We will never know the full and complete story of everything that happened in those years. Too much was happening, all at the same time. The Nazis approached t

We will never know the full and complete story of everything that happened in those years. Too much was happening, all at the same time. The Nazis approached their work systematically and with an enormous obsession with detail. A lot of what we know is due to information being scrupulously catalogued and recorded. The concentration camps were corporate legal entities which extracted labor and then re-sold it into the economy/war machine. In the highly emotional narratives on the topic this is frequently left out - the Holocaust was a process, optimized to supercharge the global war effort. And it worked. When the tides of the war turned, those same records were then systematically erased and burned, though the efforts were spread thin, we have some evidence of these cover-up efforts. This is often the purpose of these investigations - to show that this wasn't a crime of the moment or of passion, to show the premeditation. At the point of the Warsaw Uprising everyone was desperate - an unstoppable horde was approaching from the East - but the Nazis still continued executing the plan. Much of what we know is an accumulation of the remaining records + systematically catalogued recollections of the survivors. In an alternate reality in which the Nazis win, it would have been possible that nobody would have found out about much of it at all. Which is highly relevant for us today, and gives a lot to think about all the other Holocausts we perhaps are not as familiar with. The ones happening now, and the ones that happened but were successfully covered up. (I'm not a researcher - 3/4 of my grandparents are survivors of the Buchenwald/Auschwitz-Birkenau/Ravensbruck KL's and these are just my two-cents of amateurish thoughts on a subject endlessly discussed here in Poland)