>I can believe that people who didn't live near the camps didn't know about
>them.
Sorry, yes, i didn't mean to imply that my landlord was convinced that everyone was aware. I should have said "many Germans claimed that they hadn't known about the death camps, even if they'd lived quite close by, or had had dealings with them". It was claims like those that my landlord deprecated ('Well, yes, we did live 200m from the front door to the camp and had a hard time keeping the curtains clean from all the ash from the chimneys, but we had absolutely no idea that there was anything going on, we thought the folk inside were on holiday." Naja, red' mal weiter.).
These were the days before Stanley Milgram's famous experiments knocked the props out from under self-righteous US beliefs about German national depravity. At the time, any German who admitted knowing anything at all was written off by Americans as no better than a war criminal who'd evaded the rope, so naturally nobody wanted to admit anything! (Sgt Schultz in Hogan's Heroes was a parody of that attitude).
In my landlord's view, your mum's experience of her teacher was terrifyingly, heartbreakingly common -- a jewish friend, neighbor, teacher, doctor, shopkeeper is suddenly 'disappeared', and it's implicitly clear to all what will happen if anyone questions or even mentions the disappearance.
=margaret