How early in the war was the reality of the Holocaust known

Discussions on the Holocaust and 20th Century War Crimes. Note that Holocaust denial is not allowed. Hosted by David Thompson.
Peter
Financial supporter
Posts: 4792
Joined: 24 Nov 2002, 12:13
Location: Europe

How early in the war was the reality of the Holocaust known

#1

Post by Peter » 16 Dec 2002, 20:22

I'd never really thought seriously before but does anybody know how early in the war the Western Allies were aware of the Holocaust. It is pretty obvious that they knew to some degree by January 1943. Do you know if they knew earlier than this ?? Was it mentioned in any documents ?

cheers
Pete

Dan
Member
Posts: 8429
Joined: 10 Mar 2002, 15:06
Location: California

#2

Post by Dan » 16 Dec 2002, 20:32

It would help if you define holocaust. There were varying views concerning Jews in different times, and in different areas.

Regards


Peter
Financial supporter
Posts: 4792
Joined: 24 Nov 2002, 12:13
Location: Europe

#3

Post by Peter » 16 Dec 2002, 20:39

Dan
yes mate you are completely right there.

I guess that I'd like to know about both issues, Einsatzgruppen and the gas chambers, although I was thinking about the gas chambers in Poland (I am not asking about the T4 euthanasia program).
cheers
Peter

User avatar
Christian Ankerstjerne
Forum Staff
Posts: 14028
Joined: 10 Mar 2002, 15:07
Location: Denmark
Contact:

#4

Post by Christian Ankerstjerne » 16 Dec 2002, 21:21

I dont' think they knew about the extent until they actually stumbled onto the camps...

Christian

Dan
Member
Posts: 8429
Joined: 10 Mar 2002, 15:06
Location: California

#5

Post by Dan » 16 Dec 2002, 21:31

Iltis wrote:Dan
yes mate you are completely right there.

I guess that I'd like to know about both issues, Einsatzgruppen and the gas chambers, although I was thinking about the gas chambers in Poland (I am not asking about the T4 euthanasia program).
cheers
Peter
You seem well informed. There's quite alot if you use the search function.

Very best.

Peter
Financial supporter
Posts: 4792
Joined: 24 Nov 2002, 12:13
Location: Europe

#6

Post by Peter » 16 Dec 2002, 22:52

Thats my problem, everywhere I look somebody has a different idea. I've seen declassified files which tend to suggest that (based on a Jul 44 file) both Treblikna, Sobibor and others had been classified as extermination camps by the US Government as early as September 1942.
cheers
Pete

User avatar
Benoit Douville
Member
Posts: 3184
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 02:13
Location: Montréal

#7

Post by Benoit Douville » 17 Dec 2002, 04:38

Polish General Sikorski asked in january 1941 that the RAF bomb Auschwitz...

User avatar
Kim
Member
Posts: 1851
Joined: 13 Mar 2002, 00:22
Location: Minnesota, U.S.A.

#8

Post by Kim » 17 Dec 2002, 06:39

My father has told me that when he entered Ohrdruf camp on 10 May 1945,that there were corpses, and pits dug into the ground.He said that he didn't know who these people were, or how they had died. I may ask him for more information. Kim

Peter
Financial supporter
Posts: 4792
Joined: 24 Nov 2002, 12:13
Location: Europe

#9

Post by Peter » 17 Dec 2002, 09:13

Thanks folks, all advice is appreciated
cheers
Pete

User avatar
Matt Gibbs
Member
Posts: 3005
Joined: 23 Mar 2002, 01:46
Location: United Kingdom
Contact:

Photo recce

#10

Post by Matt Gibbs » 17 Dec 2002, 11:15

I recall reading somewhere recently about the task of photo interpretation from air photographs taken of the camps and discussions about identified areas in the camps that suggests the photo interpreters knew some of the information about the sites and what was crematoria, what were burial pits etc etc. I don't remember any particular dates but it was obvious from the content it was before the end of the war. I am sure that many many of the men on the front line didn't know about this sort of thing until they came across them though. Of course there were some people who were persecuted and later released who fled to the UK or other countries before the war who knew the stories of the holding camps.
Regards

Matt Gibbs

Peter
Financial supporter
Posts: 4792
Joined: 24 Nov 2002, 12:13
Location: Europe

#11

Post by Peter » 17 Dec 2002, 15:41

Hadn't considere the Photo Recce stuff - nice one !

Obviously Polish Underground were aware in 1942 thats what gets me wondering as they were sending in Intell. And after the Sobibor revolt in Oct 43 hundreds got out (if not to survive) to tell their stories.

cheers
Pete

User avatar
Birgitte Heuschkel
Member
Posts: 660
Joined: 18 Mar 2002, 09:07
Location: Fredericia, Denmark
Contact:

#12

Post by Birgitte Heuschkel » 17 Dec 2002, 19:59

I have read an account by a British RAF pilot who was a POW at Auschwitz (obviously not the Birkenau complex) sometime in 1940 or 41. Eventually he managed to escape and make it home. When he tried to tell people about what he had seen, and this was obviously not even half of what was there to see, no one would believe him.

