Top Photo: Text of the Allied Governments’ December 17, 1942, Declaration on the Holocaust. Credit: National Archives and Records Administration, RG-59, Central Decimal File 1940-1945, 740.00116/European War/1939/749, National Archives and Records Administration. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. 

As good news streamed in from Stalingrad, from North Africa, and from Guadalcanal in December 1942, confidence soared that the global struggle against the Axis powers was finally turning a corner. This was in stark contrast to how the year began, when Axis victories came one on top of the other. Then, a week before Christmas, a statement issued by the Allied powers undercut this optimism, exposing a monstrous chain of events in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Released in London, Moscow, and in multiple newspapers in the United States on December 17, 1942, the declaration bore the signatures of 11 Allied nations (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, and Yugoslavia, as well as the French National Committee). In the strongest possible language, it denounced the Nazi dictatorship for its “bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination.”[i] For 21st-century eyes, the reference was clear. Unequivocally, the Allied powers condemned what later came to be termed the Holocaust. 

Visitors to The National WWII Museum frequently ask a clear and direct set of questions. When during World War II did the Allies learn about the Holocaust? What did they know about how the Nazis implemented the genocide? And, having gained this terrible knowledge, what did the Allied powers do to stop the killing? As good as these questions are, giving clear and direct answers to them is not easy. To take one particularly poignant example, what did it mean for Allied leaders “to know” in the face of such an insidious, unprecedented course of action devised by the Third Reich’s leaders?

Knowledge in this case meant acting on limited information about a massive horror very much underway at a tremendous distance from Allied capitals and without a ready-at-hand lexicon to convey a program of mass murder so vast. After all, the Polish Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin did not introduce the term “genocide” to the world until 1944, when in American exile, with the publication of his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.[ii] My own use of “Holocaust” in the title of this article is itself anachronistic, since the term did not appear as a synonym for the Nazi genocide until a few decades after World War II. Claude Lanzmann and others did not interject Shoah, a Hebrew word denoting destruction, until even later.[iii] Thus, the systematic, clandestine, state-directed, and continentwide annihilation of European Jews remained, arguably, not fully comprehensible then (if ever) minus such a vocabulary for extreme atrocity. 

So what did governments in the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union “know” about the fate of Jewish communities in Europe at the end of 1942? Two single-spaced paragraphs encapsulated what these states had concluded. The December 17 document referenced “numerous reports” that demonstrated a transition from persecution to total annihilation. Identifying all these reports would necessitate a separate article. To be brief, a painful and protracted learning process for Allied leaders had played out. In August 1941, for instance, Winston Churchill, upon learning through ULTRA intercepts of massacres perpetrated by the Einsaztgruppen on Soviet territory, exclaimed, “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.”[iv] The apt phrase signified the novel criminality in motion in parts of the USSR overrun by German invaders. At the time, though, Churchill did not focus on Jewish victims but emphasized the anti-Slav character of Nazi mass killing (enslavement, starvation, and murder of the Slavic peoples of the Soviet Union, civilians and combatants, was a fundamental aspect of Adolf Hitler’s war of annihilation against the USSR). 

Throughout 1942, a torrent of blood-curdling information about the mass murder of Jews reached the Allied capitals. Central to the exposure of these monumental crimes was Gerhart Riegner, a German Jew with a background in international law and head of the Geneva office of the Zionist organization, the World Jewish Congress.[v] From Switzerland, Riegner had amassed an enormous amount of detail in the summer of 1942 from a chain of contacts starting with German businessman Eduard Schulte. What Schulte, the managing director of a mining company, had gleaned from SS leader Heinrich Himmler about the murder of Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau with the pesticide Zyklon B, he transmitted in late July 1942 to a Swiss Jewish investment banker, Isidor Koppelmann. Koppelmann disclosed the dreadful information to Benjamin Sagalowitz, a lawyer and journalist who worked for the Association of Swiss Jewish Communities, the chief representative organization for Jews in Switzerland. Then Koppelmann informed Riegner.

Gerhart Riegner (in the middle), photographed by Urs Arni, at a meeting of the World Jewish Congress in Montreux, Switzerland, July 8, 1948. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Linda Mittel.

In early August 1942, Riegner tried to convince American and British diplomatic contacts to pass this intelligence to their superiors. The fragility of what Riegner thought he knew from these revelations was borne out in the telegram he sent to Howard Elting Jr., the US vice-consul in Geneva. To Elting, Riegner communicated that, based on information received from Schulte, Hitler intended to execute a plan in the fall of that year where between 3.5 million and 4 million Jews under German control would be deported to Eastern Europe and be “exterminated at one blow,” ending the “Jewish Question” in Europe forever. The method of murder, Riegner contended, would be prussic acid, more familiar to the world as Zyklon B. In the United Kingdom, it was Sydney Silverman, Labour Party MP and a member of the World Zionist Congress, who initiated the process of transmitting Riegner’s information. Foot-dragging in high American and British diplomatic circles delayed its release until late autumn. Many officials were extremely skeptical of the claims advanced by Riegner.

In the intervening months, more and more stories of the Nazi genocide circulated. Rabbi Stephen Wise, a very influential figure in the American Jewish community and someone close to the Roosevelt Administration, received the Riegner telegram via Sydney Silverman (the US State Department did not forward the telegram to Wise as Riegner had wished). While he did not, at the behest of the State Department, publicize it, Wise did apprise other Jewish leaders in the US of its contents. Meanwhile, information from the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Vatican confirmed during the fall of 1942 much of what Riegner had asserted. 

