President Lincoln and the Sioux Indian uprising in Minnesota in 1862

[Eva Elisabeth]

Re: "Were most Germans unaware of the magnitude of Hitler's atrocities (concentration camps, etc.) until later in the war?"
I feel not competent to answer this for entire Germany. As I said, my grandma used to say "We knew so little until it was too late". My (mother's) family lived in a little village in East Prussia, which most Germans regarded a kind of backwoods region. Maybe they also couldn't/didn't want to believe (what still seems unimaginable) - information didn't spread like nowadays, and there was not such as live interviews with surviving victims on TV. AFAIK they also didn't personally know any Jewish people and had no interest in harming any.

However, as I said I don't feel competent to give a general answer. In Aachen I had friends whose grandparents were avoved Nazis, still I can't say when and how much they learned of such as concentration camps. One certainly knew, the father of my arts teacher, Ernst-Günther Schenck, who was a Nazi doctor and used humans as guinea pigs for experiments (and my teacher was an alcoholic as he had never got over his father's history and deeds):
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst-G%C...er_Schenck