Did the Allies discover the Holocaust in 1942?

I was discussing foreign policy with a person on another forum completely unrelated to WWII (It's actually about Sports, Entertainment and Pro-wrestling ironically) but the point was some one critizied the US for not getting involved in World War II sooner due to the holocaust and I stated that the Holocaust was largely not known about until the Spring of 1945 to which they responded....

I'm wondering if anyone can confirm or debunk this?

 

The Allies were aware of instances of the mass murder of Jews by the Nazi's in Eastern Europe from late 1941, and it did receive some publicity in the Allied press.
However the sheer scale of the holocaust, and death camps run on an industrial scale did shock the Allies to some extent when they overran them towards the end of the war

 

Discovering the Holocaust in 1942 might not have made much difference, since the US was already in the war by then. There is still some argument about whether Allied air forces should have bombed the rail lines leading to the concentration camps.

 

Also, I don't think that the USA had any material knowledge regarding the deportations and mass murders prior to the end of 1941 on which it could have based a decision to enter the war sooner. At the end of the war, when we see the reaction of American troops, including commanding officers, upon the discovery of the death camps, it seems to validate the notion that the magnitude of the horror was not known to the advancing troops.

FDR was dealing with a very isolationist population that was still in the grip of weak economy. He could not have entered the war before Pearl even though he might have wished it.

 

Martin Gilbert has a book on this subject called "Auschwitz and the Allies".He seems to think that the allies could have made a greater effort to destroy the rail lines.However, that may have caused the Germans to expedite the genocide.They could have repaired the railroads in short order or just moved their victims by trucks. Starving to death and mass machine gunning also were options.

The extent the Nazis were willing to do to exterminate the Jews boggles the mind.Merely bombing the railroad tracks would only have temporarily slowed the Nazis febrile pursuit of the destruction of the Jews.

 

The camps were in Eastern Europe, for most of the war they were out of range of the type of continual bomber offensive needed to slow down the transport of Jews to these camps, and the losses suffered by the bomber crews would have been horrific.
It should also be noted that the majority of the nearly 6 million Jews murdered in the holocaust didn't die in the camps, they were murdered by the SS Einsatzgruppen in the areas where they lived.
By the end of 1941, the Germans (along with local auxiliaries recruited by the Germans) had killed a million Jews in the Soviet Union and the Baltic region, the equivalent of the total number of Jews killed at Auschwitz during the entire war.

 

While news of German atrocities in Eastern Europe did reach the USA before they entered the war, it was often difficult for the general public to accept it wasn't merely Allied propaganda.
It wasn't helped by the fact that in WW1 German atrocities in Belgium were overblown by Allied propaganda in an effort to involve the USA in the war, and this fact had become widely known post-war, so any allied claims of atrocities by the German's were viewed with suspicion.

 

That is very well put, the past over-stating of German atrocities made believing this new batch wasn't just more of the same very difficult. America (and the rest of the west) simply couldn't believe that a cultured nation like Germany could be responsible for such nastiness. It seem unbelievable, and so it wasn't believed.

When the reports started getting more and more concrete ast the war dragged on, then FDR stated in his private meetings that (paraphrasing); "we simply can't make the Jews any part of our reason for being in this war, we have too many voters in America who hate the Jews as well." Using the reality of Realpolitik, FDR didn't want the horrors of the camps to become a reason to be in, or stay in the war effort. Defeating the Axis fast was the best way to bring this to an end sooner and save more lives. Bombing the lines leading to the camps wouldn't stop them, rail lines can be repaired and in war time the Germans did this rapidly and with regularity.

I'm not saying the west didn't know, or didn't care. They were, in reality hand-tied in any response they could make which might have altered the history of the Jews in Axis control for the better. Just my opinion.

 

Not according to this websiteHistory of the Holocaust - An Introduction.

It says that 3.5 million died in the death camps.

 

The New York Times printed articles on German politics and the Jewish situation in 1932 through 1941, inclusive of the Final Solution. So, the developing problems were neither alien to those in Germany nor the US. The question, of course, is to the degree. There were phone calls made from Switzerland to the NY Times regarding the situation at Dachau in 1943, which had been established in 1933, the first of its kind. Interestingly, Dachau was also used as a training ground for the SS and Adolph Eichmann, often referred to as the architect of the Holocaust, was assigned there in 1933 as a clerk with the rank of corporal. At the war's end, he was a Lt Colonel.

All of these articles are in the NY Times Archive:

"All the News That's Fit to Print." The Ochs-Sulzberger family [of Jewish stock], one of the United States' newspaper dynasties, has owned The Times since 1896. Concerned of being "pro Jewish," most of the articles were not front page: 1941 "Nazis Seek to Rid Europe of All Jews." section 1 page 10, 28 October 1941

1933"All Jewish Merchants Jailed By Nazis in Annanberg, Saxony."
By The Associated Press. March 10, 1933, Friday

GERMAN FUGITIVES TELL OF ATROCITIES AT HANDS OF NAZIS; Americans Bear Out Tales of Outrages and Cruelties in Racial "Purging." JEWS FLEE PERSECUTION Pour Across Borders, Fearing for Lives -- Police Apathetic and Courts Powerless. ALL NEWS IS CENSORED People Dare Not Talk to Foreign Correspondents -- Phones Tapped -- Spies Overrun Berlin. GERMAN FUGITIVES TELL OF ATROCITIES Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES. New York Times. New York, N.Y.: Mar 20, 1933.

