I’m a recent subscriber, and actually came here as a result of the Slate article.

My grandmother and her 2 sisters came to the US in between WW1 and WW2. As a result of the post-war economic difficulties in Germany, their father sent them to the US to get jobs and send money back to the family in Germany. Their family was a very large farming family in northern Germany. The girls went to the US and the boys stayed to work on the farm.

My grandmother died when I was very young and I never really spent much time with her sisters before they also passed away. The connection to my family in Germany basically died with them.

However, I recently learned of a cousin who still lives in the old farming town that my grandmother grew up in. I recently went to Germany for work and took some time to drive up to introduce myself.

The visit was pretty mind blowing, actually. My cousin actually lives in the farm that my grandmother grew up on. Also, he had a pile of old photo albums that included pictures of my mother, my sister, and even me. My grandmother apparently used to send photos to her family.

Anyway, while we were going over photos and talking, I saw a couple of pictures of men in Nazi uniforms. I knew from my grandmother that she had a brother who was a pilot in WW2, but I was so incredibly young that I had no concept of the Holocaust or any of that at the time.

I didn’t ask my cousin who the people in those pictures were and he was very quick to skip those pages.

So here’s my question: how many Germans (prior to the end of WW2) had no idea what was going on?

Follow-up: how likely is it that those people in those military uniforms in my cousin’s photo album knew about what was going on? I didn’t see the uniforms for very long, but they were black.