I’m not sure to what extent the Allies knew about the mass slaughtering of (mainly Jewish, Romany, Left Wing, Eastern European) civilians in the early years of the Second World War, though it seems logical that as time went by (and the killings intensified) the Allies would have realised that a genocide was going on. Babi Yar (1941) would have been an obvious sign of the growing brutality of the Nazi regime, and certainly Lidice (1942) was widely reported on in Western Europe.
Presumably by the War’s end the British & American airforces would have seen the death camps during reconnaissance flights and would have had some inkling as to what went on insude them. But as far as I’m aware Russia, America & Britain never publicised the fact that a genocide was taking place during the war. This confuses me because I would think that it would have been of great propaganda value to them- particularly in recruiting volunteers. For example if you wanted to recruit the Argentinian Jewish community into the American Army then revealing what happens in Belsen wouldn’t have hurt. Ditto the British Army asking for volunteers in somewhere like Ireland, publicising the persecution of Polish priests might attract people who are devout Catholics. And when you consider the amount of Socialists throughout the world, in a pre-cold war era it would have been beneficial to announce that their brothers in Eastern Europe were getting murdered in their hundreds of thousands inside Concentration Camps.
The only reason I can think of for being secretive about what was going on was that they (the allies) worried that they wouldn’t be believed. Has anyone else got any thoughts on this subject.
IIRC, by the time Allied forces actually crossed into Germany the war in Europe was essentially decided. Germany unconditionally surrendered within 3 months of Allied forces stepping foot across the Rhine.
To get compelling evidence you need to take control of the territory and that did not happen until towards the end of the war in the West. You need to be on the ground and have witnesses, ariel photographs are of limited use, because they are open to interpretation.
There was plenty of use made of evidence of the holocaust after the war to help de-Nazifiy the German people and prosecute those responsible.
Keep in mind during WWI there’d been a lot of anti-German propaganda related mostly to the invasion of Belgium(they’re raping nuns, crucifying cats on the church doors etc) and especially in America many felt they’d been duped into the war and there was probably concern over them rolling they’re eyes and saying “we’ve heard this before.”
My impression based on stuff I read a long time ago was that the US leadership knew about the Holocaust but kept it from the general public. Only when regular soldiers overran the death camps did it get widely reported.
That said, my memory does not seem credible to me, since I’m sure the Jews who were forced to flee their homelands, some to the US, had plenty to say about what the Nazis were up to.
There were at least 2 ships filled with refugee Jews that tried to dock in Fllorida and they were turned away. One went to Cuba and another to the Dominican Republic where they were welcomed. The USa was not that opposed to the Holocaust.
True, but the US still took in over the course of WWII more Jewish refugees than all the other western nations, with South Africa coming in second(for obvious reasons).
Sadly, the UK, Canada and the rest were quite anti-Semitic when it came to Jewish refugees.
So yeah, while the US took in roughly 100,000 Jewish refugees, nobody was terribly happy with taking them, except for the South Africans who wanted as many whites as possible.
That happened in 1939, a couple of years before the US joined WW2. No-one knew how the war in Europe would develop and US policy was one of neutrality.
Refugee boats were regarded as an immigration issue.
When did the Holocaust start? When were the death camps built? 1942 onwards?
If there was evidence of the Holocaust at that time, the British would surely of used it to convince the US to join the War in Europe which was a strategic priority.
Antisemitism was fairly widespread back in the day, including in the United States. Add that in with isolationist tendencies and I don’t know if it would’ve been that good of propaganda. Better to appeal to the theoretical security threats Germany represented against the United States or the more generic “freedom” angle.
Ding ding ding, give that man a prize.
For one thing, antisemitism itself was fairly common, to an extent that’s hard to conceptualize today. Today of course antisemitism is wisely regarded as a shameful, black mark on one’s character ; but that’s a result of the Holocaust itself and the whiplash of people realizing that hmm, maybe they’d let things get a little too far. But up to then, the vilest shit got printed about the Jews and *nobody *batted an eye, not in Europe, and certainly not in the US. As for the USSR, well, Russia remains pretty firmly antisemitic to this day, so…
Refugees telling grisly tales of the ghetto, well, “they probably made that up/wildly exaggerated to draw sympathy, right ? Nobody could be that bad, and you know Them Jews…”. Or people simply did. not. care. Especially in the US, where a common sentiment was that Europe was evidently locked in a state of perpetual, incorrigible bloody warfare which was their business and not worth shedding one drop of good American blood. Wasn’t 1918 enough ? Won’t these people ever learn ? and yadda yadda.