Nazi violence, however, had long overtaken Riegner’s worst fears. A new network of camps, erected or modified for the purposes of mass eradication, had been in operation for months.[vi] Asphyxiation with poison gas had largely replaced mass shooting as the method of killing. Murder of Jews with carbon monoxide gas in specially modified vans at Chelmno had started the day after Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The destruction of Poland’s Jewish populace had commenced in the hellish Operation Reinhard camps, with Belzec ready for murder operations in March 1942, then Sobibor in May, and Treblinka in July. Transports had borne Jews from Slovakia and France to Auschwitz-Birkenau in March of that year, and they would be followed by trains carrying German, Austrian, and Dutch Jews later that spring and summer. Majdanek, near the Polish city of Lublin, would alternate as a forced labor camp and as an extermination camp. 

Though this level of detail had not yet been attained, US Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles notified Rabbi Wise on November 24, 1942, that the US government had been persuaded that the Hitler regime intended to exterminate all European Jews. Wise briefed reporters, and the first mass press coverage in the United States of the Holocaust occurred the very next day. On December 8, Roosevelt met with Jewish leaders for 30 minutes and verified this catastrophic news for them. The Churchill government was shown the evidence several days later. By this point, mass protests, now largely forgotten, had erupted in many locales around the globe over the Nazi genocide.

Let us now return to the announcement the Allied powers made on that December 17, written largely by officials in the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. To be sure, US and Soviet diplomats edited what their British counterparts produced. We can observe and discern, critically, the level of understanding of the Holocaust as a whole from that crucial moment. Allied leaders realized an ominous process of evacuation had unfolded. Under “conditions of appalling horror and brutality,” Jews were forcibly removed from all over the continent to Eastern Europe. They did comprehend, too, the role of Poland in Nazi planning. The Hitler regime had transformed the country into the “principal Nazi slaughterhouse.” There, Jews had been removed from the ghettos erected under German occupation a few years earlier. Only those capable of laboring in Nazi Germany’s war economy survived for any length of time.

Chillingly, the document stated, “None of those taken away are ever heard of again.” Their disappearance signaled certain death. Mass executions, deprivation of food, and cold-blooded cruelty to the sick filled out a picture of an unspeakably nightmarish new reality for Jewish communities across wartime Europe.

The statement did not rely only on the information directed to Allied diplomats by Riegner. It recalled for readers Hitler’s “oft repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.” Likely, Hitler’s speech of January 30, 1939, was foremost in the minds of Allied statesmen. This speech, which Hitler, followed by many of his most fanatical minions, labeled a “prophecy,” featured a threat—that another war (which Hitler did not hesitate to say would be blamed on the Jews) would not end with the triumph of the Jews but with “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” 

We also witness the limits of what the Allies knew in late 1942. None of the names that evoke so much horror—Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno—appear in the text. The latter estimated, at the insistence of the Soviets, that “many hundreds of thousands” had already perished. With all the advantages of hindsight, one must look past this low number. By the end of 1941, several hundred thousand Soviet Jews alone had perished, most at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen. Over the following year, as the pace of the killing dramatically accelerated and encompassed all of Europe, the majority of the six million Jews who died during the Holocaust perished. “In the spring of 1942,” historian Waitman Wade Beorn writes, “75-80 percent of the victims of the Holocaust were still alive and 20-25 percent had been murdered. Eleven months later, these percentages had been reversed.”[vii] 1942 was a true annus horribilis in world history.

For the Nazis, the declaration promised “retribution” in the future. The chilling revelations of the “bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination” would only “strengthen the resolve of all the freedom-loving peoples to overthrow the barbarous Hitlerite tyranny.” This language of “Hitlerite tyranny,” reminiscent of Soviet antifascist rhetoric, seemingly bound together the Allied war effort, the Holocaust, and resistance struggles against Nazi domination.

But what of the Jews threatened with deportation? What would the Allies do to save them? Not a single word is devoted to the possibility of rescue. As awful as that omission was, there were still constraints on what the Allied countries could undertake. In December 1942, the exigencies of turning the tide against the Axis states pressed on Churchill, Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin relentlessly. Vowing “retribution” was no minor act, but it was a promise that could not be fulfilled anytime soon as 1942 closed. Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, and North Africa had yet to be won, and the balance of forces was only just tipping in favor of the Allies. Acknowledging these facts does not excuse the unwillingness to do more to help Jewish refugees after the Nazi annexation of Austria and the Night of Broken Glass right through 1942. It was not until 1944 that the Roosevelt Administration took significant steps to assist Jews fleeing the Nazi terror.

For the remainder of World War II, there was coverage of the Holocaust by the Allied governments. Yet it never assumed a place of prominence. Victory on the battlefield and in the war of production did that. It would not be until the war’s final year, following the Red Army’s liberation of Majdanek, when the camps were discovered and liberated, did a much fuller understanding of the Shoah develop. Eventually, much of the world would begin to grasp that the kind of war Hitler waged against the Jews of Europe (and with an eye to Jewish communities everywhere) was what Isaac Deutscher, the Polish Jewish Marxist (who lost immediate family during the Holocaust), categorized as “unconditional extermination.”[viii]