The British started the rumours.
They did that in 1940.
When the echoes of THEIR OWN psy-op, atrocity propaganda returned to them in 1942 they RECOGNISED it as such — as the memo by Victor Cavendish-Bentinck demonstrates.
And THAT memo explains — to anyone open-minded and intelligent enough to still be able to think critically and independently — why the British P.W.E advised allied governments not to include those Polish reports in their official reports.
For those still not getting it:
they gave that advice because they were certain that what those Polish reports contained was their own psy-op lie being repeated back to them. Therefore they calculated that the Allied governments would be discredited if/when that was shown to be a lie, should the Axis nations win the war.
Obviously — …er… to anyone thinking this through for themselves — that became less of a problem the more Allied victory looked certain. Why? Because then they could control the narrative pretty much without interference.
Britains rumour factory: Origins of the ‘mass-murder in homicidal gas chambers’ story
Britain’s Political Warfare Executive and its predecessor first deployed stories of homicidal gassing as part of propaganda efforts in two areas unconnected to treatment of Jews. Their objective was to spread dissension and demoralisation among German soldiers and civilians, and among Germany’s allies.
The documentary record showing British propagandists’ promotion of homicidal gassing stories runs from December 1940 (under SO1) to March 1942 (under PWE). In this period the gassing stories did not relate to Jews or Poles. British intelligence official Victor Cavendish-Bentinck discounting later claims of gassings suspected that the Jewish and Polish lobbies had picked up on the rumours that British intelligence had been disseminating and put their own spin on it, in a case of what would later be termed “blowback”, defined as follows by intelligence historian Mark Lowenthal:
Quote:
“The main controversy raised by propaganda activities is that of blowback. The CIA is precluded from undertaking any intelligence activities within the United States. However, a story could be planted in a media outlet overseas that will also be reported in the United States. That is blowback.”
Blowback: The First Reports
The first reports emanate from Polish Jewish underground newspapers in the winter and spring of 1942. The first claim of mass gassing pertaining to Jewish people that received wide circulation was contained in the so-called Bund Report, which was smuggled to the Polish government-in-exile, located in London, in the third week of May 1942.
The report contained two gassing rumours: the first that a special automobile (a gas van) was being used to gas 90 persons at one time. The second rumour pertains to actions in Warsaw: it is said that Jews were being experimented upon with poison gases.
The Bund Report, in turn, appears to be a composite of at least two documents that had come from Warsaw during the spring of 1942. The first of these was an underground communication from the Jewish Labor Bund, in Warsaw, dated March 16, 1942, which described German activities in western Poland as follows:
”In a number of villages the Jews were put to death by gas poisoning. They were herded in a horrible way into hermetically sealed trucks transformed into gas chambers, in groups of fifty, entire families, completely nude…”
This report further alleged that “gas poisoning” was being carried out in Lodz.
The second document that contributed to the Bund Report was a lead article in Der Veker, April 30, 1942, at a time of internecine struggle between Jewish resisters and collaborators in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Two of the members of the Polish National Council-in-exile were Jewish: Zygielbojm and Szwarcbart, and they could be expected to be particularly interested in what was being alleged about their coreligionists several hundred miles away under German military occupation, and in spreading these allegations as a means of getting support for their people. The Bund Report was thus extensively publicised in the media.
On June 24, 1942, the Bund Report was summarised on the BBC.
The following day, the Daily Telegraph ran a major story on the report, with two headlines of note:
“Germans Murder 700,000 in Poland,” and “Travelling Gas Chambers.”
On the 26th, Zygielbojm delivered a broadcast over the BBC, summarizing the Bund Report in Yiddish, and hence obviously directed to the Jewish population in Poland.
Within a week, the BBC had made an arrangement with the Polish National Council giving the BBC priority in the reporting of all future atrocity stories. By July 16, 1942, the allegations of gassing were repeated in the News Review, here with the claim that the Germans were preparing “large gas stations” where the Polish Jewish population would be murdered.
The BBC had already begun to play a major role in recycling these rumours back to their point of origin in Poland. These broadcasts in effect created a feedback loop that repeated and gave authority to Polish rumours, which were then reinjected back into Poland, where they multiplied and burgeoned.
