Why UK goverment and press

DURING THE Second World War, news of German atrocities, especially those committed against Jews, did not circulate freely in the British press. As early as July 1941 a Ministry of Information planning document advised that news should be used “very sparing” and in relation to “indisputably innocent people”, and should not refer to Jews.

The Ministry of Information maintained substantial influence over newspapers through formal censorship and through advice given to editors and owners.

Government concern that reports about Jews could exacerbate domestic antisemitism, and thereby weaken British unity, was one factor encouraging the marginalisation of such news.

As the war progressed, Foreign Office worries about how articles about atrocities could stimulate demands for rescue, refuge and retaliation further encouraged the omission of information about Jews from the domestic news agenda. Such demands, if responded to, could, it was feared, divert resources away from the task of winning the war as quickly as possible.

Nevertheless, in May 1942, following the receipt of the Bund Report from Warsaw, which revealed that the Germans had killed 700,000 Jews in occupied Poland, the Ministry of Information relaxed its policy.

On June 25, the Daily Telegraph reported the data from the Bund Report. On July 9, Brendan Bracken, the Minister of Information, re-stated the terrible news at a press conference. That same month, the Polish Government in Exile’s main English lan- Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who in 1942 alerted Parliament to the genocide guage publication, The Polish Fortnightly Review, published news of the death camps in Chełmno, Bełzec, and Sobibór. Dziennik Polski — the main Polish language publication — reported on the gassing of Jews at Treblinka. But this reporting of the Holocaust was not sustained. It only returned to the inside pages of newspapers to any significant degree in late November and December 1942.

Testimony from eyewitnesses who arrived in Palestine, new data from Poland, the US Secretary of State Sumner Welles’s acceptance of the veracity of the Riegner Telegram (which advised that the Germans sought to exterminate Jews under their control), together with substantial lobbying from Polish and Jewish representatives, saw both the press and government