I'll see if I can find his name in my notes somewhere.

Peter
Financial supporter
Posts: 4792
Joined: 24 Nov 2002, 12:13
Location: Europe

#13

Post by Peter » 17 Dec 2002, 20:07

thanks Birgitte,
given his name I could probably find a "Returned Escaper" report at the Public Record Office.
cheers
Pete

User avatar
Scott Smith
Member
Posts: 5602
Joined: 10 Mar 2002, 22:17
Location: Arizona
Contact:

#14

Post by Scott Smith » 18 Dec 2002, 02:48

I'd say 1942 at the latest, although there were reports of massacres in 1941. The New York Times was passing all kinds of gassing reports as early as 1942. The War Refugee Board Report dates from 1944 with the standard story, which didn't change much after the liberation of Majdanek in the Fall. It was then big news when the Western concentration camps were liberated in the Spring of 1945 and the typhus epidemics were found and photographed there.
:)

David Thompson
Forum Staff
Posts: 23722
Joined: 20 Jul 2002, 20:52
Location: USA

#15

Post by David Thompson » 18 Dec 2002, 07:19

Here are some events toward a chronology on the awareness of the western allies of the holocaust:

August 24, 1941
In a radio broadcast, British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill denounced the Nazi mass killings in Russia:
[W]hole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands -- literally scores of thousands -- of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police-troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the sixteenth century, there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale. (Gilbert Holo 186)

September 1941
The British and American governments attempted to get Pope Pius XI to publicly condemn the Nazi treatment of Jews and foreign nationals in Nazi-occupied Europe. Osborne Francis d'Arcy, the British diplomatic representative at the Vatican, wrote to the Vatican's Secretary of State, Cardinal Maglione, and stated "A policy of silence in regard to such offenses against the conscience of the world must necessarily involve a renunciation of moral leadership and a consequent atrophy of the influence and authority of the Vatican." The United States representative, Myron Taylor, sent a note to Cardinal Miglione that the deported Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe were being sent to the East to be killed, but Cardinal Miglione replied that it was not possible to verify the accuracy of such rumors. (Holo Ency 1137)

November 27, 1941
The National Council of Poland met in exile at London and unanimously voted to petition the Allies to begin to retaliate against the Germans "to force them to stop the mass murder of the civilian population and the planned destruction of the entire Jewish people." (Holo Ency 1178)

December 24, 1941
Pope Pius XI, in a message broadcast over the Vatican radio, spoke of the "hundreds of thousands who through no fault of their own, and solely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction." (Holo Ency 1137)

January 19, 1942
Jacob Grojanowski and Moroka Podchlebnik escaped from the Nazi death camp at Chelmno. Grojanowski reached the Warsaw ghetto and told the Jews there about the mass executions at Chelmno in late January, 1942. Grojanowski's report was passed on to the Polish underground which, in turn, informed the Polish government in exile at London. (Holo Ency 285)

March 1942
Representatives of the World Jewish Congress and Swiss Jewish community gave a long memorandum to Monsignor Armand Bernardini, the Papal Nuncio in Berne, Switzerland, which referred to the execution of "thousands of Jews in Poland and in parts of Russia occupied by the Germans. (Marrus/Paxton 347)

March 31, 1942
Guiseppe Burzio, the Vatican's charge d'affaires in Slovakia, reported to his superiors that 80,000 Slovakian Jews were being deported to Nazi-occupied Poland and that large numbers of them would certainly die. (Holo Ency 1137)

July 1, 1942
The BBC broadcast a French language radio account of the massacre of 700,000 Polish Jews by the Nazis. (Marrus/Paxton 348)

August 8, 1942
In Geneva, Gerhart Riegner cabled Rabbi Stephen S. Wise in New York and Sidney Silverman in London about Nazi plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The United States Department of State held up delivery of the message to Wise, who finally received it from Silverman on August 28.

September 17, 1942
The Polish Government-in-exile in London issued a statement denouncing Nazi war crimes in Poland:
"For nearly a year now, in addition to the tragedy of the Polish people, which is being slaughtered by the enemy, our country has been the scene of a terrible planned massacre of the Jews. This mass murder has no parallel in the annals of mankind; compared to it, the most infamous atrocities known to history pale into insignificance. Unable to act against this situation, we, in the name of the entire Polish people, protest the crime being perpetrated against the Jews; all political and public organizations join in this protest." (Holo Ency 357)

October 1942
The French communist resistance newspaper, L'Humanite, reported that 11,000 Jewish men, women, old people and children deported from France had been killed in poison gas experiments by the Nazis. (Marrus/Paxton 348)

October 20, 1942
The French resistance newspaper, J'Accuse, published an account stating that "the Boche (German) torturers are burning and asphyxiating thousands of men, women, and children deported from France." (Marrus/Paxton 348)

November 15, 1942
A pamphlet circulated by the French resistance reported "the most dreadful rumors" about what was happening to persons deported to Poland from France. "According to letters from Poland, the trains brought only corpses there. Now we learn that a few convoys of women, old people, the sick, and the children, in short all who were unfit for work, were asphyxiated by poison gas." (Marrus/Paxton 348)

