Topographical sketch and report of the Auschwitz concentration camp (catalogue reference: FO 371/42806)
Transcript
The Concentration Camp at Oswiecim/Auschwitz/
Explanations to the attached plan:
- Towers, sentries with machine guns /12/
- 1a. Sentry, road gate
- Amunition damp [sic]
- Canteen
- Room of the block commander with his little tower for a sentry.
-
- Block N.1. – rooms for internees
- Block N.2. – “ “ “ and washrooms
- Block N.3,4,5, — Rooms for internees
:
- Block N.6. — Museum
- Block N.7,8,9,10, — lodgings
- Block N.11. —- penal company
- Block N.12 — lodgings and arrest /bunkers/
- Block N.13 — N.19 —- lodgings
- Block N.20 — special lodging for weak persons and persons unable to work
- Block N.21 — hospital and surgery
- Block N.22, 23, 24 — lodgings nr. 24 ground floor – office
- Block N.25 — lodgings; on the 1-st floor store-room.
- Block N.26 — safe and magazine
- Block N.27 — clothing dept, and baths
- Block N.28 — general hospital
-
- Kitchen
- Lodgings for S.S. N.C.O’
- 6a. “ “ “ “ and political dept.,
- lodgins [sic] for commandant of the camp.
- Crematorium
- Xxxx administrative biuldings [sic]
- slaughter house
- dairy
- joinery
- concrete work shop
- machine laundry
- administrative biuldings [sic]
- timber warehouse
- biuldingx [sic] materials warehouse
- camp for civilian workers who are not interned at the camp
- military workshops
- stores of belongings taken away from the prisoners
- xxx stores of the SS
- Barrack rooms for the SS
- offices /
- SS barack [sic] rooms, stores on the ground floor
- SS kitchen
- Stores
- dwelling houses for oficers [sic]
- Stables
- Unloading square / for transportation to Brzezinki/
- SS barracks, square, kennels.
- a and b. concentration camp for women
- c. gas chambers in a wood west of Brzezinki/Birkenau/
- d. crematorium, in a wood probably west of the barracks
Letter to Churchill requesting action against the persecution of Jews in Europe (catalogue reference: FO 371/34550)
Transcript
1.
Copy. (C 8857/34/55). 173, Park West, Edgware Road, London, W.2.
July 26th, 1943.
Sir,
In your message to the Poles on the death of General Sikorski you said that your thoughts are with us and that you will not forget us. It is from these words which you addressed to us that I draw courage to write to you today.
News has been given on the wireless tonight about the mass murders carried out by the Germans in the district of Lublin in Poland. At the death camps of Majdanek and Treblinka a monstrous operation has begun, aimed at the destruction of hundreds of thousands of human beings who, no matter how valiant, are today absolutely unable to defend themselves or to put up any effective resistance. This means that Hitler is pursuing his policy of extermination of the Polish nation, a policy which he has so far carried out with appalling results and unpunished.
I am writing to beg you to stop German bestialities in Poland. May I take the liberty of suggesting the two measures by means of which this result could be achieved.
- To send a force of Allied bombers to destroy the death camps at Treblinka and Majdanek. Those camps have been built and fitted specially for mass executions (gas and steam chambers in which several thousand people can be killed daily), it would take the Germans several months to rebuilt them, during which period many thousands human beings could be saved.
- Immediate retaliation. I know, this is a method equally strange to the British nation as to any decent minded people, but it is the sole and only one the Germans can and will understand. If they were told that a hundred of their villages will be razed to the ground by the Allied bombers, unless mass murders in Poland or in any other occupied country, are stopped, they would stop. And if they were made to pay with the blood of their own civilians for the crimes they have committed. they would not commit them again. We know that the culprits will be punished when the Allied Nations have won this war, but by that time they will have murdered thousands and thousands more of their victims whose lives could still be saved, if the Germans were made to pay for their crimes now.
