| Topic: | Re:Reply | |
| Posted by: | David Ainsworth | |
| Date/Time: | 11/09/25 00:48:00 |
| "There's some debate about how much the allied governments knew but my understanding was the full horror of the concentration camps wasn't known until allied troops came across them?". Very brave people had managed to get out with accounts of the horrors a couple of years before that. "The first important account of the Holocaust to reach the Allies was the Polish Foreign Minister's Note of December 10, 1942, detailing the mass extermination of Jews. This led to the Joint Declaration of December 17, 1942, condemning the atrocities, though more comprehensive details, like those from Jan Karski's Report (also known as Witold's Report), emerged later, in April 1943." "Witold's Report (April 1943): While the December 1942 message was the first official denunciation, more detailed accounts, such as those from the Polish government-in-exile's courier Jan Karski (Witold's Report), reached the Allies later. This April 1943 report provided the first detailed accounts of the Holocaust's atrocities." "The first Nazi extermination camp, Chełmno, began operating in December 1941. Its purpose was to murder Jews from the Łódź ghetto and surrounding regions." Before the camps started in late 1941, approximately 1.5 to 2 million Jews were murdered in mass shootings across Eastern Europe. So this was already the Holocaust in 1939-41. |