Auschwitz, and the Typhus Plague in Poland

There was nothing new in such allegations: after World War One the American Jewish community had raised a similar outcry about what they had even then called a ‘holocaust’; the governor of New York had claimed in a 1919 speech that ‘six million’ Jews were being exterminated.[1] In 1936, three years before the war, Victor Gollancz Ltd. had published a book entitled The Extermination of the Jews in Germany.

In April 1937 a typical article in Breslau’s Jewish newspaper had been headline, “The Liquidation Campaign against the Jews in Poland.”[2] They had cried wolf too often before. In internal papers, the F.O. remarked that there was no confirmation for Riegner’s story from ‘other sources’ – a hint at ULTRA.[3] There was a marked reluctance to exploit the stories for propaganda, and the files show that there was little public sympathy with the Jews in wartime Britain.

A year before, the ministry of information had directed the horror stories were to be used only sparing, and they must always deal with the maltreatment of ‘indisputably innocent’ people – ‘not with violent political opponents,’ they amplified.

‘And not with Jews.'[4] Sydney Silverman, a Labour member of Parliament, asked permission to phone Riegner’s report through to Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress in New York; the foreign office disallowed this, arguing quaintly that this would merely provoke the Germans who ‘always listen to such conversations.'[5] While they felt that they might profitably consult PWE (their own Political Warfare Executive) about Riegner’s ‘rather wild story,’ that was the only

further action they would take.[6] There is no indication that Riegner’s message was ever put before Churchill, who was in Cairo and Moscow at that time.