I beg you, Sir, to forgive me for writing to you personally in this matter but, like all other Poles both in this country and at home, I firmly believe in the friendship and sympathy with our nation which you have always expressed in your speeches and I know that you will not want to leave those helpless victims in Poland to their horrible fate. The Polish authorities in Great Britain will, no doubt, seek assistance of the Allies to stop mass murders at Treblinka and Majdanek but the official negotiations always take time, while thousands are being killed every day at those death camps. In writing to you, Sir, I hope that/
The Right Honourable
Winston Churchill,
The Prime Minister of Great Britain.
2.
that as Leader of the United Nations, you will be in a position to act immediately in order to save those people. They are the future soldiers, ready and only waiting for weapons to take up fighting. When the time comes, they will prove themselves among the best Allied soldiers. But if the death camps at Treblinka and Majdanek are allowed to continue their work of mass slaughter, those soldiers will all be killed by the Germans before they even had a chance to fight.
For the Polish Nation their death, the death of thousands and thousands people, will constitute a calamity from which it will take it a very long time to recover. This is why I have taken the liberty of writing to you, Sir, in hope and all earnestness, that you will help us.
I have the honour, etc.,
(Sgd.) Lucyna H. Tomaszewska. (Miss)
Description of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April/May 1943 as the Germans attempted their ‘liquidation of the Ghettos’ (catalogue reference: FO 371/34550)
Transcript
MESSAGE 1 dispatched 28.4.19[43] received 21.5.194[3]
Today is the nineth [sic] day that the Ghetto fights back. SS and Wehrmacht formations lay siege to the ghetto. Artillery and flame throwers are employed and aeroplanes shower high explosives and incendiary bombs on 40,000 Jews who still remain in the ghetto. The Germans mine and blast blocks of houses where the residents have put up resistance. The ghetto is burning and smoke covers the whole city of Warsaw. Men, women and children who are not burnt alive are being murdered en masse. Mouths of drain pipes are blocked by German guards. The Jews fight back furiously and have killed and wounded about a thousand of the enemy. They burn factories and stores of German war industry. The Polish population marvel at the spirit of the Jewish defence. The reaction of the Germans is that of shame and rage. The Jewish fighting organisation addressed a proclamation to the people of Warsaw and the Polish workers parties paid tribute to the fighters of the ghetto. Only the power of the United Nations can offer immediate and effective help now. On behalf of the millions of Jews burnt and murdered and buried alive. On behalf of those fighting back and all of us condemned to die we call to the whole world;
It is imperative that the powerful retaliation of the United Nations shall fall upon the bloodthirsty enemy immediately and in some distant future, in a way which will make it quite clear what the retaliation is for. Our closest allies must at last understand the degree of responsibility for such apathy in face of an unparalleled crime commited [sic] by the Nazis against a whole nation, of which the tragic epilogue is being enacted now. The heroic rising without precedent in history of doomed sons of the ghetto should at last awake the world to deeds commensurate with the gravity of the hour.
Signed: Central committee of the Jewish Labour Movement. The Jewish National Committee in Poland.
MESSAGE 2 dispatched: May 11th, 1943- received May 21st 194[3]
The heroic resistance of the ghetto of Warsaw continues with but a few strongholds holding out. The Jewish fighting organisation shows supreme agility and courage. Mr. Klepfisch, an engineer, who was one of the pillars of the armed resistance, member of the bund, died like a hero. German cruelties are gruesome. Many are burnt alive, while thousands are being shot or taken away to camps, members of the presidency of the Jewish communal council were shot. They were: Lichtenbaum, Wielikowski, Sztolcman, Szereszewski Stanislaw. A few thousand remained underground and in the store-houses of the ghetto. The store-house defences are being overcome after stiff resistance the same goes for the shelters. The Germans are shelling and setting on fire one block of houses after another. Explosions and fires […]
Letter from Attlee to the Central Leadership of the Movement of Working Classes in Poland in response to their request for action (catalogue reference: FO 371/34550)
Transcript
It is with the deepest feelings of sympathy and admiration that I have received on behalf of the British Labour Party the stirring message from the Central Leadership of the Movement of Working Classes in Poland.
To British Labour it is an inspiring token of the faith of our Polish comrades in the cause of human liberty. We are deeply moved by the knowledge that despite the cruel persecution of the ruthless might of Fascism you remain united and resolute, true even in your bondage to our common ideals.
