1944 : belief in Rwandan 'savages' mass killings, disbelief to 'civilized' Germans' mass killings ?

What if the genocide in Rwanda had happened 50 years earlier, during WWII, so that only a very little, but seemingly detailed, information about it had reached London and Washington?

Say much less information than actually did reach the Allied West about the mass murders of the civilians of Eastern Europe, (in particular Jews) starting in September 1939 and carrying on right up to the liberation of the death camps six long years later ?

Would the average middle class white citizen back then have found it too hard to believe that the Germans Rwandans were capable of such horrific crimes ---- or would they have not been surprised at all ?

I suggest very much the latter.

Note that my blog post title, to recreate what was typical of western pre-war western thinking, deliberately describes the African Rwandans as 'savages' and the European Germans as 'civilized'.

The felt intellectual and social/moral distance between fellow white middle class 'Moderns' of the biggest European-based civilizations was very small back then.

If such an individual back then felt they were incapable of butchering an entire race in cold blood from babies to grandmas, they couldn't see a fellow Modern (from the Germany of Beethoven & Mozart) doing the same.

For merely beginning to believe the Germans capable of such evil would be like 'letting down the side' and calling the whole Modernity-Enlightenment project into question.

But, oh yes, savages butcher people, for sure. Without a single twinge of conscience.

That is what makes us Modern - we don't do that - literally can't do that.

The Holocaust - as is well known - spectacularly failed in its attempt to kill all the world's Jews to save the Modernity Project --- for there will soon be more Jews alive today than were alive in 1939.

In a further irony, in trying to do so, in the long run it also destroyed that Modernity Project - root and branch....