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August 19

What are the earliest explicit references to mass extermination during the Holocaust?

What are the earliest explicit references (in documentary, in letter, in diaries, in news) to mass extermination at extermination camps during the Holocaust? This would not include, for instance, Nazi speeches making reference to destroying Jews, or wartime reports of terrible treatment and death among the Jews. Rather, I am looking for the early explicit, unambiguous references or descriptions. Thanks! Zanahary (talk) 20:40, 19 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Zanahary: I guess it could be The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland (1943), based on information smuggled from Poland to the West by Jan Karski. --CiaPan (talk) 21:48, 19 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You may want to see the Jan Karski#Reporting Nazi atrocities to the Western Allies section and the Raczyński's Note (1942) article linked there for more details. --CiaPan (talk) 22:00, 19 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Wannsee Conference in January 1942 is generally taken as the outset of the Nazi extermination policy, although our article describes earlier actions dating back to mid-1941. All this was unknown to the Allies at the time. Alansplodge (talk) 19:18, 20 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure exactly what the OP wants. The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland refers to and contains the slightly earlier December 1942 Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations which of course was front page news at the time. There has been an amazingly successful campaign to replace history with fairy tales that the extermination policy was not known or publicized at the time, while the reality was that both happened about as fast as possible. It was suspected earlier, by the time of Wannsee, but known once the suspicions were confirmed. And further that no action was taken based on it, that there was some magical rescue operation that the allies failed to perform. The revisionists miss a little event called World War II. The two best critics of this appallingly victorious and universal revisionism I know of are Robert Rosen's Saving the Jews : Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust and William Rubinstein's The Myth of Rescue.

In Britain, publisher Victor Gollancz was a leading figure publicizing what was happening. None Shall Escape is a 1944 US movie about postwar war crimes trials (starring Marsha Hunt (actress, born 1917), who died only last year). They even made movies about it! John Z (talk) 08:58, 23 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]