1935 "Jewish Concert Banned."
1935 "Reich Adopts Swastika As Nation's Official Flag;
Hitler's Reply to `Insult.'"
1935 "Nazis in New Drive on Jews in Trade."
1936"Reich Will Seize Jews Who Vote."
1937"Jewish Cafés Closed in Reich."
1937"Boycott of Jews Reviving in Reich."
1938 "Austrian Province Ousts 3,000 Jews."
1938 "Germany Tightens Boycott of Jews."
1938"Sudetens Halt Firemen As Jew's House Burns."
1938 "Nazis Smash, Loot And Burn Jewish Shops And Temples.
1939 "Bill to Shut Out Aliens Is Reported."
1940 "Germany Tightens Jews' Ration Curbs."
[1940 Nazis choose Oswiecim (Auschwitz) in Poland near Krakow
as site of new concentration camp. Jan. 25]
1940 "Hoover Envisions Refuge to 10 Million."
1941 "Jews of Hanover- Forced From Homes."
1941 "Nazis Seek to Rid Europe of All Jews."
New York Times. 28 October 1941, section 1 page 10.

To paraphrase discussions- the few- I had with Germans while living in Germany in the early sixties,
"We knew; to the degree, we guessed. Many made efforts not to know with silence in order to survive."

Fred J.

 

The New York Times printed articles on German politics and the Jewish situation in 1932 through 1941, inclusive of the Final Solution. So, the developing problems were neither alien to those in Germany nor the US. The question, of course, is to the degree. There were phone calls made from Switzerland to the NY Times regarding the situation at Dachau in 1943, which had been established in 1933, the first of its kind. Interestingly, Dachau was also used as a training ground for the SS and Adolph Eichmann, often referred to as the architect of the Holocaust, was assigned there in 1933 as a clerk with the rank of corporal. At the war's end, he was a Lt Colonel.

All in the NY Times Archive:

"All the News That's Fit to Print." The Ochs-Sulzberger family [of Jewish stock], one of the United States' newspaper dynasties, has owned The Times since 1896. Concerned of being "pro Jewish," most of the articles were not front page: 1941 "Nazis Seek to Rid Europe of All Jews." section 1 page 10, 28 October 1941

1933"All Jewish Merchants Jailed By Nazis in Annanberg, Saxony."
By The Associated Press. March 10, 1933, Friday

GERMAN FUGITIVES TELL OF ATROCITIES AT HANDS OF NAZIS; Americans Bear Out Tales of Outrages and Cruelties in Racial "Purging." JEWS FLEE PERSECUTION Pour Across Borders, Fearing for Lives -- Police Apathetic and Courts Powerless. ALL NEWS IS CENSORED People Dare Not Talk to Foreign Correspondents -- Phones Tapped -- Spies Overrun Berlin. GERMAN FUGITIVES TELL OF ATROCITIES Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES. New York Times. New York, N.Y.: Mar 20, 1933.

1935 "Jewish Concert Banned."
1935 "Reich Adopts Swastika As Nation's Official Flag;
Hitler's Reply to `Insult.'"
1935 "Nazis in New Drive on Jews in Trade."
1936"Reich Will Seize Jews Who Vote."
1937"Jewish Cafés Closed in Reich."
1937"Boycott of Jews Reviving in Reich."
1938 "Austrian Province Ousts 3,000 Jews."
1938 "Germany Tightens Boycott of Jews."
1938"Sudetens Halt Firemen As Jew's House Burns."
1938 "Nazis Smash, Loot And Burn Jewish Shops And Temples.
1939 "Bill to Shut Out Aliens Is Reported."
1940 "Germany Tightens Jews' Ration Curbs."
[1940 Nazis choose Oswiecim (Auschwitz) in Poland near Krakow
as site of new concentration camp. Jan. 25]
1940 "Hoover Envisions Refuge to 10 Million."
1941 "Jews of Hanover- Forced From Homes."
1941 "Nazis Seek to Rid Europe of All Jews."
New York Times. 28 October 1941, section 1 page 10.

To paraphrase a few discussions in the early '60s while living in Germany: "We knew; to the degree, we guessed. Survival was silence."

Fred J.

 

The allies received alot of criticism of anti-semitism, etc. after the war for not doing more to eliminate or destroy the concentration camps. It was known to the allies that they existed, and where most of them were, but the scale of exactly the very worst that went on inside some of them was only rumored at for much of the war.

Assume for argument's sake the allies had had the resources to devote to bombing the railway lines and trains that went to the camps, and possibly also even the camp walls themselves to allow the prisoners to escape (which was in fact done once, by a special flight of British mosquito bombers, to free some Dutch prisoners in a Gestapo facility in Holland). The only way until about 1945 for the western allies to damage the camps was by air. The Russians showed very little interest in doing such altruistic acts, (in fact they actually halted their advance in Poland and stood aside during the Warsaw uprising in 1944, and allowed Hitler and Himmler to raze the city before advancing again.)

That left the western allies to hinder the German SS death camp efforts. Again, until 1945 it could only be done by air. The locations of most of the camps was in eastern Germany and Poland - out of reach by allied air attack until well after D-day. The only aircraft possibly capable of reaching them, through hundreds of miles of continuous German flak, was the B-29 - and all of these were committed to the Pacific theatre.

The allies probably should have done more to hinder and destroy the concentration camps on humanitarian grounds alone - but until late in the war there was no practical way to do anything significant towards this end.

 

The Allies were full aware of the persecution of the Jews and to what extent by 1942. They had well Informed Intel of various actions and "pogroms" in the occupied areas. Their were a number of Jews who had already witnessed the "Einsatzgruppen" in Russia, and were able to emigrate to the U.S and England. A majority of them had pleaded to the respective governments to allow the mass Immigration of Jews, Politicians and Scholars from Poland,Balkans,Russia,France etc... To which the U.S and England closed the doors for fear of German spies and saboteurs also making their way in.