CONDITIONS IN OCCUPIED TERRITORIES. A series of reports issued by the Inter-Allied Information Committee - PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS – Report no. 6 issued by the Intelligence Bureau of the Allied Powers (9 reports were issued in total), dealing with the persecution of Jews in countries occupied by the Nazis – London, December 1942. The first official report on the extermination of European Jewry.
A detailed report issued in London at the height of World War II, reporting on the extermination of European Jewry. The report states that the implementation of the Nazi policy declared by Adolf Hitler in his book "Mein Kampf" regarding the destruction of Jews took practical form since Germany conquered a large part of Europe. The report quotes the declaration of the German Minister of Labor in December 1942: “We must continue to wage this war until the Jews are wiped off the face of the earth”, and states that it is clear the Nazis are making every effort to succeed in this intention. “Original reports which cannot be disputed determine that Jews are being deported from their homes and sent to concentration camps in ever growing numbers, and that some of them are being sent to their deaths in methods completely foreign to all known standards of human conduct, ” it says. In the introduction to the report by George Schommer, chairman of the Allied Information Committee in London, it is written that the evidence appearing in this report is a terrible indictment, and that the Allies are committed to bringing the Germans to justice.
The report provides a picture of the persecution of Jews in Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Slovakia, France, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. It details the conditions in the concentration camps, and “evidence of an extermination plan beyond anything we have known in history” received in mid-1942. The report further states: “The number of Jewish victims deported or killed since 1939 in Axis-controlled Europe has now reached the appalling figure of two million... Five million are in danger of extermination”.
The report details the anti-Jewish decrees issued by the Germans against the Jews in every country with the goal of isolating them and separating them from the general population, establishing Jewish "labor battalions" for forced labor, concentrating them and sending them to be killed. It also reports on non-Jews who assist the Germans in their deeds, and on the other hand non-Jews who help Jews escape from the Nazi pursuer. In Belgium for example, a priest who hid about a hundred Jewish children was "facing the death penalty, " it says. In Poland, it reports on the requirement to wear the yellow badge, establishing the Warsaw Ghetto, the harsh conditions in the ghetto, murder of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen, and more. The report quotes an explicit order given on July 22, 1942 for the deportation of all the Jews of Warsaw "to the east".
It is clear from the report that at this point the Allies were already well aware of what was happening in the occupied territories, and in particular the fact that the systematic daily extermination of Jews was taking place. This fact did not prevent the machinery of death and systematic murder of Jews from continuing to operate for another two and a half years until the end of the war.
It is commonly thought that the report published in London under the title The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland which was published in early 1943 was the first official report on the Holocaust. From this pamphlet it is clear that the report preceded that one by a few months, and the clear picture of the systematic murder of European Jewry in all occupied countries had already been received.
20 p. 24 cm. Rust stains near pins. Good condition.
