Sorry, I was unclear. While I do definitely mistrust US propaganda on North Korea, I don't doubt at all that it's a terrible place to live in every possible wa

Sorry, I was unclear. While I do definitely mistrust US propaganda on North Korea, I don't doubt at all that it's a terrible place to live in every possible way, I have read several books by defectors (and visited numerous communist and post-communist countries). My point was more that the reason we have heard about it is mostly because that suits the Western agenda. Otherwise very few would have any idea about what is going on there. Just like few Americans or even Europeans know much about Transdniestria, a present day communist state in Europe. Or Bhutan, a seemingly very happy little country. Even in the days of Wikipedia and internet news, most people don't know much more about the world than what is convenient for Western media to tell us. All this to say that it's inconceivable that people outside Germany could be pretty ignorant about what was going on in the late 30s.