How did the SS hide the evidence of extermination camps?

Answer 1

They didn't. The United States and other countries surrounding Germany knew what they were doing, they just either didn't do anything about it, or couldn't do anything about it.

AnswerNote that there is a difference between the concentration camps (essentially, prison and forced-labor camps holding "undesirable", with poor living conditions and often brutal treatment by the guards), and the extermination camps (or, death camps, where mostly Jews and Roma were sent to be immediately killed).

The existence of the concentration and forced labor camps was well known, as they had existed well before WW2 started. The terrible conditions inside these camps were generally known shortly after the war began, via a variety of means, primarily from descriptions of escaped prisoners and through sympathetic (to the Allied cause) religious leaders making reports to their ecclesiastical superiors.

The establishment of the death camps didn't start until mid-1942, after the Wansee Conference defined the Final Solution to the Jewish Question and a plan for carrying it out. During 1942, several former forced labor and concentration camps were changed over or expanded to become death camps, and began their grisly work shortly afterwards. The first notice of the unique nature of the death camps (vs the more "ordinary" concentration camp) came through several eyewitness accounts of escaped refugees in 1943. They were discounted as exaggerations. However, by the middle of 1944, mounting evidence indicated that something horrible was happening at these camps; historical evidence shows that the Allied leadership knew by mid-1944 that mass killing was taking place at these camps and the general purpose of these mass killings, though there is debate about their knowledge of the true scale of the killing.

Overall, the Nazi SS managed to conceal the true nature of these camps from the general public through a series of misdirections and concealment strategies: most were nearby other "ordinary" forced labor camps, and thus, were depicted as simply an expansion of those camps. In addition, the camps were tightly guarded, and in generally out-of-the-way locations. People being sent to these camps were deceived through trickery (being promised "relocation" or jobs, or other inducements to travel there). However, there is considerable evidence that the general nature of these death camps was reasonably widespread amongst the German populace, and certainly the real purpose behind them was known to a large section of the collaborating pro-German governments.

Answer 2

The nazis put their concentration camps in rural areas, and far away from major cities. they also made ads that showed jews "playing" in pools with nazi officers, to make it show like they were having fun and that no one was being harmed

Answer 3

The gas chambers and crematoria at most of the major camps were blown up.

At Treblinka the SS went to a lot of trouble. The camps was demolished in October 1943 and grassed over to look like grazing land.

Answer 4

There were different types of concentration camps, and the true purpose of some was not hidden. Please see the related question.