nazi sympathies took place prior to 1939. In fact it might be fairer to say that the Nazis were the ones inspired by Ford’s open promotion of anti-semitism.

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