When Nazi Germany began the extermination of the Jews, Poles, Gypsies, etc., were peoplein the neutral nations of europe aware of what was going on? For example, Sweden carried on trade with Nazi Germany, selling them steel, iron ore, ball bearings, etc. There must have been quite a bit of business travel between the two countries. Likewise Switzerland.
My questions: did the newspapers in these countries ever print the news of the dreadful goings-on in Germany? Did the news of the killing ever provoke liberals in those countries to oppose trade with the Germans?
I recall that several diplomats from neutrsal nations intervened to save people from the death camps, so the intellectuals must have had a clue about the enormity of germany’s crimes…so what did they know?
Did any paper anywhere print such news?
I know the AP wrote stories about the Holocaust, and papers did run articles. They tended not to give it anywhere near the attention it deserved, though. Here’s the script of a short documentary film about reporting on the Holocaust (you can watch the film if you click on the links):
http://www.newseum.org/Holocaust/script.htm
Here are some of the article headlines mentioned in the film:
“Nazi Mobs Riot Against Jews”-Philadelphia Inquirer 11/11/38
“Hysterical Nazis Wreck Thousands of Jewish Shops, Burn Synagogues in Wild Orgy of Looting and Terror”-Dallas Morning News 11/11/38
“700,000 Victims Listed”-New York Times 7/2/42
“Reports Nazi Slaughter of Jews”-New York Times 4/6/42
“2,000 Jews Sent From Vienna”-NYT 10/22/39
“Slaying of Jews in Galicia”-NYT 10/26/41
“Nazis Seek to Rid Europe of All Jews”-NYT 10/28/41
It didn’t get the play it deserved, but then again, most people just didn’t care.
This is a difficult question, I think. Certainly there were lots of people that knew what was going on; apart from the nazis/ss-wards/soldiers directly involved, at least the people that lived next to the concentration camps must have known something. But - was the full, practically unimaginable extent of the industrial-style genocide ever general knowledge at the time? I don´t think so. Even the allied forced that liberated the concentration camps were totally shocked by what they saw.
I’m really not sure about neutral countries. I know that some articles were printed in the US, but they weren’t placed prominently. Much of the early information about the Holocaust – the death camps, at least – came from partisans and resistance fighters, and might have seemed like exaggerated atrocity propaganda. For example, there were stories about death camps that used steam-filled rooms or rooms with electric floors. (Obviously, few people had seen the actual apparatus; even after the war, there were very few survivors who had detailed knowledge of the process of killing.) Readers might not have have taken them as seriously as they should have.
Atrocity propaganda is a very old way of raising public hatred of the enemy, and many such stories seem difficult to believe. In WW1, for example, there were stories about babies in Belgium being impaled and crucified on barn doors.
Tragically, many of the WW2 atrocity stories – the Holocaust, Lidice, Ouradour-sur-Glane – were true, but the reader’s opinion might vary depending on their political standing. Some might dismiss some of the stories as exaggerated atrocity propaganda. Some took them seriously but realized there was little they could do. Nazi sympathizers and devoted Nazis probably took one of two stances. If they held anti-Semitic beliefs of their own (and these beliefs were by no means restricted to Nazis at the time), they would have supported the genocide. Those who felt that violence and murder of Jews was wrong, I’ve read, often blamed those actually perpetrating such violence, rather than the Party that authorized and organized it: “If only the Führer knew!”
Keep in mind that unless you actually visited one of the camps, it would have been hard at the time to know for sure what was really going on.
People knew that Jews were being rounded up and shipped off to camps. But large numbers of people were being displaced all around the world at the same time. Stalin had forced labor camps. The Japanese had forced labor camps. Even in the United States there were internment camps for Japanese.
What wasn’t widespread knowledge was that the largest Nazi camps were extermination facilities. Most people probably assumed that the Germans were rounding up the Jews and shipping them off to labor camps and resettlement locations in the east. They knew that there was mob-level violence directed at the Jews, but not a systematic governmental program of genocide.
The Nazi government perpetuated this fiction. The Jews weren’t told they were being rounded up and shipped to their deaths. (Although rumors abounded.) Many were told they were being resettled, and left their homes with suitcases packed. This fiction was maintained right up until they were marched into the “delousing showers” that were, in fact, gas chambers.
In the context of all the other suffering of the time, the plight of the European Jews probably seemed at the time to most people outside Germany (and even to many Germans) as tragic side effect of war, not as the horrific crime that we now know it to be.
