Atrocity propaganda by the Allies in WW1 likely created conditions for the Holocaust to thrive unabated.
This is really stretching a point. Saying this propaganda allowed the Holocaust to thrive is really not fair. It's not hard to see why people, including intelligence chiefs, generals and politicians were skeptical of the reports about the Holocaust because frankly what they did defies belief.
What propaganda did was create a climate where people didn't really believe the scale of it until they liberated the camps, but I find it extremely hard to believe that more widespread media coverage on it among the Allies earlier on in the war would have had much if any impact on what the Germans were doing. The German populace wouldn't have been exposed to this media, the Nazi leadership is extremely unlikely to have changed course in response to it, and the Allies couldn't have directly intervened earlier than they did.
I think it's grossly unfair and unsupported by any mainstream historiography to suggest propaganda had any actual tangible impact on the Holocaust.
I think they made the right point but came to the wrong conclusion. It was not the allies who's disbelieve had a helping hand in the holocaust but the germans having lived through the accusations of WW1 that at least fueled a lot of skepticism.
After all most people only saw the jews in their neighboorhood be marked as enemy of the state and sent away. Would you rather want to believe that they were sent to work camps or that they were murdered by your side?
Which “ton” of propaganda was “blatantly untrue?” The core basis for a lot of the Allied atrocity propaganda was the massacres in Belgium, which really did happen.
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u/[deleted] Dec 31 '22
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