To all British people your message is an inspiration to ever increasing effort against the enemy. We have followed with grief and horror the long martyrdom which the Polish nation has suffered at the hands of the German oppressors. We have watched with admiration the courageous resistance which your people have opposed (to) that tyranny. We are determined that by our effort and that of our Allies the evil forces which have caused your suffering shall be forever destroyed. To that end are striving the soldiers, sailors and airmen, the land workers and the factory workers of all the United Nations.
Our air attacks on Germany, in which Polish airmen are playing so gallant and effective a part, are bringing home the horrors of war to the Germans. As our one object is to hasten the defeat of the Axis these attacks must be directed against the most important strategic objectives. With every day that passes their weight is increasing and the enemy is no longer in any doubt of our ability to deal heavy blows at the very heart of his strength. Berlin, Essen, Nuremberg, Munich and other German cities are having to endure heavier attacks from the air than the Germans have inflicted upon Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade and London.
We know how great is your sacrifice, how bitter your agony. But we know too that you will endure to the end. Already the Axis are on the defensive. Every day, by land, sea and air, the Forces of Freedom grow stronger. They are united in that struggle for Freedom which is also yours. They will not pause in their efforts till victory is won.
(sgd.) C.R. ATTLEE.
14th April, 1943.
Letter from the Central Leadership of the Movement of Working Classes in Poland to Attlee regarding the treatment of Jews in Europe (Catalogue Reference: FO371/34550)
Transcript
COPY
The Central Leadership of the Movement of Working Classes in Poland, which represents the various forms of the pre-war Socialist movement in the country, addresses you on a matter which affects not only Poland.
The destructive activities of the Germans, who have practised on us their principles of total war, have now reached the stage of creating a ‘Lebensraum’ for the Germans. They have expelled the Polish peasants from their farms and homes in the Western provinces, which have been incorporated in the Reich. There they have murdered hundreds of thousands of people. They have robbed and pillaged them. They have massacred, using the most cruel methods, 1,500,000 of Jews – Polish citizens.
Now they have directed the same destructive acts towards the Poles on the territories of Central Poland. Already hundreds of villages have been burned – human beings and property perishing in the flames.
Not a day passes without mass executions. There is not a town, not a village without its gallows. Lublin and Zamose, where the head of the Gestapo Blobotznik now directs the work of extermination have been most brutally ravaged; the inhabitants are being thrown out of their homes. Able-bodied men and women are deported to forced labour in Germany. The weak are sent to camps to be murdered in gas chambers.
At the same time the whole machinery of destruction is working at high speed in the concentration camps of Oswiecim, Treblinka, Radogoszez, Majdanek, where several hundred thousand people have already been murdered. The Germans cynically declare that they must reduce the numbers of Poles because many Germans are being killed on the fronts, and equilibrium must be maintained. Whenever they suffer defeat – as for instance now in Africa – the entire weight of their atrocities falls upon our shoulders. We are being driven into such a state that the forms of self-defence so far used may at any moment be abandoned for an open rising. This, unfortunately, would have now no chance of success, for we should have to fight with our bare hands.
Do not take this as a complaint. Long before this war broke out we had chosen with our eyes wide open, to fight against fascism. We ask you, however, to find some means of checking the totalitarian barbarity of the Germans. Warnings of retribution after the war and of punishment to be meted out to war criminals is not enough. They will not break down the criminally passive complicity of the German people, who tolerate these crimes. The German people must understand now, to-day, that they are responsible for the Nazi crimes.
They will understand this only if reprisals for mass murders in our country are directed, not against the German army, but against centres of civilian life behind the front. We know how difficult it is for a civilised human being to decide upon such action, but to-day your scruples only serve to encourage the brutality of the invader.
We appeal to you to-day, as we appealed for your help from our besieged capital, at the moment when our country was on the point of collapse. We implore you to use those extreme measures which may in part restrain the Nazi murderers. The world must give us immediate help if our country is to conserve the minimum of strength required for the crucial moment of deliverance. Freedom, Equality, Independence.