Was Franco’s Spain really a neutral country in more than name? I rather doubt a whole lot of negative stories about Nazis were in the Madrid papers in 1944…
I don’t know if we can automatically assume that the lack of outrage during the war was due strictly to apathy. From what I understand, the first reports of the holocaust that came out were so outrageous that many assumed that they were propoganda. And when you think about it, it’s still hard to wrap your mind around the magnitude of the event, even with all the documentation that wasn’t available until late in the war and after.
Darn, I thought I had read all the posts. Roches made my point much more eloquently than I did.
Yes. As my wife (who’s Jewish) has pointed out to me, before the Holocaust occured it wasn’t obvious to most people that an event like the Holocaust could occur. A “civilized” European country like Germany setting up human slaughterhouses for the assembly-line extermination of millions … it sounded too fantastic to believe.
The Nazis benefitted at the time from the sheer outrageousness of their actions.
Regarding Spain: Hitler tried to sign up Gen. Franco, but the wiley Spanish dictator never became an ally of the Reich. Of course, Spain did send a token military force to fight in Russia (the Blue Legion), and Spain traded with Germany (steel, mercury,asbestos). I would imagine that business travellers to germany (from Spain) would have gotten an idea of what was going on.
Sweden was physically closer to Germany. The fact that several (courageous) Swedish diplomats (like Wallenburg)intervened to save some Jews argues that there was common knowledge of the holocaust in Sweden.
A big clue would have been the public Nazi discussions of the “Jewish problem” and their statements about the evil, disgusting, unbearable nature of Jews.
People pretty much have to do this kind of justification when they start thinking about killing.
My grandfather(mom’s side) was in WWII (Europe)as was my father(Pacific). According to them nobody knew exactly what was going on at the camps. At least not on a general or public level. They knew there were forced labor camps but when they saw what went on at the concentration camps they were shocked. They expected to find prisoners and sure they figured that they’d probably be in bad shape BUT nothing like the atrocities that went on. Gramps said this was pretty much the norm even for the civilian population there. Basically the only people that saw what went on were killed, or were German soldiers who were threatened with execution for treason if they talked about it, some high ranking SS and the survivors. Even at executive levels it wasn’t openly discussed…terms like “the final solution” were used and practically no paper trail was left and Hitler’s orders to Eichmann was fague at best. There was a lot of “data” and information found afterwards but not much that was public before the war ended.
Was it in the papers? Not any that I ever saw or heard of. (BTW I did my thesis in pol./sci on Adolf Eichmann)
Dad was in the Pacific and has a very little to say about Guadalcanal or Okinawa. He was at both. If that wasn’t enough he got in on Korea as well.
BTW I know y’all were talking about the WWII detainment camps in the states earlier. Did anyone mention that there were several POW camps here as well.
Was it in the papers? Not any that I ever saw or heard of that was intended to be related to Eastern Europe as in…how would Switz or Sweden have known for sure? The news there was propaganda to the max.
I read/heard somewhere that even to the end many of the German troops were under the impression that they were winning the war. That they all thought the rest of the war was going better than their particular area. You know how propaganda is…
I think there’s a common confusion about this, whether people knew or not knew about the holocaust, which makes it difficult to discuss. For example, in a discussion regarding Saving Private Ryan, the writer ponders about the jewish soldier’s taunting of German POW:s (“I’m jewish, jeewish”, etc), and puts in the question; “Now, did these soldier know about the holocaust, and if so, why didn’t they… etc”.
The thing is, I believe, that Yes, people knew that nazism was an anti-semite movement; later on: Yes, people became aware that nazism treated jews badly; later on: Yes, people got to know that jews where put in camps, and probably suffered quite a lot. But from that to “they knew that the nazis murdered them in the millions”, there’s a great leap. Even today, it’s difficult to understand the magnitude of the holocaust; in fact, it’s so difficult to believe it, that some choose not to. It’s just such an ubelievable madness, on a such an unbelievable scale.
(I know that some britons who really heard about the holocaust at the end of the war actually thought that it was propaganda, since they remembered the propaganda from WWI – the Germans were eating babys, and so forth – and this was just as unlikely.)
Talking about Swedes in general (whom I know particularly well), of course they knew that Germans treated Jews badly, and later really really bad, I mean really bad – but did they know about the extermination camps? Of course not, and by they way, who could’ve believed such a thing?
The papers did not report about these things, I don’t know of any reporter at the time who knew (at least for sure) about these horrible events.
Remember that German invited the Red Cross to it’s camps, they took great steps to hide the “anus mundi” they created; the Germans involved knew that if this came out, they would never be forgiven or shown pardon. Even Himmler was shaken by the project. They knew what they were doing.
PS. Please don not understand this as excusing ignorance, or for looking the other way; this is just my conclusion after some reading and thinking.
