How much did the American public know about the Holocaust?

[Civil War Man]

I recently discussed this topic with some family members, and none of us could really say for sure either way. Basically, before the Allied armies started liberating the concentration camps, how much did the American public know about the Holocaust?

Pop culture tends to depict the discovery of the camps as something that came right out of left field for allied troops, but the whole operation is too big to have been that big of a surprise. After all, you had boats of Jewish refugees attempting to enter the US prior to Pearl Harbor. There were attempts by Jewish advocacy groups to get the Allied military to bomb Auschwitz. You had high profile immigrants like Albert Einstein, fleeing Europe in order to escape the Nazis (Einstein even sent a letter to his sister when he left, advising her to get out of Switzerland because he was afraid that the Germans would invade).

On the other hand, the US was pretty heavily ethnically segregated, so I can also see someone who did not have Jewish friends or family not knowing about it, while someone who had, say, an uncle from Poland who mysteriously disappeared might start to suspect something.

[Deathstalker]

From what I have read, it wasn't known to the general public, government or military of the USA, England, USSR, and most European countries. The Jewish communities outside of occupied Europe heard rumors but they were was no evidence or not believed. People knew Germany was not friendly to Jews, but not what happened to people taken by the German government. People assumed it was nothing good, which lead to trying get Jews, political dissidents etc., out of Germany before the war, and to try and save said people during the war.

Germans who knew or suspected what happened in camps stayed quiet out of fear or indifference, and if you wound up in a camp, you didn't get out so there was no one to provide information on what happened at the camps.

[wautd]

On a related note, how well were the atrocities done by the soviets on their own population known? In a closed, totalitarion regime before the dawn of television, let alone the internet it must have been pretty damn obscure I guess.

[Spoonist]

From what I have read, it wasn't known to the general public, government or military of the USA, England, USSR, and most European countries.

This is false. You should read up on this again before making such a reply.

After the spanish civil war a lot of reporters where familiar with how the nazis had acted vs the civilian population. So there where lots of reports starting with the Kristallnacht and onwards.

By 1940 detailed reports on work camps and ghettos. Including death tolls.
By 1941 lots of reports and articles about round up and summary executions in nazi conquered eastern territories.
By 1942 there had been detailed articles published in Daily Telegraph and the New York Times. Plus data on concentration camps complete with ovens and gas.
By 1943 it was so obviuos that when the order for rounding up the Danish jews was leaked early by a german officer there was no hesitation in shipping almost ALL of the danish jews to neutral sweden.
So the public knew. They just mostly chose to ignore it.

[Spoonist]

Forgot to add that lots and lots of americans, brits, euros didn't care because of prevalent anti-semitism.
The Elmo poll in 1938 is telling, not only through the 41% YES but through the actual question.
"Do you think the Jews have too much power in the United States?"
Imagine making such a poll today.

Or the 1938 Gallup poll.
"Do you think the persecution of Jews in Europe has been their own fault?"
10% said 'entirely', 48%'partly', and 31% 'not at all'.

Fuck revisionist history, the public didn't know, my ass.

[Broomstick]

Well,speaking for my own family, dad's side started to get suspicious when, after 1939, we lost ALL contact with those who were still in Europe. Never heard from any of them again, and never learned what happened to them.

When one Gunther showed up at my parents' high school he spoke about escaping from a train to Auschwitz, where entire villages were being exterminated, and such things as he had seen, but his English was poor and most people didn't want to believe it. Don't discount how much was just people not wanting to believe that the civilized Germans could do such things. (and, of course, a hefty dose of anti-Semitism).

On mom's side - I had one uncle who got to see the camps up front and personal after his capture. Coming home weighing literally half what he had when he had left provided pretty convincing evidence that the Nazis could be fucking neglectful and cruel to a German-American Christian, much less anyone else. They hadn't wanted to believe, being of German descent and all, but the boys in the family who fought in Europe had seen too much and some were even able to write home about some of it. Of course, my nearly starved to death uncle could only provide testimony AFTER he came home on a stretcher. So mom's family heard rumors, but didn't really believe it until the news broke in general and her brothers came home.

So, based on all that, who knew what had to vary quite a bit, and it depended on how connected you were to the news in general, whether you knew any Jews or refugees, and of course denial was a factor in many cases.

[K. A. Pital]

From what I have read, it wasn't known to the general public, government or military of the USA, England, USSR, and most European countries. The Jewish communities outside of occupied Europe heard rumors but they were was no evidence or not believed.

If they really didn't know... Why would over a million, IIRC, Jews rush across the frontlines to the USSR to get behind the retreating army to save their lives once the Germans came? They clearly knew what was going to happen (even if in very rough terms).

So the level of awareness was bigger than one could think. It wasn't total awareness, but clearly they understood that nothing good was coming.

On a related note, how well were the atrocities done by the soviets on their own population known? In a closed, totalitarion regime before the dawn of television, let alone the internet it must have been pretty damn obscure I guess.

