Stubble wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 8:29 pm
I believe I addressed all of that in my first paragraph, let me check.
Oh, I did...
'Perhaps grey propaganda or simply propaganda would be a better term. My operating definition for black propaganda differs from the wikipedia definition, which is fine. I'll just call it propaganda.
Like you say, not all propaganda is false. Another point is that almost all propaganda contains within it kernels of truth.'
Thanks for ignoring that part of my post in your quote though.
No, you defaulted back to black propaganda in your reply, and you also missed how I noted that grey propaganda doesn't apply to reporting of the Holocaust, either.
Grey propaganda is either sourceless or laundered through neutral sources, as with Soviet KGB disinformation and US copying of this tactic.
Let's look at the part I quoted again
When the vans turn into homicidal gas vans or the steam chambers turn into homicidal vacuum chambers or homicidal gas chambers, that's the propaganda. It's misinformation, not malinformation. That's what I would call black propaganda. Like the dead babies thrown out of incubators or weapons of mass destruction propaganda. There was no real basis for it. I'm not saying that Kuwait didn't have a nicu, I'm saying Iraqi troops didn't throw premature infants on the cold floor and leave them to die.
Do you see now why I pointed out you were defaulting to the wrong term?
Your understanding of the reporting of the extermination camps in 1942 doesn't really match the reality, which is unsurprising as you're likely deriving this understanding from deniers while conventional accounts in English don't always explain everything in depth.
The first reporting was written down in intelligence reports by the Polish underground and as yet unpublicised accounts in the Polish Jewish underground. This applies to Chelmno especially. Once the reports were in,
then a decision was taken to publicise them locally (in the Polish underground press and in the Warsaw ghetto underground press) and to transmit the reports to the Polish government-in-exile, with Polish reports going alongside summaries by the Jewish underground, with the Ringelblum Archive summaries then summarised by the Bund. Those summaries included many reports received and written up in the same way about mass shootings in eastern Poland as well as about Chelmno, then Belzec.
The next wave of intelligence reports for the Polish underground included one observing Belzec from the outside and reporting the local rumours on methods - 'gas or electricity'. These rumours appeared simultaneously in local diaries before any publicity was forthcoming with the same 'gas or electricity' two views recorded. So this was a spontaneous local interpretation reported up the chain to Warsaw and thus 'nationally'. Ironically, the fugitive from Chelmno recording the longest account, Shlomo Winer aka 'Szlamek', took refuge, so he thought, in Zamosc, near to Belzec, after deciding to leave Warsaw, and sent a postcard back to Warsaw saying that the Germans 'make cold in Belzec as they do in Chelmno', which was not strictly speaking true (gas vans vs gas chambers), but in Zamosc, Winer was a recipient of hearsay. He was right about gas, though, and didn't mention electricity.
Diaries, letters and intelligence reports are not 'propaganda'. They can of course record rumours or hearsay distortions, which is what we observe with several of them (eg the Polish underground report on Belzec, and Klukowski's diary discussing the first news of Belzec, both locally). The precise killing method was less crucial for these contemporary observers than the fact of transports disappearing into camps and the deportees not emerging alive. The same held true for the next waves of reports on Sobibor, Birkenau and Treblinka. Unlike for Chelmno, there were no fugitive accounts offering more direct testimony on Belzec, Sobibor or Birkenau until some Jews started escaping from Treblinka and reaching Warsaw. The first reports of serial mass gassing at Birkenau came from the underground in the Auschwitz main camp, several kilometres away.
By then (late August-early September 1942), the Polish underground had reported through its usual intelligence channels on yet more massacres by shooting in eastern Poland, and did so through to the end of 1942, chronicling massacres in western Belarus and western Ukraine, including the Bronnaia Gora killing site near Brest, a pure shooting gallery. The details of such actions were written up and transmitted to London, but not necessarily given as much publicity, either in the underground press published out of Warsaw, or outside German controlled Europe. The Warsaw ghetto action was the one thing to break through to the front page of the Polish underground press, everything else went to the back pages.
A good summary of wartime knowledge is in the so-called 'last letter from Bedzin', signed off by among others a well known courier between ghettos, Frumka Plotnicka, who had made trips to Wilno and Bialystok as well as the provincial Lublin district before heading back to Warsaw and then to Silesia. Note how by mid-1943, the 'general knowledge' had defaulted to gas for Chelmno and Treblinka, yet paradoxically despite the close proximity of Bedzin to Auschwitz, the letter does not mention gassing there, instead deportees were 'shot and exterminated'
https://www.jhi.pl/en/articles/the-last ... 0Sosnowiec.
By this time (mid-1943), the Auschwitz underground had transmitted multiple reports on gassing, and knew of the new crematoria, so the lack of clarity about killing methods even among those only a short distance away shows how the camps were more notorious for being places of extermination than the precise methods.
Other contemporary accounts from Bedzin contain a mix of knowledge, with some knowing about Treblinka using gas but not mentioning gas for Auschwitz at all, just that it was a place of extermination. A 1943-44 diary as well as a 1944 memoir by Renia Kukielka both display this pattern. Meanwhile, actual fugitives from the Auschwitz main camp, including Witold Pilecki, were talking in much more detail about their indirect knowledge of gassing.
None of those contemporary accounts, or the last letter from Bedzin, can be classified as propaganda, as they were either not publicised at all (with some diaries or the last letter - first known from being found in the German archives in a censorship report after being intercepted en route) or were written down prior to being fed into intelligence reports (Polish underground reports), and from there some details might make it into the Polish underground press, but were not necessarily reported in Britain or the outside world even when transmitted to the government-in-exile.
