News
How the JC reported Auschwitz’s horror
Archive material reveals how liberation unfolded and the journalists who helped bring the horrors of the death camps to light
January 27, 2025 09:00
Archive material reveals how liberation unfolded and the journalists who helped bring the horrors of the death camps to light
January 27, 2025 09:00The news of the liberation of Auschwitz appeared in the Jewish Chronicle of February 2, 1945 halfway down a front page report headed - with what seems now to be the darkest irony - ‘Poland’s Jewish survivors.’
Many reports during the war had told JC readers what was happening at the death camp. For example in November 1944, an account of the trial in Paris of a “traitor who had joined the Gestapo” stated that “For the slightest sickness prisoners were sent to the gas chambers. In April the number, of men and women executed daring one single day reached 2,700. Even the Reich authorities supervising concentration camps found this excessive and ordered a slow-down because the executions were causing serious labour shortage."
However, the reports after liberation threw new light on the scale and methods of the Nazis’ programme of industrialised killing
The JC of February 9 contained a fuller report, which focused on the Nazi attempts to cover up the full horror of their actions.
“First investigations reveal that the horrors perpetrated there put even those of Maidenek in the shade,” read the report.
“Several thousands of completely exhausted prisoners in the last stages of emaciation were rescued by the Russians.”
The Germans, it went on “destroyed an electrical machine which was able to kill several hundred victims at once, the bodies then being dropped onto a conveyor belt which carried them to the electric furnace where the bodies were burned and turned to powder.
“A mobile plant for slaughtering children was removed by the Nazis and the gas chambers were reconstructed to make them appear to be garages,” it continued. “Mass graves in the camp were levelled.
“According to the survivors the death camp was a great industry with many departments. There were offices where the deportees were sorted according to their age and capacity to perform slave labour before being slaughtered. Other offices were set aside for the aged, for children and for invalids doomed to immediate execution.
“The powdered remains of the victims were used as fertiliser for the fields surrounding the camp which was several square miles in extent. Between 1941 and 1943 five to eight sealed trains filled with deportees used to arrive at the camp daily. They drew up at a special siding built in the camp.”
The report estimated the number killed at Auschwitz as 1,500,000 “and hundreds and thousands of them were Jews.” Yad Vashem today estimates that a million Jewish men, women and children were murdered at the camp.