Knowledge of the Holocaust before 1945.

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The question of the Holocaust is a very complicated subject and one that is still studied and discussed intensely.

The Holocaust was a state organized and sponsored genocide of the Jewish people.

In the late 1930s Germany was one of the most educated and culturally sophisticated countries in the world. Many of the greatest scientists, artists and musicians were of German origin.

At the same time, anti-Semitism was and had been prevalent throughout Europe since the Roman Empire scattered the Jewish people and they settled in northern Europe.

In 1939, the luxury ocean liner, the SS St. Louis, left Hamburg Germany with approximately 900 Jewish people on board. The ship first sailed to Cuba, then to many other countries where those people on board asked for asylum. Even though many governments were aware of the anti-Semitic stance of the Nazi government, (as events similar to Kristallnacht were well known around the world), all the countries turned the refugees away and they were forced to return to Germany. From there many, though not all, were murdered in the Nazi camps.

Though the ocean liner did not land in any Canadian port, the Canadian government refused to grant asylum to those on board.

When World War II started in September 1939, and especially after the invasion of Russia by the Nazis in 1941, the Nazis made a very concerted effort to exterminate the Jewish people of Europe.

As of 1942, after the opening of the death camps, the exiled Polish government in London learned through the Polish resistance and other sources, that there was mass extermination of the Jewish people occurring mostly in German occupied Poland.

Sadly, the Allies did very little to stop the mass murders. To the Allies, there was no military value in bombing the camps, or attempting to stop the genocide.

One must add, that though the Allies were vaguely aware of what was happening, they were probably not well-informed of the human cruelties (starvation, torture and ‘pseudo-medical’ experiments) that were occurring on a daily basis in camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau.

After discussions with many historians in Germany and many with the many guides of numerous concentration camps, it can be proposed that the Allies were complacent with the Holocaust, and they were compliant with the Germans in not prosecuting the approximately one million German war criminals after 1945. Europe was in rubbles, tracking the war criminals was simply too much effort, and no one knew where to start.

The Allies and the Russians used many Nazi leaders to help spy on the other side. They also used German scientists who employed slave labour. For example, German rocket engineers built the rocket program for both the Russians and the Americans. Wernher von Braun, a German scientist, engineered the Saturn rocket program for NASA that put the first human on the moon. During the War, Von Braun was aware of the treatment of camp inmates when he visited camps to select labour for his V2 rocket program.

Politically, Communist Russia was foremost on the minds of the Allied commanders after the defeat of Nazi Germany.

In a House of Commons speech in 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made an annoucement that Canada would offically apologize to the Jewish people for turning away the SS St. Louis in 1939. At the same time, he added that apporximately 17% of all hate crimes in Canada are targeted towards Jewish people .

The images below are not as clear as they were photographed between a glass container in various museums.

This poster is found in the Topography of Terror Museum in Berlin, Germany. To summarize the most poignant section of the poster, “Even though the tragic fate of Jews was no longer cloaked in secrecy, no tangible actions were taken. From the British and American point of view, these issues were not of the utmost importance, as the priority was to win the war.”

This poster was photographed at the Pawiak politcal prison in Warsaw, Poland. It shows that the Polish government in exile made the United Nations at the time aware of the mass extermination of Jewish people in Poland. The presentation was made in December 1942, two and half years before the end of the War

This poster can also be found at the Topography of Terror Museum in Berlin. This Polish man, Szmul Zygielbojm, committed suicide because as he wrote in his last letter“By my death, I wish to make protest against the passivity with which the world is permitting the extermination of the Jewish people.”