Newspaper tells tragic story behind its original report of the mass murder of Jews

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

The Daily Telegraph tells a fascinating story today behind one of its greatest unheralded scoops from the past that should have set the news agenda but, sadly, did not.

On this, Holocaust Memorial Day and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Telegraph’s David Blair reveals how it obtained the story it published on 25 June 1942, headlined “Germans murder 700,000 Jews in Poland”. He writes:

“The story was remarkably detailed and accurate, yet the credit belongs neither to this newspaper nor the anonymous ‘Daily Telegraph reporter’ who was the author. All the facts were supplied by Szmul Zygielbojm, a member of the Polish government in exile who made it his mission to inform the world about the holocaust. After arriving in London in 1942, Zygielbojm used a clandestine network of contacts across occupied Poland to gather eyewitness accounts of the fate of Jews. The particular information in the Daily Telegraph’s story was smuggled to London on microfilm hidden inside a key”.

The newspaper reported that mobile gas chambers were being used for industrialised murder and that “an average 1,000 Jews were gassed daily”.

The story as published by the Daily Telegraph on 25 June 1942

The article, reproduced on the Telegraph’s website, also lists the death toll from massacres in seven towns and cities. Here are two paragraphs:

“Children in orphanages, pensioners in almshouses and the sick in hospitals have been shot. In many places Jews were deported to ‘unknown destinations’ and killed in neighbouring woods. In Vilna 50,000 Jews were murdered in November. The total number slaughtered in this district and around Lithuanian Kovno is 300,000”.

Yet the article, which referred to “the greatest massacre in the world’s history”, was published on the fifth page of a six-page issue. And it got no traction elsewhere.

Blair reports that when the Telegraph’s story appeared, Zygielbojm’s wife, Manya, and their son, Tuvia, were prisoners in the Warsaw ghetto. Both died during the razing of the ghetto in 1943.

As for Zygielbojm, he was dismayed at the public indifference to his detailed and chilling revelation of mass murder. And, crushed also by his family’s fate, he took his own life on 11 May 1943. He wrote:

“The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out. But indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime. By looking on passively upon this murder of defenceless millions of tortured children, women and men they have become partners to the responsibility”.

It may be fair to point out that Britain and the Allies were fighting to liberate Europe from the Nazis who perpetrated the holocaust. But Zygielbojm is surely correct in saying that the plight of the Jews was largely overlooked at the time. The British public averted its gaze, and the Telegraph does well to remind us of that fact.

Source: Daily Telegraph