Auschwitz, and the Typhus Plague in Poland.
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THERE WERE other matters concerning German prison camps on which Whitehall preferred to turn a blind eye. Rumours were still trickling out of Hitler's empire about things happening to the Jews.
Britain already had evidence from codebreaking and diplomatic sources that the Germans were deporting the Jews from Germany and other parts of Europe under their control to ghettoes and camps in the Government-General (formerly Poland) where malnutrition, epidemics, brutal conditions, and executions were taking an immense toll.
There was no shortage of Intelligence about the continued 'cleaning-up' operations in the east.
The codebreakers had only just intercepted a message from the southern Russian front, reporting a Judenaktion on July 23 forty miles south-west of Kamenets, during which seven hundred Jews found incapable of work had been shot. 
Despite this, the foreign office was inclined to treat the more lurid public reports with scepticism. They were regarded as part of the international Zionist campaign which was continuing regardless of the war effort. 'Information from Jewish refugees is generally coloured and frequently unreliable,' the F.O. had reminded one diplomatic outpost in December 1941.
When such a telegram arrived from Geneva on August 10, 1942, composed by Gerhart Riegner, the youthful secretary of the World Jewish Congress, it ran into this wall of institutional disbelief: Riegner claimed that Hitler's headquarters was planning to deport up to four million Jews from Nazi-occupied countries to the east during the coming autumn, where they were to be exterminated 'in order to resolve, once and for all, the Jewish question in Europe.' Killing methods under discussion included, claimed Riegner, the use of hydrogen-cyanide.
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. 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." 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. 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.' 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.' 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. There is no indication that Riegner's message was ever put before Churchill, who was in Cairo and Moscow at that time.
Similar 'wild stories' did however reach the United States. On September 4 the Polish ambassador in Washington produced to Lord Halifax 'an awful report about the Germans exterminating all the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto at the rate of 100,000 a month.' Halifax added: 'They are supposed to make various things they want out of the boiled-down corpses. I wonder whether this horror is true.* A good deal more likely to be true, I fancy, than it was in the last war.' A few mornings later he noted heartlessly a visit by Rabbi Wise and a colleague 'whose talk was exactly like that of a stage Jew.' Grim though the subject-matter of their visit was, as the ambassador privately recorded, 'it was all I could do to keep a straight face when he chipped in.' They depicted in vivid detail how the Nazis were deporting French Jews to the east to kill them. 'If this is true,' Halifax cautioned himself, 'how vile it is of Laval to hand any more poor wretches over.' Again the foreign office line was one of scepticism. In September 1944 a British diplomat would argue against publicising the atrocity stories on the heartless ground that it would compel officials to 'waste a disproportionate amount of their time dealing with wailing Jews.'
* It was not true.
See Reader's letter: Frank Lowe Jr has information on Hitler's order, Wannsee; and the Typhus War
Later in September 1942 information did reach Churchill from his secret sources lifting a corner of the veil on Hitler's concentration camps. Analysis of their commandants' secret returns, transmitted in cypher to Berlin, had begun yielding daily figures for the death rates in a dozen such camps. These included twenty-one deaths during August at Niederhagen, eighty-eight at Flossenbürg, and seventy-four at Buchenwald; in a fast-growing camp at Auschwitz in Upper Silesia the intercepts revealed the notable totals of 6,829 male and 1,525 female fatalities. There was evidently a deadly epidemic raging at the camp since a message of September 4, in reply to a request for a thousand prisoners for building the Danube railway, stated that Auschwitz could not provide them until the 'ban' (Lagersperre) on the camp had been lifted. It was an odd, one-way kind of quarantine: 'It appears that although typhus is still rife at Auschwitz,' the Intelligence report pointed out, 'new arrivals continue to come in.'
Every other detail, however trivial, was reflected in these intercepts, including a signal to Auschwitz commandant S.S. Sturmbannführer Rudolf Höss in September 1942 regretting that rubber truncheons were unobtainable in Breslau.' On October 26 the codebreakers found Berlin warning Auschwitz to stand by to receive two visitors from the Führer's Chancellery in Berlin - the agency supervising euthanasia and various other killing schemes - for a lengthy stay, as the radio signal said: they would be setting up an X-ray sterilisation operation (this being the method chosen by the S.S. to keep the Jews from breeding). On October 27 Sachsenhausen reported that it was shipping to Auschwitz two hundred Soviet prisoners of war found to have contracted tuberculosis. After Berlin ordered that all camp fatalities were to be reported, on December 1 Buchenwald dutifully reported, in their secret code, a total of 134 deaths from natural causes during November including four Jews. On December 8 Dr Wirths reported twenty-seven male and thirty-six female typhus deaths in Auschwitz during the previous week. It is worth noting, as the official historian does, that nowhere in these myriads of intercepted German messages was there any reference to gas chambers or gassings, so the official scepticism which greeted Riegner's report from Geneva is understandable.