In a discussion last night the question in the title came up and I realized I had no clue as to the answer. For the answer I am interested in several different aspects.
I assume the Allies knew right away that Hitler was instituting some sort of pogrom against the Jews (and several other groups such as Gypsies and homosexuals but from here on in I’ll just say Jews). Is my assumption correct or did it take the Allies awhile to learn about Hitler’s ethnic cleansing?
When did the Allies learn the truth about what was actually being done to the Jews and about the death camps?
How informed was the German public about what was being done to the Jews?
Did the Allies (governments) inform the public about the death camps once they knew or did they keep it under wraps?
Did the first soldiers who liberated the death camps know what they were walking into (I’ll grant that no one could be prepared for the full reality…just curious if they knew what the camp was for before they walked in)?
What was the public’s reaction at that time to learning about the death camps (whenever it was they finally learned)?
IIRC, reports of the camps were known in to the allies during the war. Some were discounted as propaganda, but it was known that people were being sent to the camps and killed. Few in the allied camp understood just how many were being killed, though.
Reports were also in allied newspapers. The public either considered them lies (akin to the “evil Hun” stories in WWI) or exaggerations. And, frankly, not many Americans at the time were that interested in the plight of Jews.
I believe most people knew about the camps (the Nazis never particularly hid their existance, though they did gloss over exactly what was going on). When the camps were liberated, though, it was a shock for everyone. The degree of what happened was beyond most people’s comprehension.
Dammit! I can’t remember where I read this… but I do remember reading (somewhere) that the Allies were aware of atrocities being committed against civilian populations, and warned the German government that they would be prosecuting them for war crimes, as early as the winter of 1942.
But, as RealityChuck says, the sheer scale of the atrocities wasn’t realised until Allied forces actually found the death camps.
It notes that the first press reports of massacres of thousands of Jewish civilians in western Russia surfaced in July of 1941.
In May of 1942, Polish Resistance workers transmit to London a document summarizing Nazi massacres of Jews in Poland and Russia
A press conference held by the World Jewish Congress in London on June 29th, 1942, estimated that over a million Jews had been killed by the Nazis.
The first word of an official Nazi policy of total annihilation of the Jews in Europe comes from Switzerland in August of 1942.
(Above notes from the PBS “American Experience” page).
As Reality Chuck noted, many in the public took the figures, and even the reports, with a grain of salt; the Allied (and in particular the British) propaganda machine of World War One had been extremely successful in spreading stories of German “frightfulness,” the vast majority of which were false. After WWI, many took such atrocity reports to be exaggerated, or even false.
The first public mention of the word “holocaust” that I have seen personally in a primary source is in a Winnipeg, Canada Jewish organization’s quarterly yearbook from mid-1943. Even so, IIRC, most of the text talks in terms of “many thousands” being killed and sent to concentration camps (although this referred, I believe, to the Warsaw Ghetto and Theresienstadt rather than the death camps).
How much the German public knew is a tricky question. Many, I believe, just didn’t want to know; an elderly German of my acquaintance (who would have been in his early 40s in 1940) once told me that he remembered civilians making reference to troublemakers (in the sense of people criticizing the regime) “going up the chimney,” if they didn’t watch their step. An interesting reference is Gitta Sereny’s excellent book “Into that Darkness,” the story of Franz Strangl, commandant of Treblinka, and also the development of the Nazi gassing program, beginning with “mental defectives,” which laid the groundwork for the later death camps.
Sereny quotes one man (interviewed afer the war) about knowledge of the Holocaust:
Ian Kershaw, in his book “Popular Opinion & Political Dissent in the Third Reich,” makes particular mention of the protests in Bavaria over the Nazi euthenasia of mental patients and disabled, but notes the complaisance over the transportation of Jews from Bavaria.
I will try to add more to this later, addressing the last 3 questions on the OP, but for now I have to go to work.
I’m too lazy to do a real web search right this minute but IIRC a couple of camp “guests” escaped from Auschwitz and started to spread the news. they were either treated as sensationalistic or they were drowned out by other war news.
So if I might summarize what I’ve read so far the Allies (heck…the German public too) had reports of what was going on fairly early on but nobody could bring themselves to buy such a thing so chalked it up to exaggerated rumor.
If so when did the Allies finally come face-to-face with the reality of the scope of the Holocaust? Only after the camps were liberated and they spent some time adding it all up or sooner than that?
I’d say the ‘allies’ (maybe 100-200 top people in the U.S. & Britain) almost certainly knew by 1942 that Jews were being interned and killed on a massive scale. To what extent they understood HOW massive and focused in/ignored this is an open question. There is certainly some evidence that they had a pretty good idea what was happening & did nothing to stop it: “indifference” is the term thrown around. NB: few argue that before 1944 at the EARLIEST, it was not possible for allied operations to reach the camps with any regularity/safety/efficacy.