I will almost certainly feel stupid after asking this but thought I would ask anyway
It is common knowledge that Hitler knew that millions of Jews were being murdered in concentration and death camps. A special efford was made however to hide the fact that is occurring. This included the use of euphemism. In some cases it went through different stages where a report to Himmler would use one euphemism and one to Hitler would use even a blander one.
There were efforts made to hide this is soldiers reports home, what senior officers reported, and government reports. Seem to be pretty a systematic attempt at covering this up. There were a few more plain language discussions including some recordings of Himmler.
First, what audience(s) were being targeted by this attempt at deception?
Second, what does this say about conspiracies in general? This seems to be a vast conspiracy and it took a very long time to really dawn on those outside Germany.
It's worth remembering the degree of internal duplicity and conspiracy which went on in even the highest levels of the Nazi government. In a related example, I've seen reasonably credible arguments that Hitler's and OKH's beliefs in the Soviets being "on their last legs" was due in part to the ludicrously inflated casualty reports they were regularly receiving. After all, if you'd truly killed as many Russians as the reports indicated, how many fighting-age males could really be left? To some degree, the differing reports might just be symptomatic of the internecine conflict common among the NSDAP regime.
That being said, I suspect part of the deception effort may have been aimed at avoiding the Fuhrer's personal attention. Hitler might've been a fruitcake with an eye towards old-school colonization via gas and bullet, but he was also a bit of a Romantic with a sentimental streak, and he wasn't the only top German official with occasional outbreaks of conscience about the whole
Lebensraum thing. "Sanitizing" reports to focus on positives such as 'foodstuffs produced' (through mass extermination), or 'industrial output' (from slave laborers) would likely have played better with both Hitler and the rest of the German top brass.
As for what it says about conspiracy...well, IMO it's difficult to really count the early-war coverup as one. There were certainly efforts to minimize the publicity of Nazi atrocities, but "cutting out the 'messy' bits of war" was part and parcel of wartime censorship, and let's not forget that all sides freely engaged in censorship of their own troops' messages back home. I'm not aware of a particularly concerted effort to cover up either the extermination or labor efforts of the broader Holocaust during much of the war, other than more routine efforts at spin and media control.
The only time I'm aware that such an effort really came into play would be 1944-45, when Germany was clearly on the defensive and seemed destined to lose the war. At
that point we can see efforts to destroy records, burn or bury camps to avoid discovery, and similar moves to conceal the scope and scale of the Holocaust. However, AFAIK the late-war and postwar efforts to conceal German atrocities were a bit of a mess; rather than the popular image of a coordinated conspiracy, events like "guards fleeing/mass-executing shortly before Soviet/American tanks rolled into a camp" reads more like a black comedy than a stereotypical conspiracy.
And while there was certainly evidence of the ongoing atrocities, it's also important to remember that they would've been overshadowed by literally earth-shaking events such as "several thousand German and Soviet soldiers were just fed into the Rzhev meatgrinder again," or "American ships make landing at Bougainville, fierce fighting expected." Additionally, combatant countries logically focused on events and circumstances which affected their own people; when half the young males of the town were under arms, you can bet you'd pay attention to every little detail which you might have a personal stake in, as opposed to a distant atrocity which wouldn't have an immediate effect on you and yours.
