Looking for a just-the-facts timeline of what’s been released about knowledge we gained about the holocaust via espionage or other routes while it was happening.
Who are “we”? Do you mean everyone other than the perpetrators? Everyone other than the perpetrators and victims? Some specific nation?
There’s a pretty good timeline here:
According to that site, American newspapers were already reporting on the murder of millions of Jews as early as November, 1942.
Partial information from Polish resistance groups and individuals who had managed to make it out was widely enough known in the west by mid to late 1942, to the point that a special meeting of the House of Commons was called to confirm the government’s recognition and commiment to punish the crime(s).
I have seen It said (I cannot now recall the book in question) that Enigma decrypts had revealed the mass shootings of the Einsatzgruppen in the USSR in the summer of 1941, but this wasn’t publicised in any detail for fear of revealing the Enigma secret. That the Nazis were committing vicious crimes, in general, was hardly a secret, nor obviously was the mass deportation of Jews, and it was a reasonable assumption that little or good could come to them.
I also recall seeing the text of one of Thomas Mann’s broadcasts to Germany that mentioned the existence of gas chambers at a time that seemed surprisingly early; but the full, systematic and industrialised nature of the Holocaust wasn’t fully grasped for a long time. The rest of the population in Nazi-controlled territory had no access to external news sources, except at great risk to themselves, and were subject to official cover stories. For the Allies, there wasn’t much that could be done in practical terms short of the physical defeat of the Nazis.
A lot of governments and ordinary people knew, especially the German public. The concentration camps weren’t all out in the middle of nowhere; German citizens could see and hear what was going on and didn’t do much to stop it because either (or both) they didn’t want to know and were afraid of what the Nazis would do to them if they said anything.
Whereas soldiers liberating the camps in 1945 were absolutely shocked at what they saw - so probably the general public or anyone not deeply following the details of German occupation procedures, probably did not grasp the magnitude and depravity of the situation.
I guess parallel to the OP’s question is whether and why the general news of the day did not report this sort of action in detail, or was it that the progress of the war and perhaps the number of general atrocities drowned out any other news?
Keep in mind that the Holocaust didn’t really kick into high gear until mid-1942. I imagine anything we knew before that was incomplete, and the Allies may not have been quite so aware of the ramping-up of the process in 1942-1943. If the Allied high command was only partially aware of the problem and its magnitude, the likelihood that ordinary news outlets would have better info in that day and age was really unlikely.
At any rate, it’s not like the Allies could have done much- invading Europe was pretty much what they could do, and there wasn’t really any question of doing it any earlier than they did, at least not effectively. Most of the camps were in Germany/Austria and Poland, so they were typically liberated in the very last stages of the war. Bombing was out of the question as well- Bomber Command wasn’t equipped to bomb particularly accurately, and the US 8th Air Force, while more accurate than Bomber Command, wasn’t accurate enough to bomb the camps without killing huge numbers of innocent prisoners.
I think we should entertain the third possibility that at least some did know and were accepting and supportive of the policy.
@mods can we move this to GD to see if there is further input?
Moderator Action
Moved to GD (from GQ) at OP’s request.
The thing is, it would have been better if they had bombed the death camps, killing all the prisoners inside - those people were for all effects and purposes already dead, and bombing the crematoria might have prevented the next trainload from dying.
Still, I don’t really blame them for not doing it. It’s a horrible choice to make. They might have *known *the magnitude of what was going on, but I doubt they really *grasped *it it.
That’s a tall order for the crews though; bombing* the enemy * is one thing- you’re either bombing the enemy’s infrastructure or the enemy cities as abstract things. But performing what amounts to wholesale high explosive euthanasia is something entirely different for the crews to undertake. I’m not sure anyone involved was quite ready to do that.
I’m not sure they really understood the magnitude, at least not in 1943-1944, and I’m certain that they didn’t grasp it until the spring of 1945. I suspect if they had, there wouldn’t have been nearly the level of shock at all levels that there was in 1945 when the camps were liberated. I’d have imagined that field army commanders at least would have been briefed about this, but it appears they were not.
We (the allies) knew about the* Concentration* camps quite early. But of course the British had put the Boers in such camps. And anti-semitism was rife in the allied nations.
The horror of the death camps, afaik, wasn’t truly known until allied soldiers liberated them.
Wasn’t there an Allied commander - maybe Eisenhower - who told his troops to get all the residents from a nearby German village out, took them on a forced tour and let the Germans be agape at what had been going on in the death camps?
As far as the Death Camps, the vast majority were dead within an hour of arrival. The argument for bombing the camps was to shut down the machine, at least temporarily. Considering 6000+ were being killed each day, each day the trains couldn’t run would potentially save thousands.
Right – like they didn’t know about that before!
Trains carrying thousands of people going in there every day, but nobody ever comes out? Up to 6,000 bodies being burned each day, but nobody noticed the smell?
But it’s a lot safer to be agape and pretend “I knew nothing!”
I think there were several instances of such commands. I definitely remember that after the liberation of the camp in Bergen-Belsen the German people from around were forced to walk the camps and see the atrocities and the dead bodies. I’ve seen coverage of that event. Of couse that didn’t come from Eisenhower as the British conquered Bergen Belsen, but I don’t know under whose command.
As PatrickLondon said, I’m sure that most people knew that bad things were happening to Jews in Germany and elsewhere. There was of course Kristallnacht and expulsions from Germany and Poland. Jews in these areas were essentially stateless. I think people knew ‘bad things’ were happening to Jews, but they might not have imagined that they were being systematically slaughtered until sometime later. Also, it’s not unusual that Germans would have been in denial that their people could have perpetrated such horrific crimes, which is something that at least some allied commanders clearly understood and which is why they wanted German citizens see and smell the death that took place in their name.
I think Western politicians knew in 1942, at least to some degree. By then, the killing was kicking into high gear, and Polish underground people had already gotten the word out as to what was happening.
The German people knew, too. They were hearing from their soldier who would come back on leave and talk about the slaughter.
Maybe no one knew the scale of it. But they knew that mass slaughter was going on.
Even in 1941, the Einsatzgruppen were coming in behind German troops in the East and beginning the slaughter via shootings.
As horrible as it sounds, bombing the camps, even if it prevented more people from being murdered, was not a military objective. That is, it would not have done much to bringing the end of the war closer. Not as much, for instance, as bombing a factory or a shipyard.
It might even be the case that the Germans diverting resources like guards and military personnel from actually fighting to slaughtering Jews siphoned off from prosecuting the war effort. It might not have saved lives overall, but maybe tying up rail stock transporting Jews to be killed kept those rail cars from being used to ship munitions or manufacturing supplies.
In economic terms, the Holocaust was a deadweight loss for the Nazis. It wasted resources on something that didn’t, to say the least, need to be done.
It was not only evil. It was stupid.
Regards,
Shodan