I’ll admit it’s not something I’m sure of but a South African student at college made that comment and it certainly makes sense that they’d want as many whites as possible do to their population. Certainly during the 80s South Africa tried to recruit many Eastern European immigrants. In fact the guy who killed Chris Hani was not an Afrikaner Nationalist but a Polish immigrant pissed at Hani over Hani’s stance regarding the Solidarity Movement.
Yeah, this is my guess. Despite the size of the operation I think the Nazis still were at least still attempting to speak in euphemisms to the public about the Final Solution and trusting in the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ idiom.
In the history of the world propaganda has never once needed proof so I don’t know why it’s relevant what enemy territory the Allies took and when.
There is a whole mass of academic literature on this. One claim, not sure I accept it fully, is that the Allies best evidence for the Final Solution was from ULTRA decrypts and no action was taken so as not to reveal German high level cyphers were being read.
My theory is that the Western Allies at least were solely fixated on winning the war and could not have cared less that the Nazis were wasting their time with murdering off their own subjects/slaves.
In fact, in their minds, the more time the Nazis wasted on the Holocaust, the better. They were using scarce rail resources for shipping victims to the camps, and by all accounts, their attempts to use victims for slave labour - as at the Buna Rubber factory - were more or less wastes of time and effort (Primo Levy, who saw this first hand, left an indelible account of the pointlessness of making Nazi victims into industrial workers). Remember, these victims could have been productive German subjects/slaves, used to power German industry or agriculture - instead, the Germans were busy starving and murdering them. All to no reason. Even in a ruthless warlord calculation devoid of any humanity, the whole thing was totally pointless - even for scaring the rest into obedience (much lesser, but more public, measures of frightfulness would have sufficed).
If the Allies had made a big deal about the Holocaust, this would have lead to public pressure on the Allies to do something about it - which would, in Allied minds, have led to them wasting scarce Allied resources on such projects. Better to let the Nazis waste their efforts in peace - why bother making an effort to prevent the enemy from blundering? And, in point of fact, there wasn’t a hell of a lot they could have done, until the camps were overrun.
That’s it - the most effective thing the Allies could have done to end the Holocaust was to just win the war, as quickly as possible, which they were already trying their utmost to do. Diverting military strength to liberating the camps might have made the war last longer, with more deaths ultimately.
Besides, wasn’t the information more incredible than ordinary propaganda, to the point that it might have caused people to question their governments’ veracity more than propaganda usually does? It’s hard to believe it happened even today.
This was a huge, huge factor, at least in the United States. The German-atrocity stories had softened up American opinion before the American entry into WWI in April 1917.
After the war, writers led by Lord Ponsonby reviewed and debunked many of the atrocity stories. A consensus emerged within the US (see the Nye Committee) that American entry had been a mistake, driven by bankers who had loaned money to the Allies and arms merchants who wanted to supply the Army. The atrocity stories had been British propaganda to make the bankers’ job easier.
(Modern scholarship, FWIW, tends to debunk the debunkers. The Germans did indeed behave abysmally in Belgium.)
Anyone describing German mistreatment of Jews, or any other atrocity, before Pearl Harbor was at risk of being denounced as a British propaganda stooge.
After Pearl Harbor, this was less of an issue. But even so Americans were leery of speaking or writing about the Holocaust without solid proof, so that they wouldn’t be exposed by the Ponsonbies of the next generation as credulous dupes.
My impression is that a big part of it was not wanting the war to be seen as being for the benefit of the Jews, which would have undermined support for it.
Lots of good answers. I was aware of the prevalence of anti-Semitism at the time so can understand how sympathy for the Jews would have been limited. Gypsies have for centuries been the underclass/ boogie-men of Europe so it is understandable that their plight had little propaganda value. Interesting point about Stalin needing to present Russia as the most hard done by party during the war- and knowing Uncle Joe’s personality he wouldn’t have cared the slightest over the death of unthinkable amounts of Western & Eastern European Socialists, even those aligned to Moscow. And if the film Amen (2002) is accurate it appears that the Vatican were perfectly willing to sacrifice the Polish members of their flock if it meant Russia’s victory over Germany was delayed. There’s also a good scene where the American ambassador makes it clear that increased Jewish emigration to the States would be a political disaster for Washington.
And yet since the liberation of the death camps the Allies were happy to publicise what happened, and by & large the population of the world believed it. I sometimes wonder if the genocide shocked people not so much of because of it’s severity but due to the industrial methods used, ie. factories of death. I doubt the Armenian genocide benefited from as much media attention due to happening in one of the more remote parts of the world, but were the Nazis to use similar methods of murder in their genocide I suspect it it wouldn’t have piqued the interest of the world as much as the death camps did.
Interestingly despite long ingrained anti-Semitism throughout the world in nowadays popular opinion the Jews are often portrayed as the ultimate victim of the Holocaust, despite the fact that they were only slightly over half of the 11m victims. I put this down mainly to naivety rather than revisionism (as I’ve never heard of credible historians who deny that Gypsies, Jews, left-wingers, Homosexuals etc. also perished in massive numbers), but it is awfully prevalent today.
It could have something to do with the state of Israel keeping the Holocaust issue alive because it gives it a moral edge and motivates its supporters in the US and other countries.
The Gypsies have no state and very little influence. Maybe if they did, they would be doing the same.