The Central Leadership of the Movement of Working Masses in Poland.
Oil Painting of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, codenamed Operation Anthropoid, 27 May 1942 signed by artist (Terence Tenison) Cuneo (catalogue reference: INF 3/24)
Site plan of the Treblinka camp – in Polish – showing the location of mass graves (catalogue reference: FO 371/42806)
Translated transcript
TREBLINKA
Site Plan
Explanation
Railway line
Barbed wire hedgerow
Barbed wire fence
Boarded fence
Forest
Observation point
Graves
Report of the mass execution of Jews in Poland (catalogue reference: FO 371/34550)
Transcript
EXTERMINATION OF THE JEWS IN POLAND
According to recent reliable reports received from leaders of the underground movement in Poland, the process of extermination of the Polish Jewish population of over 3 million and of the large number of Jews deported to Poland from Germany, Austria and the occupied countries of Europe has been carried far towards its final completion.
Although at first the Germans established a number of ghettos in various Polish cities and towns, thus deluding the Jews into the belief that they would be allowed to survive in this way, they proceeded early in 1942 with the mass extermination of the Jews and it is known that the principal ghettos, those of Warsaw, Wilno, Lwow, Krakow and Lublin have now been largely liquidated. It is known that some time in April the remnants of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, offered desperate resistance to the German military and police attempting to remove them, and that the complete destruction of the Jews in this ghetto was preceded by street and house-to-house fighting lasting several days.
The dreadful mass slaughter of the Jews in Poland is being carried out in several death camps, the largest and most notorious of which is that of TREBLINKA. The Polish Government have received a detailed description of the circumstances and methods of the mass slaughter, based on the personal accounts of several Jewish grave-diggers who succeeded in escaping from the confines of the camp and are being sheltered by the Polish underground movement.
The Slaughter Camp of TREBLINKA.
‘The extermination of Jews in Poland by methods of mass slaughter continues with unabated intensity. Not only Polish Jews, but those from other occupied countries of Europe, including France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Czechoslovakia, etc., are being deported to special Death Camps and murdered by the thousand without discrimination as to age or sex.
‘The principal Death Camp has been established near the village of TREBLINKA situated near the main Biakystok-Warsaw Railway Line. At first, the Germans used this camp as a Penal Concentration Camp for Poles, where many thousands of them were executed in March 1942, however, the Germans proceeded to construct a special Death Camp for their mass …’
Cutting from the Daily Worker newspaper of an open letter – also published in the Times – by well-known figures appealing for action against the mistreatment of Jews in Europe (catalogue reference: FO 371/36653)
Transcript
DAILY WORKER
Cutting dated …17 Feb 1943 … 194
Britain Urged To Act Now and Save Jews
The following letter appeared in the Times yesterday: –
We have noted with satisfaction the Joint Declaration of the United Nations vigorously protesting against the Nazi outrages upon the Jewish people.
We desire to associate ourselves with it. But we think that present action to mitigate this barbarism now is even more essential that the assurance of penalties after Hitler’s defeat for those who have shared in the perpetration of the outrages upon the Jews and other victims of Nazi Germany.
We suggest that the nation is eager to see the British Government take the lead in attempting to rescue as many as possible of these, the most helpless of Hitler’s victims, as they were also the first; the generous temper in which Italian settlers in Abyssinia have been repatriated to Italy should be applied to the right of the Jews to protection.
OBLIGATION
In the circumstances, we suggest that it is incumbent on the British Government to take the initiative in the following measures:
- To make representations by the United Nations to the German Government to permit Jews to leave the occupied countries of Europe.
- To offer the joint protection of the United Nations to Jews liberated or escaping from the occupied territories.
- To facilitate the transfer of Jews to and their asylum in the territories and colonies of the United Nations.
- To urge on neutral countries the desirability of receiving as many Jewish refugees as possible until, with victory, it is possible to consider ways and means of their permanent settlement. Where food and finance raise difficult problems for neutral countries willing to assist, the United Nations should agree to make these available to them.
- To make available the fullest possible facilities for the immigration of Jewish refugees into Palestine.