Not much, before Khrushev at least. The repression was generally believed to touch the miscreants alone. Until someone got repressed himself he usually believed everything was a-ohkay. Of course, the mass repression became all too obvious in 1937, when about 800 hundred thousand people got executed, and that left an impression in public consciousness.

[Straha]

Forgot to add that lots and lots of americans, brits, euros didn't care because of prevalent anti-semitism.
The Elmo poll in 1938 is telling, not only through the 41% YES but through the actual question.
"Do you think the Jews have too much power in the United States?"
Imagine making such a poll today.

Or the 1938 Gallup poll.
"Do you think the persecution of Jews in Europe has been their own fault?"
10% said 'entirely', 48%'partly', and 31% 'not at all'.

Fuck revisionist history, the public didn't know, my ass.

Here's something else for you. In 1947 the U.S. Military surveyed its officers and enlisted men on their attitudes towards 'certain minority groups'. 86% of enlisted men surveyed agreed with the statement "There is nothing good about jews." and only 48% of enlisted men thought that the "Hitler government's" treatment of Jewish people was flat wrong. (Link to the survey itself. Page 13, if you want to see it yourself.)

[Elfdart]

On a related note, how well were the atrocities done by the soviets on their own population known? In a closed, totalitarion regime before the dawn of television, let alone the internet it must have been pretty damn obscure I guess.

First a caveat: I suspect that just as most people today in the US aren't very well informed about foreign affairs, most people back in the 1930s weren't either. The was a depression on, after all.

However, among those who were reasonably well-informed, not only were Soviet atrocities well known, but thanks to the fact that most newspapers were owned by right-wingers, they were wildly exaggerated. The Hearst press was worst of all. Of course all that took a backseat after the Nazis overran most of Europe, and the Soviet Union and USA found themselves fighting against them.

The propaganda series Why We Fight showed the Nazis doing some pretty heinous acts (such as beheading Poles in 1939) which no one could really dispute since Frank Capra got the footage from the Nazis themselves -who were stupid enough to send footage of their many atrocities overseas. Hitler's murderous intentions toward the Jews were well known and given what the Nazis practically boasted of doing, any reasonably well-informed citizen should have been able to put two and two together.

I do remember reading that the New York Times, which was (and still is) owned by the Sulzberger family, made it a point not to put stories about the mass murder of European Jews on the front page out of fear of being accused of conspiring in a sinister plot by DA JOOOOOOOOZ! to get America to fight for Britain or Russia.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I think there's a sharp difference between antisemitism and the holocaust, however. The American public was aware of atrocities in Europe against Jews before--the Russian pogroms, namely, had attracted very large American response in form of hostility against Russia and also in terms of support for the Jews in the early 1900s. I suspect that the average person, on hearing news of what the Germans were doing, assumed that it was somewhere on the scale of the Tsarist pogroms, i.e., with tens of thousands killed at most and the rest having their property confiscated and sometimes being relocated. In short, that the shock was about the scale and barbarity and dehumanization of mass industrial murder of millions. I am quite certain the average American by the 1940s would have grasped the idea that the Germans had squads of men going around terrorizing Jews, stealing their property and occasionally shooting some in the occupied territories, but the progression from that to industrial mass murder which was the holocaust was likely not made until the camps were discovered, which is part of why the allied response to trying to do something about the camps was so tepid. I imagine that for most of the war they were seen as concentration camps, in the British sense of the word, and not as extermination camps.

Remember also that allied propagandaists in WW1 had invented a bunch of total bullshit about Wilhelmine Germany engaging in mass slaughter of innocents which had been proved completely false after the war. That soured people to the idea the Germans were responsible for great crimes, so that created a further disincentive to disbelieve rumours about mass industrial slaughter and keep the idea of repression and pogrom instead of a holocaust more firmly in peoples' minds.

[Elfdart]

I just saw the old Errol Flynn movie Edge of Darkness and one of the characters is a Polish Jew who somehow found her way to Nazi-occupied Norway. The movie makes clear that she faces certain death if she's deported to the East. The movie was shot in 1942 and released in 43, so I should think that if it was well-known enough to be in an Errol Flynn movie it was well-known enough for just about anyone who cared.

[CJvR]

There were attempts by Jewish advocacy groups to get the Allied military to bomb Auschwitz.

I have been to Auschwitz Birkenau. Everything in the camp is above ground with light wooden and thin bricked barracks as the only buildings. You lay a bomb carpet over that and you are going to get a butchers bill that defy description. Besides you haven't solved anything really. Auschwitz was big because it was a combined KZ-Transit-Extermination camp. You don't need a facility on that scale to commit genocide, the other extermination camps were very small in comparisson but were just as good at killing. In addition I expect Göbels would have had a wonderful time documenting the savage bombing of innocent civilians in the harmless transit camp...

[Kanastrous]

I think they were trying to get bombers directed against the railways and railway support infrastructure that was being used to *get* people to Auschwitz. It's tough to feed people through an extermination camp if you can't efficiently get them there.

