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What Did Americans Know as the Holocaust Unfolded? Quite a Lot
(Washington Post) Tara Bahrampour - History Unfolded is an initiative of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is using crowdsourcing to scour newspapers across the country for articles that ran between 1933 and 1945 on the plight of Europe's Jews. Some were shocked to see how much news had been printed on the Holocaust. "My prevailing notion about this period in time was that a lot of what had happened with the Nazis during the '30s and '40s was not that well-known," said Sandi Auerbach, 62, a retired IBM financial manager who is a member of the museum and has contributed more than two dozen articles to the project. "I am amazed, quite frankly, at the coverage that there was in a lot of different papers," Auerbach said. "For example, in 1933 there was a huge rally in Madison Square Garden with 20,000 people in attendance to protest the persecution of Jews in Germany." Contributors say they have been struck by detailed accounts of the Nazis' persecution and slaughter of Jews. Tayte Patton, 17, whose English class in Lexington, Ky., is participating, said he was shocked at the U.S.' inaction. "I never knew that we didn't want to let Jews into the country," he said. "I always thought that we would let anyone in, that we would be a refuge for the Jews."