Yet these were all localized reports The first report of European-wide geno-
cide came in August 1942 with the Riegner telegram, in which Gerhardt
Riegner, World Jewish Congress representative in Switzerland, reported that
Jews were being deported, concentrated in the east, and “exterminated at one
blow to resolve once and for all the Jewish Question in Europe.” Riegner also
mentioned prussic acid (the gas used at Auschwitz). By December 1942, the
United Nations confirmed news about mass killings
Even at this point, however, it was difficult to make the leap from the facts
to the scope and significance of the events. Available information left certain
things unexplained. The World Jewish Congress believed that starvation, not
mechanized killing, was the major cause of death. The assembly-line process
that made it possible to kill so many Jews so quickly was unknown until mid-
1944, when four Auschwitz inmates escaped. Hitherto, the full extent of
killing at Auschwitz-Birkenau had largely been concealed.
In addition, the overall skepticism of the American press made it more dif-
ficult to believe reports of Jews being killed. Such skepticism was augmented
by the lingering experience of exaggerated reports of atrocities during the First
World War. Thus, reports in 1942 and 1943 were often buried in the back
pages. Moreover, Japan, not Germany, was seen as the great barbaric threat to
humanity. This was true until December 1944, when, at the Battle of the
Bulge, SS officers shot a group of unarmed American prisoners in Belgium.
The tortuous dissemination and slow understanding of information is
important in assessing the responses of Jews (especially in the United States),
non-Jews, and state governments. The ability of American Jews to offer aid was
limited by a lack of political influence and diplomatic leverage. American
Jewry made up only 3.6 percent of a population whose popular anti-Semitism
peaked during the war. American Jewish leaders, moreover, lacked the diplo-
matic leverage they had had during the First World War, since there was no
doubt as to which side in the war would have the support of the American gov-
ernment. Most important, perhaps, American Jews shared in the belief that an
Allied victory in Europe was the most effective and expedient way to save Jews.
By contrast, it is clear that the US government could have acted to save at
least some Jews, particularly the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews,
who were not deported until 1944. By May 1943, the U.S. Fifteenth Air
Force division, operating at full strength, had begun to bomb Nazi industrial
complexes in Nazi-occupied Europe. This attests to the Allied capacity to
bomb the death camps, or the railroad lines transporting Jews there. Some
historians have argued that simply destroying key railway lines such as the
Kassa–Presov line could have halted the killing process, or at least slowed it
long enough for more inmates to have survived. By June 1944, moreover, the
allies had received the Vrba–Wetzler Report, a detailed report by eyewit-
nesses of the geographical layout of Auschwitz, the killing process, and
internal conditions in the camp.
From renewal to devastation, 1914–45 227