The systematic extermination of the Jews began, not with gas, but with the “Holocaust by Bullets” via mobile death squads called Einsatzgruppen that followed the German army into the Soviet Union. And the Allies knew about it from minute one.
On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the USSR. Five days earlier, Reinhard Heydrich briefed the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen on their mission: follow the Wehrmacht and murder every Jew they could find.
In village after village and town after town, they dragged Jews from their homes, marched them to pits or ravines, forced them to dig their own graves, and shot them. Men first.
Then, from August 1941 onward, all women, children, and even infants too.
Local antisemites, particularly from Lithuania, Ukraine and Latvia, often enthusiastically collaborated and even joined in on the mass slaughter of the Jews.
And the level of bloodthirsty butchery was truly savage.
Babies were torn from mothers’ arms and shot or smashed against trees. Entire families were machine-gunned into ditches. Jews were forced to watch their loved ones die before their own turn came. Germans experimented with lining Jews up two, three, four Jews at a time and trying to shoot them all through the neck with a single bullet. It was sick sport.
Nothing about the Einsatzgruppen’s “mission” was “war." This was industrialized extermination with pistols, shovels, and some of the most sadistic mass human behavior ever recorded.
By the end of 1941, the Einsatzgruppen had murdered more than 1 million Jews.
By December of 1941, the Nazis began their first large-scale gassings using mobile gas vans at Chelmno, the first extermination camp. More death camps followed with Belzec (March 1942), Auschwitz II (March 1942) Sobibor (May 1942), and Treblinka (July 1942).
But the Einsatzgruppen kept on killing. Gassing would become the main method of extermination by the Summer of 1942.
Current estimates (especially following the groundbreaking work of Father Patrick Desbois’ Yahad-In Unum project) place the total number of Jews murdered just by the Einsatzgrupppen by war’s end at between 1.5-2 million.
Now, here's the part almost no one talks about: the Allies knew about the extermination campaign against the Jews almost immediately.
British codebreakers at Bletchley Park were reading the Germans’ own radio traffic in real time, and the Einsatzgruppen and Order Police sent daily tallies back to Berlin that included the exact numbers of Jews shot in specific towns and villages (the recordings got sloppier as time went on with some going unreported - especially those carried out by local collaborators instead of Germans).
Every detailed report sent back to Berlin was intercepted and deciphered by the British within days, and sometimes within mere hours, of the mass killings.
That’s right. The Allies had precise, irrefutable intelligence on the “Holocaust by Bullets” from the very first days of the invasion in June of 1941.
And yet, the Allies refused to name what the Germans were doing publicly. They buried the reports. They spoke only in vague terms about “atrocities” or “Nazi brutality.” They never highlighted that this was a deliberate campaign to exterminate the Jewish people. The Allies knew their efforts could lose support if it was seen as a “Jewish war.”
And so, there was no public declaration, there were no urgent warnings to Jewish communities, and there were no serious efforts to reverse the illegal White Paper of 1939 that closed British Mandate Palestine to further Jewish immigration.
The horror was known to the Allies and was deliberately downplayed.
Why? The answer was always the same: saving the Jews wasn’t a “military priority,” only "winning the war" was a military priority.
Regardless, it is historical fact that the systematic murder of Jews began in June 1941, and the free world looked away.
So, Jews take it seriously when people and groups and countries threaten to and try to once again annihilate us. And now that we are a sovereign people again, we don’t have to rely on foreign codebreakers, foreign politicians, and foreign generals to decide whether we live or die. Now, we like having friends, but we ultimately defend ourselves.
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