Most of the European neutrals (the above plus say Ireland and Portugal) bent over backwards to avoid giving either side any sort of provocation by adopting ‘biased’ positions. This included a certain amount of press censorship, especially of potentially incendiary information. The Irish press, for example, might list Irish war casualties (volunteers in British service) while avoiding any mention of the cause of death (referring to a sunken Royal Naval vessel in only the obliquest of terms).
Pretty much all of the continental neutrals (Spain included) maintained positions as pro-allied as the situation allowed at that time, with industrial/trade policies shifting continuously throughout the war as the potential penalty for pissing off the Germans declined
Nah. During the Weimar Republic, plenty of Germans with political ambitions tried to gain power by using a scapegoat- It’s the fault of of our province leaders. We should secede from Germany and become our own nation. It’s the fault of the seperatists. We must become a more unified Germany. It’s the fault of the capitalists. Communism is the answer. It’s those darn communists. Everything will be fine once we eradicated Marxism in Germany.
Blaming the Jews was standard rhetoric. An American politician who supported segregation would say many of the same things.
It’s worth noting that Stalin attempted to create a Jewish Autonomous Zone. He invited Soviet Jews to move there, where he wouldn’t have to deal with them, and they wouldn’t have to deal with him. The Zone failed because nobody wanted to go. They couldn’t be sure that the whole thing wasn’t just a cover for another Holocaust. AFAIK It’s still unknown whether it was.
PoorYorick: Thanks. I agree that the lack of outrage wasn’t caused by apathy, at least not in most countries. Faced with incontrovertible evidence of what was happening, Americans (for example) would probably have felt compelled to act. (Although they didn’t have the same idea of human rights that we have now, partly because much of the modern view on human rights and genocide was shaped by the Holocaust.) There are a few countries that, I think, had sufficiently deep-rooted anti-Semitism that little would have changed if they knew what was happening. For most, though, the lack of information and the lack of evidence to support the little information that was available meant that there was little outrage.
That being said, anyone who had read Mein Kampf or pre-war newspapers would be aware of Hitler’s opinions on Jews. But others held opinions equally as vicious; even some Americans at the time would have held vicious opinions on race. The leap from hatred of a race to extermination is large, and even people who knew about the Nuremburg Laws and Kristallnacht might not conclude that Hitler would attempt genocide.
Witko: AFAIK the Red Cross were invited only to Theresienstadt (Terezin) in annexed Czechoslovakia, which was more of a ghetto than a camp. Apparently the visit happened when the Danish and Swedish Red Cross began to enquire about the condition of Danish Jews who had been sent there. The inspectors were taken along a fixed route; grass and flowers were planted on the tour route, and buildings were fixed up and given false signs. Residents were given extra food and, IIRC, performed for the inspectors. The cruellest part of the facade was that 7500 people, including orphans and the sick, were deported (presumably to their deaths) in order to maintain the illusion. Why the Red Cross was deceived is something I don’t really know; a few careful questions would have exposed the Nazis. (“What’s down that street?” “Can we see the hospital?”)
DocCathode: It’s not surprising that no-one moved to the Jewish Autonomous Region – it’s in the far east of the USSR, near the border with China. Its population is now less than 2% Jewish.
A couple of miscellaneous, anecdotal facts that may help here:
The office manager for whom I worked for about 14 years was a war bride, who grew up in Nazi Bavaria. According to her, absolutely no indication of the Holocaust was available to the German public, and, given the political climate, it was wise not to inquire into what had happened to Herr Goldbaum or Rabbi Meyer. But nobody suspected that they were being systematically killed.
Wernher von Braun did receive assistance in his rocketry researches from a prison camp at Dora (location not clear to my quick Google search), but was under the impression that it was a prison camp for persons convicted of criminal offenses. He said after the war that he knew nothing about the Holocaust, and the guilt that he felt is that in his position, he could have found out the truth but did not try to do so.
The JAR was proposed in 1921 and established before the end of the 1920s. The original site was proposed for the Crimea but apparently the Soviets were having trouble finding land for the population of 2 million they wanted to relocate there, and the site was gradually moved eastward. About 110,000 people relocated there by 1939. Many of them were from other Soviet minority ethnic groups who thought the territory sounded pretty good. It also looks like about 700 foreign (presumably Jewish) nationals moved there before there was an Israel, and ironically even some from the Mandate territory that became Israel.
I’m not so sure this was more a failure than the rest of the USSR, an in fact was probably bringing up the curve a bit.
If the JAR’s only 2% Jewish now (I’m curious if that figure is practicing or genetic) it’s because of emigration (mostly Israel) and the descendants of the non-Jewish influx. Aside from the establishment of the Jewish state draining its population, that establishment hastened by the West’s reponse to the Holocaust, I don’t think there’s much of any connection between the two.