I saw the leaked picture of the political prisoner in China yesterday and the first thing that popped into my head was that the person looked exactly like concentration camp prisoners.
That got me thinking about how concentration camps where first made public. Where these camps immediately recognized as what they were i.e. extermination camps, or did people perhaps think that those might just be extremely malnourished prisoners due to the circumstances of war? Was there a public debate or were they made public immediately labelled as extermation camps?
Any insight is appreciated! I do feel very sick having to see a colored version of this in 20 fucking 19. I really hope this is not the first public "proof" of what might be a systematic erradication of Uyghurs in China but I also don't see how that picture can be put into a less horrible perspective.
(Based on previous replies of mine.)
Pretty much everybody knew "about" concentration (as opposed to extermination) camps from the start since they were not a secret and were often located near big cities, like Dachau near Munich and Buchenwald near Weimar. They were freely mentioned by the Nazi propaganda as rehabilitation facilities.
Now, the extent of the knowledge about the actual goings-on in the camps is another thing. In the early days of Dachau there were a few curious Germans who wanted to take a peek and they were basically told that if they were that much curious, they might as well want to spend some time there... (see Wachsmann, KL). Certainly, the rumors still spread (even if spreading such rumors was a criminal offense). Moreover, the first wave of the inmates in 1933 was largely released and they could spread some info, though they had to sign a pledge not to. Some were reserved about their experiences, with some things were more obvious, like an employee who came back from a camp without fingernails or toenails (see Johnson, Reuband, What we knew, p. 354).
Quite a few Germans assumed the camps were for real criminals and delinquents.
If you look at the liberation videos of the locals being led around the camps, they do seem to exhibit a genuine shock.
This is different from the knowledge of the extermination camps in far away occupied territories, none of which were inside the "old" Germany and must not be confused with "normal" concentration camps.
Specifically the extermination camps (as opposed to "mere" concentration camps) had the highest degree of camouflage: http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2018/12/whats-there-to-hide-camouflage-and.html
Thus, the Red Cross was strictly forbidden to inspect Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau, this is documented by the Nazis themselves:
Certainly, the information about some of what was going on in various camps was appearing in the Western and Soviet press for years, at least since 1942. Take the Polish Govt-in-Exile's 1942 report "The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland" https://www.msz.gov.pl/resource/e7497fea-f446-4f82-80b1-169d609d697a:JCR or the 1944 report of the escaped Auschwitz inmates Wetzler and Vrba. There were thousands of various such articles, naming Treblinka and other camps.
The Allied propaganda also used this information for the German-language broadcasts, and there are German documents transcribing such broadcasts, with mentions of Treblinka, Auschwitz and so on, without much German commentary, however.
Wiith all such reports, and the war going on, I speculate (and I say so explicitly) that the Allied public might have become numb to the facts of the reports themselves, whereas many Germans would reject it as enemy agitprop. So when the reality hit after the liberation of the camps, that was still a shock - not mere theoretical words on paper but the real horrors.
Just as an example, as the Soviets were moving towards Auschwitz, they were liberating its smaller subcamps one by one and we have the liberation reports. You can read some of them here and see the progression and, sometimes, the emotions:
So basically, lots was know early on, but mostly various locations peasants would be able to observe some extermination camp inmates.