November 24, 1942
In a press release, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise revealed the news contained in the Riegner cable of 8 August about Nazi mass murders in eastern Europe. (Holo Ency 1774)

December 17, 1942
In a speech made to the House of Commons, British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden (later British Prime Minister) denounced the massive executions of Jews in Poland by the Nazis. (Marrus/Paxton 348)

December 17, 1942
The western allies, together with the French National Committee, released a joint statement detailing conditions in the "main Nazi abattoir" in Poland and threatening retribution after the war with war crimes trials. (Marrus/Paxton 348)

December 17, 1942
In a joint statement, the British, American and Russian governments condemned the Nazis' "bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination" of the European Jews and other peoples in the German-occupied areas. (Holo Ency 1496)

January 28, 1943
Theophil Wurm, Bishop of Wurttemberg, wrote an open letter of protest to a ministry official protesting the "systematic murder of Jews and Poles." The Bishop also wrote letters of protest to Gauleiter Wilhelm Murr (8 February 1943), the Reich Minister of the Interior (14 March 1943) and to Adolf Hitler (16 July 1943). Bishop Wurm's letter was not submitted to Hitler, on authority of Dr. Hans Heinrich Lammers, chief of the Reich Chancellory and Hitler's closest legal advisor. (Fleming 30)

March 1943
Guiseppe Burzio, the Vatican's charge d'affaires in Slovakia, reported to his superiors that "Jews in Poland are killed by gas or machine guns." (Holo Ency 1137)

April 19-30, 1943
British and American representatives conferred in Bermuda about rescue options for the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, but failed to come up with significant proposals. (Holo Ency 1776)

May 12, 1943
Samuel Zygelbojm, a Jewish representative of the Polish government-in-exile in London, committed suicide as a expression of solidarity with the Jewish fighters in Warsaw, and in protest against the world's silence regarding the fate of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. (Holo Ency 1776)

July 14-17, 1943
The Soviet military tribunal of the north Caucasus Front put 13 Soviet citizens on trial for war crimes at Krasnodar. The defendants were accused of having participated in the killings of 7,000 persons while serving in Sonderkommando 10a, commanded by Dr. Kurt Christmann, under Einsatzgruppe D. Eight of the accused were sentenced to hang, and three others were sentenced to 20 years' hard labor. (Holo Ency 1489)

September 12, 1943
In a pastoral letter, all of the Roman Catholic Bishops of Germany joined in condemning euthanasia, as well as the murder of "innocent hostages, prisoners of war or penal institutions, and human beings of foreign race or extraction." (Into That Darkness 72)

November 1, 1943
The British, American and Russian governments issued the "Moscow Declaration" pledging that the Allies would prosecute war criminals and assist in extraditing them for punishment "on the spot by the peoples whom they have outraged." (Holo Ency 1496)
The statement continued:
"Accordingly, the three Allied powers, speaking in the interests of the thirty-three United Nations, hereby solemnly declare and give full warning of their declaration as follows: At the time of granting of any armistice to any government which may be set up in Germany, those German officers and men and members of the Nazi party who have been responsible for or have taken a consenting part in . . . atrocities, massacres, and executions will be sent back to the countries in which their abominable deeds were done in order that they may be judged and punished according to the laws of these liberated countries . . . .
The Declaration concluded:
"Let those who have hitherto not stained their hands with innocent blood beware lest they join the ranks of the guilty, for most assuredly the three Allied powers will pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth and will deliver them to their accusers in order that justice might be done." (End of a Berlin Diary 272-3)

January 1944
French Abbe Joseph Catry, a pro-Nazi propagandist, asked SS-Obersturmfuehrer Heinz Roethke, the German Judenreferent in France, to give him information to disprove the rumors that the Jews of Europe were being systematically executed by the Nazis. According to Catry: "There is a real effort to hide something very grave, but without success, because the subterfuge is very clumsy." (Marrus/Paxton 349)

April 7, 1944
Two Slovakian Jews, Rudolf Vrba (Walter Rosenberg) and Alfred Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp with the assistance of other prisoners. The two men brought with them the first detailed accounts of the internal workings of the extermination camp and estimated that 1.75 million people had already died there. (Holo Ency 121)

May 27, 1944
Two more Slovakian Jews, Czeslaw Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin, escaped from the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland, bringing information concerning the murders of Greek and Hungarian Jews at the camp, and confirming the accounts brought out by two earlier escapees who had fled the death camp on April 7, 1944. These reports, known collectively as the Auschwitz-Birkenau Protocols, reached the free world in late May and June, 1944. (Holo Ency 121)

July 23, 1944
Advancing Red Army troops liberated Lublin, in the Generalgouvernement of Poland, and discovered the nearby death camp at Maidanek. Their findings were immediately publicized in the world press. (Holo Atlas 200; Hilberg 630)

Post Reply

Return to “Holocaust & 20th Century War Crimes”