There were even more diaries and contemporary manuscripts (memoir type accounts written in 1943 in hiding) from Jews in the Warsaw area or city which were clear on Treblinka as a site of extermination (eg Calel Perechodnik's account from Otwock) and one using gas (eg Stanislaw Gombinski's memoir, he was a former senior Warsaw ghetto policeman and extremely well informed on the deportation action). There were also similar diary-manuscripts from Eastern Galicia by Jews, one of which recorded an encounter with a Belzec escapee who related gassing and not electricity at all (in Moty Stromer's diary-manuscript).
For Chelmno, a local resident took diary-style notes on scraps of paper to chronicle the onset of mass cremation there, among other goings-on.
The Polish underground kept up regular intelligence reporting in two report series (Current Information and the 'Aneks' series) on a roughly 10-14 day basis, so chronicling further deportations to all camps, reports out of Auschwitz, and the onset of mass cremation at the various camps as well as in other towns by 1944, with the connections across prewar Poland overlapping into Vilnius, along with the 'Harvest Festival' massacres in November 1943 and subsequent cremations. The underground press did then report on some of these cases, but as before, the intelligence reports preceded the publicity.
The Jewish underground received largely the same information, with the Zegota branch of the Polish underground a key intermediary, so further reports from the Bund and the Jewish National Council (ZKN) referenced the same knowledge of ghetto actions and reductions, uprisings, cremations and massacres. The ZKN reports were signed off by Adolf Berman, Emanuel Ringelblum and Yitzhak Zuckerman, so combining welfare, the former Ringelblum Archive circle and the Jewish Fighting Organisation (ZOB). Ringelblum was arrested in spring 1944 and executed, Zuckerman sent out a long account of the ZOB across the whole of Poland, so offering details from couriers on other ghettos and camps, again referencing gas for key camps. The border between the Government-General and Silesia meant that the Jewish underground was less informed, but not totally ignorant of Auschwitz, while the Polish underground had better channels. Nonetheless as the last letter from Bedzin shows, Jews were also crossing this border.
The surviving labour camps and ghettos in 1943-44 stood out more in reports because the other ghettos had been liquidated and their inmates deported or shot on the spot. Both undergrounds had a reasonable idea of who was left, which of course matches the German documents and the records of the reformed Jewish welfare association (JSS then JUS, led by Michael Weichert in Krakow who remained alive as a kind of figleaf and could barely organised medical supplies to the Plaszow concentration camp in Krakow).
Diaries of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews in hiding are clearer on one aspect covered in Polish underground and partisan reports but which the Jewish underground in 1943-44 could not easily write about or may not wanted to have written about in such detail, namely the hunting down of Jews in hiding and in the forests, which included reporting on the killings of fugitive Jews by Poles and Ukrainians as much as by the German police. Denunciations of Jews also became a theme for selective reporting in the Polish underground press to try to stem some of this, but the denunciations and blackmail went on. German placards announcing executions singled out some victims of public reprisals as guilty of 'sheltering Jews', a death penalty offence.
This was only 1417 words - a very short summary of a large literature and many sources, and not covering every aspect (I didn't discuss Majdanek gas chamber reports for example), but which shows how it is not
that difficult to discuss the main extermination camps together with other aspects
together. The key camps really amount to five (Majdanek was not a major centre - the confusions on liberation in 1944 are another story), which is just as many fingers as one has on a hand, but raising the stakes from one camp at a time to five poses serious problems for arguing that xyz cope explains all of them.
Moreover, the Polish underground reports give copious details on the ongoing repressions, executions, deportations of non-Jewish Poles, on 'Germanisation', but especially in 1943 on the Zamosc action, on the UPA uprising in Volhynia and its spread into Eastern Galicia and by 1944 into the Lublin region, and in 1943 also on Katyn, followed by the Polish-Soviet conflict in eastern Poland (two partisan forces going to war with each other). The unfolding of the extermination of the Jews wasn't the main story for the Polish underground, it was one story alongside others, and in the reports and newspapers it was generally relegated to dead last in the bulletin. Not an afterthought, but not always the thing to prioritise. So one can ask
why that story, and then only part of it (since revisionists are apparently totally disinterested in the shootings and ghetto actions in general, and only care about some of the camps, usually ignoring Chelmno), might have been concocted. There's never a clear answer as to why. Both the Polish underground and Jewish underground risked public refutation if the Germans had only publicised a Potemkin resettlement camp in the east to respond to the reports of extermination, and neither had a clear incentive to escalate to extermination if the actual policy had been 'merely' resettlement and transfer east.
But also
how - since the contemporary sources for this story are multiple and not reducible to someone starting a fake news blitz a la the 'corpse factory' propaganda action by British military intelligence in WWI. There just isn't a single point of origin but rather many parallel reports, locally as well as nationally. And this hasn't even factored in the reports reaching German and other audiences about what was happening in Poland, recorded very often in yet more diaries and letters rather than being 'publicised', cases like Adam Trott du Solz passing on reports of Auschwitz as a killing centre in Sweden (without this being publicised) in early 1943, or the German military resistance circle around von Tresckow informing a Swedish diplomat in Stettin in 1942 of the Lublin ghetto action and the use of gas chambers. The latter was the so called Vendel report:
https://www.jozeflewandowski.se/texter/ ... ocaust.htm