The question of what the Allied governments knew about the Holocaust during the war years, and when they knew it, has been the subject of an enormous historical literature. The short answer is that the Allies knew the essentials by mid-1942 and had detailed information by mid-1943. They acknowledged the killing publicly in December 1942. They did not, however, treat the killing as a primary war aim. The Allied response to the Holocaust during the war was, in the judgement of most modern historians, inadequate. The argument over how inadequate, and over what could realistically have been done with the information available, is still going on.
The first reports
Information about the killing began to reach the Allies almost as soon as the killing began. The Polish Government in exile in London received reports from the Polish underground from the autumn of 1941 onwards. The reports described the deportations of Polish Jews to the German-controlled east, the conditions in the ghettos, and from mid-1942 onwards, the existence of dedicated extermination camps. The reports were detailed and specific. They named places, methods, and approximate numbers.
The Riegner Telegram of August 1942, sent by Gerhart Riegner, the Geneva representative of the World Jewish Congress, to American and British Jewish leaders, summarised information he had received from a German industrialist with senior contacts in Berlin. The telegram set out the German plan to murder all the Jews of Europe through hydrogen cyanide gas in dedicated facilities. The State Department in Washington and the Foreign Office in London held the telegram for several months before allowing it to be passed to the relevant Jewish organisations.
The Karski mission
Jan Karski was a young Polish underground courier who had been smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto and into a German extermination camp (probably Bełżec or Izbica, the historical record is unclear) in late 1942. He was then smuggled out of occupied Poland through Gibraltar to London, where he reported in person to the Polish Government in exile, to the British war cabinet, and ultimately, after a further trip to Washington, to President Roosevelt himself.
Karski’s reception in London and Washington in 1942 and 1943 is one of the more troubling episodes in the Allied response. He gave detailed first-hand accounts of what he had seen. He was largely disbelieved or politely heard out. Felix Frankfurter, the Jewish American Supreme Court Justice, told Karski after a lengthy meeting that he could not believe what Karski was telling him; he was careful to add that he was not calling Karski a liar, but that the human mind could not accept that what Karski described was actually happening. Karski was telling the truth and Frankfurter knew it. The reaction is what the human mind does with information of this kind.
The 17 December 1942 declaration
On 17 December 1942, the Allied governments issued a joint declaration acknowledging that the German government was systematically murdering the Jewish population of occupied Europe. The declaration was read in the British House of Commons by the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, followed by a minute of silence, the only such silence ever observed in the House of Commons for any wartime atrocity. The declaration was simultaneously released in Washington and Moscow.
The declaration committed the Allied governments to the punishment of those responsible after the war. It did not commit them to any operational response during the war. The pattern of Allied policy in the following two years would essentially follow the December 1942 declaration: condemnation in words, no operational diversion of resources to the rescue of Jewish lives, victory over Germany as the primary war aim that would, indirectly, end the killing.
The Vrba-Wetzler Report
The most consequential single piece of Allied intelligence on the Holocaust was the report produced in April 1944 by Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, two Slovak Jewish prisoners who escaped from Auschwitz on 7 April 1944 and reached the Slovak Jewish underground. The two men dictated a 32-page report describing the operation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in detail: the layout, the ramps, the gas chambers, the crematoria, the killing methods, and approximate figures. The report was passed through underground channels to the Vatican, the British, the Americans and the Hungarian Jewish leadership, reaching the Allies in late April and May 1944.
The report’s timing was crucial. The Hungarian deportations to Auschwitz were about to begin. The report set out, in detail, exactly what would happen to the Hungarian deportees on arrival. It is the document that triggered the international protests that eventually persuaded Horthy to halt the Hungarian deportations in July 1944. It also reopened the question of bombing the Auschwitz facilities, which the Allies declined to do, on the grounds covered on the page on Allied bombing. The Vrba-Wetzler report is the case in which Allied possession of detailed, specific operational intelligence about the killing programme is impossible to dispute.
The decoded German messages
The British codebreaking operation at Bletchley Park decoded German Order Police and SS communications in real time from 1941 onwards. The decoded messages included regular reports from Einsatzgruppen units in the occupied Soviet territories, listing the numbers of Jews killed in each operation. The figures were detailed and specific. They cumulated, by the end of 1941, into a mass killing on a scale that the Bletchley analysts could not ignore. The British Joint Intelligence Committee was reading the figures from late summer 1941 onwards.
The decrypts were treated as ULTRA secret. Their contents were not shared with the public, with the press, or with most government officials. The British did not, even after the killings became public knowledge through other channels, publish the figures from the decrypts during the war. The full archive of the Bletchley decrypts on the Holocaust was only released in the 1990s. The historian Richard Breitman’s work on this material is the central modern study.
What the Allies did and did not do
The Allies, through the war years, made several decisions on the Jewish question. They did not relax their immigration quotas to take in larger numbers of Jewish refugees. They did not pressure neutral countries to take in larger numbers. They did not bomb the death camps or the railway lines feeding them. They did not organise rescue operations behind enemy lines. They did, in late 1944 under American leadership, set up the War Refugee Board, which produced some real if small-scale rescue results, including funding the Wallenberg operation in Budapest. They did, after the war, conduct trials of the perpetrators on the basis of the law they had set out at Nuremberg.
The argument over whether more was possible, and over the extent to which the Allied governments are morally implicated in the killings they declined to interrupt, has continued ever since. Some historians, particularly David Wyman, have argued that the Allied response was a major moral failure. Others, particularly William Rubinstein, have argued that the operational alternatives were largely illusory and that the Allies’ chosen strategy of winning the war as quickly as possible was the realistic best response. The argument is unresolved.
What the documentation now shows
The Allied governments, by mid-1944 at the latest, had detailed and specific operational information about the Holocaust. They knew where the camps were, how the killing was being conducted, and approximately how many people were being murdered each day. They had photographic reconnaissance of Auschwitz, taken by aircraft of the 15th Air Force in summer 1944 in the course of bombing operations against the IG Farben factory at Monowitz. They had the Vrba-Wetzler report. They had the running stream of Polish underground reports. They had the decrypts. None of this is in dispute on the historical record. What the Allied governments did with the information is what continues to be argued.
See also
- Jan Karski
- The Hungarian Deportations 1944
- IG Farben
- Anthony Eden and the Commons Statement December 1942
Sources
- Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth About Hitler’s Final Solution, Little Brown, 1980
- David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945, Pantheon, 1984
- Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew, Hill and Wang, 1998
- Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, Oxford University Press, 1979
- Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State, Houghton Mifflin, 1944
- USHMM: The Allies and Jewish Refugees