[Liberty]

I heard a holocaust survivor speak at my university several years back. She was only a child at the time, of course. In 1939, when she was only one, she and her parents boarded the MS St. Louis and sailed for the U.S., along with more than 900 other Jews. They were turned back and forced to return to Europe. Her parents didn't survive the camps, and only just managed to smuggle her out. A kindly French Catholic family took her in and passed her off as one of theirs for the rest of the war.

The U.S. knew that the Jews were being persecuted, but they didn't like Jews either, so they weren't about to accept hundreds of Jewish refugees. Pathetic.

[CJvR]

I think they were trying to get bombers directed against the railways and railway support infrastructure that was being used to *get* people to Auschwitz. It's tough to feed people through an extermination camp if you can't efficiently get them there.

Auschwitz was selected for a reason, there are four major raillines converging on it. Cutting those with heavy bombers would be next to impossible.

[CJvR]

The U.S. knew that the Jews were being persecuted, but they didn't like Jews either, so they weren't about to accept hundreds of Jewish refugees. Pathetic.

Hardly a unique position though, no one wanted Jews back then.

[Sea Skimmer]

I think they were trying to get bombers directed against the railways and railway support infrastructure that was being used to *get* people to Auschwitz. It's tough to feed people through an extermination camp if you can't efficiently get them there.

Specific attacks against the gas chambers were asked for as well as attacks on the railroads. Inaccuracy of bombing was compounded by the very long range of the missions required. It would have been a huge amount of risk to deliver small payloads.

They could have at least tried a few raids in my opinion, but its worth remembering that basically everyone in the war was always asking for more heavy bomber sorties for special purposes all over the place. Planners were trying to get the most bang for the buck they thought they could to win the war. I wouldn't be too sure anyone really realized, or mentally accepted that this was murder on the millions, not just large scale murder of political opponents and that ilk.

[Slacker]

On a related note, how well were the atrocities done by the soviets on their own population known? In a closed, totalitarion regime before the dawn of television, let alone the internet it must have been pretty damn obscure I guess.

My wife's family comes from around Kiev and all but one of her grandparents (including her maternal grandmother) are veterans of the war. They were all partisans and later regular army, her grandmother serving in the Soviet version of a MASH unit once the western Ukraine was liberated. They knew a fair amount of what happened-the famines in the '30s, obviously, but also a fair amount of the hinky shit Stalin did in the early days of the war. You can't stop rumor. They absolutely loathed Stalin, her grandmother even now curses him as much as she curses Hitler (the whole family is Jewish). On the other hand, they absolutely love (to this day) Zhukov and Timoshenko.

[xt828]

How do they feel about Beria, Molotov, and the like? By which I mean, do they hate Stalin the person, or Stalin the regime?

[Lusankya]

The U.S. knew that the Jews were being persecuted, but they didn't like Jews either, so they weren't about to accept hundreds of Jewish refugees. Pathetic.

Hardly a unique position though, no one wanted Jews back then.

China was actually quite welcoming to Jewish refugees, even though they had their own problems at the time. Shanghai accepted over 20,000 Jewish refugees, most of whom survived the war, since even when Japan took over, they didn't really care too much about actually exterminating the Jews.

[Kanastrous]

There's a book - the title of which I'll have to find - detailing the work of Japanese diplomatic officials to settle European Jewish refugees in areas of China under their control (mostly IIRC coastal places like Shanghai). I'll try and look it up...

[Samuel]

There's a book - the title of which I'll have to find - detailing the work of Japanese diplomatic officials to settle European Jewish refugees in areas of China under their control (mostly IIRC coastal places like Shanghai). I'll try and look it up...

A Special Fate
http://www.amazon.com/Special-Fate-Chiu ... 0590395254

Or do you mean one that covers the general work?

[Kanastrous]

Pretty sure that Sugihara was the person but not sure that was the particular book. Good find, thanks!

[Ilya Muromets]

Hell, the Jews tried to go practically everywhere to avoid the Nazis. Around 1300 Jews (most were German Jews at that) even started escaping to the Philippines, a country with very little to do with Jews, around the late 1930s until the Japanese invasion stopped any further refugee efforts. It's hard to believe that such a massive, literally world-spanning exodus of German and eventually European Jews would go unnoticed.

[thejester]

Hell, the Jews tried to go practically everywhere to avoid the Nazis. Around 1300 Jews (most were German Jews at that) even started escaping to the Philippines, a country with very little to do with Jews, around the late 1930s until the Japanese invasion stopped any further refugee efforts. It's hard to believe that such a massive, literally world-spanning exodus of German and eventually European Jews would go unnoticed.

Except there's a massive difference between religious persecution and outright extermination. Outbreaks of violence and discrimination against Jews were hardly unknown in Europe prior to 1933; if what was happening in Germany was extreme, it was still recognisable. The Holocaust was not, and given that (IMO) the most persuasive explanation for it is that the Nazis basically stumbled into it after the violence of the summer of '41, it's not surprising that it came as a shock to the Western world when it was discovered.