One of the things people don’t talk about is how the Holocaust happened because we tend to see things through the modern prism.
All of the leaders during WWII went through WWI. Now think about that for a second. These people witnessed the deaths of literally thousands a day on the battlefields without blinking an eye, at a scale unheard of up to that point. Plus you had the Armenian Holocaust going on during the war. So really, what happened to the Jews to them really wasn’t all that out of the ordinary.
We react to it, because for the first time we had the images of the camps and the technology to thoroughly document the atrocities and disseminate them to the public.
But the fact is, events like the Holocaust went on for centuries. If you aren’t familiar with it, read up on the The Massacre At Clifford’s Tower, in York in 1190. It’s as blood-curdling as any Nazi atrocity.
It’s true. The veneer of civilization is very thin in the best times, and the barbarity comes through a lot more often than we realize.