It’s not dissimilar to the way many Americans look on the Middle East these days, come to think about it.
Last but not least there’s also the fact that Jews were associated with Communism back then - Marx, Lenin, Trostky, Radek… were all Jews of course, and plenty of folks explained at length how that damn dirty communism (which naturally scared the pants of moneyed and influential people back then, as factory workers and negroes shouldn’t get notions above their station, like they deserve fair compensation or regular reprieve from work, no no no, that wouldn’t do) was really a Jewish secret plot to Destroy Civilization As We Knew It. They even called it “Judeo-Bolshevism”. That crap worked spectacularly well in Germany obviously, it worked everywhere else too. And considering the spectre of Communism & unions spreading was essentially reason number one why the Western powers let Hitler do whatever he wanted for so long, that particular angle is non-negligible.
It’s also one of the main reasons Jewish refugees were not exactly welcomed outside of the Reich, as they were assumed to be potential troublemakers (another being, of course, that most of them came with the clothes on their backs and no country looks favourably on large numbers of poor, unemployed, homeless people crossing their borders ; regardless of their religion).
Look at the dates. After Pearl Harbour Dec 8 1941, the US was at war with Japan, it was not at war with Germany.
I guess if Hitler had played the diplomatic card, opinion in the US could have been to concentrate on the War in the Pacific. If that were the case, propaganda using evidence of Nazi death camps may have had some impact in changing that position.
However Hitler decided to declare war on the US a few days later on December 11, 1941. So after a suprise attack by Japan and the a declaration of war by German, the neurality debate in the US was finally settled. No-one needed convincing anymore of the threat.
The evidence for the death camps emerged in December 1943.
I guess by then influencing opinion of the remaining neutral states was not so important. Only states with significant armies would have affected the outcome. It did create some protests in Switzerland, I believe. Spain was neutral…would it have had an affect there? They were ideologically aligned with the Nazis, so likely to forbid such propaganda. For the countries committed to the conflict, the bombing of cities spoke more loudly than any propaganda.
Also, beside making the case that genocide was being perperpetrated. It leads on to the question of what can be done about it. Opinions were very divided about how effective bombing the camps would have been. That subject has been much debated.
The death camps didn’t begin until 1942. Not that what was going on before then was truly a monstrosity and already a worse genocide than anything in history up until then.
And there was plenty of evidence of what Hitler intended in Mein Kampf and his speeches and eyewitness reports of people fleeing.
It wasn’t used as propaganda in a good way because it wouldn’t have helped. America was heavily anti-Semitic and so was the rest of the world. Henry Ford had spent years publishing anti-Semitic tracts.
The word genocide hadn’t been first used yet.
Patton first saw a concentration camp (not a death camp) and was so utterly sickened he rounded up the local German population and made them look and start digging graves. He was used to the horrors of war, but had never seen anything like it. The death camps were even more monstrous. Who among the civilian population would believe that people could do such things to other people?
No one was greatly interested in recruiting volunteers. “we’ll take you when we want you and you’ll come” was more the attitude this time. For Stalin the sufferings of the Soviet nation had to be shown to be the worst and the most deserving, and no bunch of Jews was going to out-suffer him.
Plus how do you get evidence that is incontrovertible? As distinct from some guy saying, “I’ve been in there and I’ve seen it”. Most prison camps look the same from aerial photographs (and most extermination camps were tucked away in the East where they were not easily photographed).
Assuming the Allies were fully apprised of the situation, what would the point be? Forget anti-Semitism; really, that has nothing to do with it. Who was or wasn’t a bad guy or a good guy was freely manipulated to serve the purposes of government. Nobody in the USA was terribly fond of Chinese people either, who had been treated as akin to donkeys for years, but China’s noble fight against the Japanese was played for propaganda.
The idea of propaganda was to motivate the people to do something:
Join the armed forces
Buy war bonds
Galvanize public opinion
Stop wasting war materiel
Do whatever specific thing helped the war
By the time the Holocaust was truly in full swing, Germany as a nexus of evil that had to be destroyed was already fixed in everyone’s heads. There was really nowhere to go in the “Nazis are evil” category and nothing more to add to that discussion.
The Germans were killing millions of Soviets and committing countless atrocities in Eastern Europe, and the occupied countries in the west weren’t exactly vacation spots. The allies considered the fate of civilian internees and prisoners the least of the Nazis’ crimes. I doubt many people in the US or UK knew until after the war’s end just how focused and intense the Final Solution actually was.