Why didn't the Allies use the Holocaust for propaganda during the War

[Whack-a-Mole]

@Evil_Captor

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.

I asked many years ago here when the Allies knew about the Holocaust.

An interesting post in that thread (linked above) said:

@Rodd_Hill

There is an excellent timeline of the Holocaust, and its reporting to the Allied nations, at:

Timeline | American Experience | Official Site | PBS

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.

[Capt_Kirk]

@Knowledgable

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

Thanks for the info

What I did not make clear in my post was that I seriously doubt the Allies were able to grok the scale of what was happening, some individuals knew of course.

Eleven million is a number, eleven million people is a whole nother ball of wax.

Capt

[Chen019]

I thought that that some revisionists argued that the Allies did use it for propaganda?

Allied planes dropped large numbers of leaflets, written in Polish and German, on Auschwitz and the surrounding areas which claimed that people were being gassed in the camp. The Auschwitz gassing story, which was an important part of the Allied wartime propaganda effort, was also broadcast to Europe by Allied radio stations.

OTOH. they claim that the British Intelligence records of intercepted German communications identified references to deaths mainly caused by typhus epidemics, shootings & hangings (British Intelligence in the Second World War: F.H. Hinsely). Also, they point to Dr Charles Larson, the US pathologist who performed autopsies on victims in the camps and found no evidence of poison gas.

There were Allied physicians who confirmed typhus and starvation as supplies ran out was a major cause of death (eg. John E. Gordon, “Louse-Borne Typhus Fever in the European Theater of Operations, U.S. Army, 1945,”).

These were the people where typhus predominated, more than a half million of them in the Rhineland, wearied with the war, undernourished, poorly clothed and long inured to sanitary underprivilege and low level hygiene. Add to this shifting population the hundreds of released political prisoners, often heavily infected with typhus but happily far fewer in numbers; the German refugees, first moving ahead of our troops and then sifting back to their homes through the American lines. Rarely if ever has a situation existed so conducive to the spread of typhus.

Typhus fever in a stable population is bad enough. It has demonstrated its potentialities in both war and peace. The Rhineland in those days of March, 1945, could scarcely be believed by those who saw it – it is beyond the appreciation of those who did not. It was Wild West, the hordes of Genghis Khan, the Klondike gold rush, and Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow all rolled up into one. Such was the typhus problem in the Rhineland…

Conditions in Western Europe in many respects favored a much greater spread of typhus fever than actually occurred. Germany was in chaos. The destruction of whole cities and the path left by advancing armies produced a disruption of living conditions contributing to the spread of the disease. Sanitation was low grade, public utilities were seriously disrupted, food supply and food distribution were poor, housing was inadequate and order and discipline were everywhere lacking. Still more important, a shifting of populations was occurring such as few countries and few times have experienced.

That’s similar to the account of the International Red Cross?

“In the chaotic condition of Germany after the invasion during the final months of the war, the camps received no food supplies at all and starvation claimed an increasing number of victims. Itself alarmed by this situation, the German Government at last informed the ICRC on February 1st, 1945 … In March 1945, discussions between the President of the ICRC and General of the S.S. Kaltenbrunner gave even more decisive results. Relief could henceforth be distributed by the ICRC, and one delegate was authorised to stay in each camp …”

(Vol. III, p. 83).the three-volume Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its Activities during the Second World War, Geneva, 1948.

One thing I only recently learned was that there was widespread torture of German witnesses (eg. Judge Edward L van Roden - The Progressive, February 1949, p. 21f. American Atrocities in Germany). Including for example Hoess who was the commandant as Auschwitz, who was tortured before his signed a statement confessing to gassings according to British officers Bernard Clarke (who captured Hoess) & Reg Jones.

It’s all pretty bizarre and no doubt will be debated for many years to come.

[Capt_Kirk]

Oh here we go

Typhus did it

Sweet caring Nazis tried their best to save the poor Juden

Nobody confessed to anything except through torture

The Allies were complicit in a massive Jewish/Bolshevik conspiracy to malign the glorious Reich

Photos, documents, witnesses and evidence were fabricated, modified or distorted

Did I miss anything?

Just trying to figure out who we are dealing with

Capt

[Dissonance]

@Chen019

It’s all pretty bizarre and no doubt will be debated for many years to come.

There aren’t enough :rolleyes:. The fact that you are linking to rense.com speaks to how batshit insane you have to be to actually believe this steaming pile of horseshit. Any further doubt should be removed by reading the title, author, and original source:

Auschwitz - Myths & Facts

By Mark Weber
IHR.org

Yes, that IHR, the Institute of Historical Review, the cesspool of holocaust deniers. They don’t even believe their own bullshit.

[Ibn_Warraq]

@Dissonance

There aren’t enough :rolleyes:. The fact that you are linking to rense.com speaks to how batshit insane you have to be to actually believe this steaming pile of horseshit. Any further doubt should be removed by reading the title, author, and original source:Yes, that IHR, the Institute of Historical Review, the cesspool of holocaust deniers. They don’t even believe their own bullshit.

No, as Chen points out, they’re not “Holocaust deniers” they’re “revisionists”.:dubious:

[Siam_Sam]

Was the Holocaust known very early on? I’m reminded of this thread.

And my post in it:

“The nine-hour-plus Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985) relates that not all Jews were shipped packed in cattle cars a la Schindler’s List. While many Polish and other Eastern European Jews had heard rumors of extermination and were packed in, many times Jews from Western Europe – France, the Netherlands – had never heard the rumors and were sent on regular trains complete with assigned seat numbers, dining cars etc. They had no idea what was awaiting them. And here’s a detail I found fascinating: One railroad or train-station worker interviewed told of having seen one Jew on one such train actually get off to go buy something in the station! And when the train started to pull out without him, he actually ran after it to catch it! :eek:”