Let us not forget the genocide of Russian prisoners by the Nazis which amounted to more than 3 million. Though that is probably a lot less than the Soviet genocides of their own people. Returning Russian PoWs were often executed by the Soviets as traitors. The Soviets lost 26 million during WW2, but there were also significant losses during the purges before and after the war. Who now remembers Stalins genocide of 5 million Kulaks? I am sure they do in Ukraine.
Genocide is depressingly common in human history. Usually the slaughter goes on unreported and often unknown to the rest of the world. The Holocaust was followed by the Nuremberg war crimes trials put on by the victorious Allies. They were anxious to de-Nazify the Germans. If it were not for that, it might have remained as little known as all the other genocides that took place in the Soviet Union. So really they did use the Holocaust as propaganda, but after WW2. Maybe it helped prevent WW3, it certainly made the case for the state of Israel.
But, if they got out in time, not even they would have really known about the camps – they is, they would have known there were concentration camps, but not that some of them were death camps with gas chambers.
My theory: Nobody gives a shiite about genocides to actually do anything about them. Khmer Rouge. Rwanda. Armenia. Cultural Revolution. Forced famines in Soviet Russia. Nigeria in 1967. One-child policy. Rape of Nanking. And those are just the ones off the top of my head…
The Holocaust was unique in that the world’s powers actually did come to the rescue, admittedly as a by-product of the larger overall war, but still.
One question that always arises is: Why didn’t the Allies bomb the rail yards that facilitated the policy of extermination? Rail yards were in fact major targets throughout the air war, and were often cratered like the surface of the Moon after a raid. They were, however, quickly repaired and put back into service, especially with slave labor available. The effect an intensified campaign against the rail yards would have had was minimal.
Bombing the extermination camps themselves was out of the question: they were too far east, and the precision required to take out, e.g., gas chambers rather than barracks simply did not exist. Bombing raids would have killed more inmates than they rescued (if they rescued any at all).
It should also be borne in mind that until around March 1944, when the Luftwaffe began to lose its potency, Allied aerial losses were staggering. To conserve scarce resources, targets had to be carefully selected in order to shorten the war and save lives all around. Bombing factories, refineries, and so on would accomplish this; bombing the camps would not have.
I recollect reading that the Germans got the art of repairing rail tracks down to a fine art so they could be up an running within a day. Bombing would not have had much effect. Most of the food for the camps also came in by rail.
Often there was not much the rest of the world could do. It would need an army on the ground to oppose the army responsible for the genocide.
There is no world policeman to enforce international law. The nations of the world are still organised much like a school playground with no teacher to blow a whistle when things get out of hand.
Let’s look at this from the opposite side, why didn’t the Axis use the Holocaust for propaganda during the War?
Europe had been slaughtering off the Jews for nearly a thousand years before WWII. Maybe England stays out of the war if they knew that could finally be rid of the vermin. Not sure about France, but Spain sure did kill a lot of Jews over the centuries.
I don’t know, I don’t think it was all that important during the war. The Allies knew some Jews were being killed, but that happens in war. The priority was to stop fascism and more than just Jews died for that cause. Just the killing of them was a sort of “ho-hum” type of thing …
… until the Allies saw first hand the manner in which they were being killed. Look at the pictures, this wasn’t about killing Jews, this was about torturing them, and not always to death. This was the true horror of the Holocaust. Especially from the American point of view, you just don’t do this to people, anytime for any reason.
Never again will we allow this to happen to white people, never again.
I agree with every word of this.
There was also little need to use the happenings in Germany and Poland as propaganda. The death camps were not in real effect until mid way to latterly during the war. By that time public opinion was as good as settled in favour of doing whatever it took to destroy Germany.
Because anti-Semitism was not confined to Germany, alone. That’s it. We can discuss the causes of the American Civil War endlessly. But the simple and most concise answer is it was over the question of slavery. And that’s it. All else is secondary, at most. Hitler hated Jews because the bible, or at least the Christian churches, told him he should.
It says here Hitler did not think much of Christianity either.
I think this is also relevant
My Grandfather was in CBI during the War and stationed in Germany after. He and my Grandmother were forced to go visit some of the camps because people could not believe the scale of what we now call Genocide. My Grandmother, in particular, was profoundly affected by what she saw. She “knew” that the Nazi’s had done horrible things before she went to the camps but the scale and intense cruelty, plus the systematic nature of the camps were beyond her imagination. She had a very difficult time understanding that people could do that to each other. I believe that most Americans, in fact most citizens of the planet, had a hard time with the fact that eleven MILLION humans were murdered, in such a short time. Sadly some do not understand still.
I do not think the Allies could have used the Holocaust for propaganda because very few would have believed them, even if they actually knew what was happening.
My Grandmother made sure I understood, not that the Germans were bad or evil but good people can be made to do heinous things, which for me is the whole point.
Never forget, I will not and that little lady from Bossier City never did either.
#26947 KLAuschwitz
Capt
I don’t know why, but I can certainly tell you that he Allies had knowledge about what was going on. We know this because they even made a meeting in order to discuss whether to bomb the railways, which carried masses of Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
This plan failed to meet implementation due to the fears that this strike could have killed civilians (ironic), pushed Germans to rapidly execute the rest seeing that the transportation channels were being damaged. Moreover damaging the railways would mean cutting huge amounts of food supply, which the prisoners survived on.
Here’s some more on this topic: Auschwitz bombing debate - Wikipedia