Archie wrote: ↑Fri Jun 27, 2025 12:38 pm
It seems we have some contradictions here that we will need to resolve.
1) International Zionist groups not only "knew" about the Holocaust, they were able to calculate, as early as 1944, that six million Jews had been killed.
2) British and American diplomatic and intelligence circles do not seem to been convinced, with many being openly skeptical of Jewish claims of extermination. Even the more sympathetic reactions were usually vague.
3) Jews themselves were unaware to the extermination plan throughout the war and continued to fall for the fake shower trick for over three years. This would imply that although the Zionist orgs "knew" in 1942, they were unable to inform their own people. This includes the Hungarian Jews in 1944.
The "contradictions" largely evaporate when it is remembered that "international Zionist groups" did not control radio or air forces dropping leaflet propaganda, the British were largely in control of both as the BBC broadcast from the UK while the RAF and USAAF flew from there. The British had considerable influence over government-in-exile radio broadcasting, and were the only ones even trying with e.g. the Axis state of Hungary. Not only has the BBC Hungarian Service been criticised for inadequate broadcasts of warnings, but it's also been pointed out that the leading experts on Hungary in Britain like C.A. Macartney were less than interested in Hungarian Jews.
There were nonetheless two brief waves of British-endorsed broadcasting about the fate of the Jews, both in 1942, one in June 1942 around the Bund report, whose details can be observed as 'received' (if not always understood or digested) in the Netherlands, France and Poland. The other was around the UN Declaration of December 1942, which is also when some air-dropped leaflet propaganda was tried - in Germany not the occupied territories.
The December 1942 publicity stirred up an inconvenient public response in the UK, so the various organs of the British state including the Political Warfare Executive (dictating to the BBC as well as the governments-in-exile) backpedalled on further prominence for such reporting, suppressing or downplaying further reports from Poland including about Auschwitz in 1943. The British did not want to deal with millions of imaginary Jewish refugees descending via the Balkans and Turkey on Palestine, which further dictated the kick-into-touch behaviour at the Bermuda Conference and remained true into 1944. The British were not especially happy when FDR announced the foundation of the War Refugee Board, responding to delayed political pressures in the US.
Governments-in-exile including the Dutch and Free French have likewise been criticised for not foregrounding the issue, as has the Polish government-in-exile. The PGE did put out more news via their radio stations but this simply reinforced what was already circulating in Poland via the underground press, which filtered a fraction of what Poles were witnessing with their own eyes in hundreds of towns.
Inside Axis controlled Europe, censorship and control of official media channels (German etc radio and German controlled or Axis controlled press) was another factor. Jews were generally ordered to give up radios and had at best a censored press, which rapidly became irrelevant when deportations began on a large scale in Germany, Poland or elsewhere. News had to spread by word of mouth, couriers or in veiled form.
The 'contradictions' further evaporate when one considers the extent of
channelling and coercion. Hungarian Jews in the provinces were evidently not hugely well informed but likely knew more about German atrocities than might be expected - e.g. any surviving Labour Serviceman might know of killings in the Soviet Union, there were some Polish Jewish refugees but these gravitated towards Budapest, and so on. The level of knowledge is irrelevant when the ghettoisation action unfolded practically overnight and caught essentially the entire Jewish population with very few opportunities to go to ground inside Hungary, unless one went from the provinces to Budapest. Then the ghettos were coerced onto trains which arrived under armed guard at Auschwitz into a barbed wire enclosed and guarded area for selection.
At the other extreme, over half of Norwegian Jews and 99% of Danish Jews could escape to Sweden, 75% of Jews in France evaded deportation, 80% of Italian Jews evaded deportation, well over half of Belgian Jews evaded deportation. Jews in Salonika in northern Greece were easily trapped, Jews in the south and Athens had more opportunities to escape.
The 'contradictions' forget that in Poland, the eastern part of the country saw the same type of ghetto 'Aktionen' but ending quite locally in mass graves in nearby forests where hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews were shot. The level of violence used in 1942-3 to eliminate ghettos did not vary so much; an ever increasing number would be killed insde the ghetto/town often when trying to hide (in bunkers, attics, etc), the rest were forced out to be marched to train stations or local killing sites. The degree of surprise mattered along with neutralising tactics beforehand (such as soliciting bribes or making false promises to Jewish councils, then launching an 'Aktion' anyway, or taking out potential leaders who might galvanise resistance). Even with all of this 10% made the attempt to flee although most were caught rapidly after an 'Aktion'. Up to 10% tried hiding 'on the spot' which was a doomed option for nearly all, ending mostly in violent death when grenades were thrown into cellars or those trying to hide were rousted and shot.
The Germans were also more effective in coercing and bribing the non-Jewish population to ensure that Jews did not escape, or were handed over, the longer things went on. This meant that they could tolerate some initial escapes if their cordons and encirclements were incomplete.
The chronology is quite clear that there were more escape attempts then more resistance the longer the whole thing went on into late 1942 and 1943. The escape attempts also affected the transports to the camps, while resistance also was more common for arriving transports at the camps, requiring more coercion at the arrival end, because more were fighting back (eg a transport from Grodno in late 1942 seeing a grenade thrown at Treblinka guards).
The overcrowded trains also caused some to suffocate to death, occasionally in their near-entirety, other times 25% dying. It would be difficult to claim that the deportees on the Kolomea-Belzec transport described here did not have some idea they were being sent to their deaths:
http://www.tenhumbergreinhard.de/taeter ... lomea.html
Selections at departure points holding back able-bodied men and women as workers together with the greater likelihood that such age groups would try fleeing meant the transports had a skewed profile. Existing leaders of Jewish councils were not infrequently killed ahead of deportations, but their profile was middle aged to elderly, they were not generally former Habsburg Army battalion commanders who could have organised anything. So the mass arrived largely leaderless, and with a heavy disproportion of the elderly, children and worried mothers. Selections on arrival recreated the same profile but on the Birkenau ramps.
Polish Jewish survivors report much greater prior knowledge of extermination if they arrived from the Government-General at Auschwitz. But they were just as channelled and coerced as any other group of new arrivals.
West European survivors report knowing essentially nothing. The ones deported had failed to escape and evade. There was no need to know precisely what would happen to consider deportation a very bad thing, so many had tried to escape regardless. But the number of reports reaching Jews in western Europe about killings was limited. By the time underground papers were publishing reports on Auschwitz in western Europe in late 1943, Jews in western Europe had long concluded they needed to go underground. So they would not necessarily have read such stories, or might not have connected them with Auschwitz-Birkenau - as was shown in surveying the full range of survivors from Belgium. Even the mid-1944 publicity for Auschwitz after the Vrba-Wetzler report seemingly broke the dam would not have translated to greater awareness, since so much else was going on in the news at the same time. Blink and you might miss a report, if one was even broadcast - and if you even had access to a radio. But what difference would that have made anyway? The Frank family had decided to go into hiding before Anne did hear about gassing in the summer of 1942, once they were caught their knowledge or lack thereof of Auschwitz would not help one iota on arrival at Birkenau.