We suggest that, as a prelude to these large-scale measures, the British Government should offer immediately to admit to Great Britain the largest possible number of Jewish refugees, especially children.
We see little difficulty, given good will, in taking all the necessary precautions which the national security demands.
We do not deny either the magnitude or the complexity of the Jewish problem. But we do not feel that the Government and nation can stand helplessly by while a whole people is ruthlessly butchered.
Verbal sympathy is not enough. We must be prepared, whatever the action of other people, to act with resolution and magnanimity.
HISTORIC TRADITION
That is an attitude rooted in our historic tradition. Never was it more necessary to prove that it is still a living faith among us.
For if we do nothing while a helpless people is assassinated, we shall breed a temper of acquiescence in the barbarism of tyrants which may become one of the unhappiest legacies of this epoch of agony. – Yours faithfully, W.G.S Adams, Phyllis Bottome, A.M. Carr-Saunders, Wyndham Deedes, P.A.M. Dirac, E.M.Forster, G.P.Gooch, R.A.Gregory, Storm Jameson, F.G.Kenyon, A.D.Lindsay, Kingsley Martin, Frederick Maurice, Gilbert Murray, Harold G. Nicolson, John Boyd Orr, Margaret Rhondda, Sankey. George Bernard Shaw, R.H. Tawney, Beatrice Webb, Wedgwood, Rebecca West.
Report on the attacks on the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw (catalogue reference: FO 371/30923)
Transcript
News is reaching the Polish Government in London about the liquidation [of] the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw.
The persecution of the Jews in Poland, which has been in progress from the very first day of the German occupation, has taken on extremely acute forms since March 1942, when Himmler ordered the extermination of 50% of the Jewish population in the Government General, to be carried out by the end of 1942.
Though the German assassins had started this work with extraordinary gusto, the results apparently did not satisfy Himmler, for during his visit to the General Gouvernement [sic] in July 1942 he ordered new decrees personally, aiming at the total destruction of Polish Jewry.
The persecutions in Warsaw started on July 21st. 1942, when German police cars suddenly drove into the ghettos. The soldiers immediately started rushing into houses, shooting the inhabitants at sign without any explanation. The first victims belonged mostly to the educated classes. On that day almost all the members of the Jewish Municipal Council were arrested and held as hostages.
On July 22nd. 1942 the Jewish Council was ordered to proclaim the decree of the German authorities dealing with the resettlement of all the Warsaw Jews, regardless of sex or age, in the Eastern part of Poland, with the sole exception of persons working in German factories or members of the Jewish militia. The daily quota of people to be re-settled was fixed at 6,000 and members of the Jewish Municipal Council were ordered to carry out the order under the pain of death.
By the next day, however, on July 23rd., the German police again appeared in the Jewish Municipal Council and demanded to see the chairman, Mr. Czerniakow. After the police had left, Czerniakow committed suicide. From a note he left for his wife, it became clear that he had received an order to deliver 10,000 people the next day and 7000 daily on the following days, in spite of the fact that the quota had been fixed originally at 6,000. The victims to be delivered to the Germans are either dragged out of their homes or seized in the streets. As the zeal of the Jewish police to perform these duties against their own people was slight and did not give a guarantee of efficiency, the Germans have mobilised temporary security batallions [sic] for the man-hunts, consisting of Ukrainians, Latvians, and Lithuanians. These batallions, under the command of SS men, are characterised by their utter ruthlessness, cruelty and inhumanity.
The Jews, when caught, are driven to a square. Old people and cripples are then singled out, taken to the cemetery and there shot. The remaining people are loaded into goods trucks, at the rate of 150 people to a truck with space for 40. The floor of the truck is covered with a thick layer of lime and chlorine sprinkled with water. The doors of the trucks are locked. Sometimes the train starts immediately on being loaded, sometimes it remains on a siding for a day, two days or even longer. The people are packed so tightly that those who die of suffocation remain the crowd side by side with the still living and those slowly dying from the fumes of lime and cholorine, from lack of air, water and food. Wherever the trains arrive half the people arrive dead. Those surviving are sent to special camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. Once there, the so-called ‘settlers’ are mass murdered.