The Allied declaration on the extermination of the Jews

On 17 December 1942 the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, read out in the House of Commons a joint statement by the governments of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Yugoslavia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, and by the French National Committee of the Free French. In it the eleven Allied governments and the representatives of Fighting France stated that the German authorities were carrying into effect Hitler’s “oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe”, condemned “in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination” and declared that those responsible would not escape retribution. The same day the text was published in Washington and Moscow, and radio carried it around the world. After Eden’s statement the members rose from their seats and honoured the victims with a minute’s silence.

It was the first joint public declaration by the great powers of the anti-Hitler coalition to call the Holocaust by its name – the planned murder of an entire people. The Polish government-in-exile did a great deal to bring it about: from the spring of 1942 it had been passing reports from the occupied country to the West, and on 10 December it sent the Allied states a note signed by the head of Polish diplomacy, Edward Raczyński. The declaration nevertheless had clear limits: it condemned and threatened punishment, but announced no rescue measures whatsoever.

News from occupied Poland

In the spring and summer of 1942 the Germans moved in occupied Poland to the systematic murder of the Jews in the death camps of Operation Reinhard: at Bełżec from March, at Sobibór from May and at Treblinka from July, when the Great Deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto began. News of these crimes reached London through the communications network of the Polish Underground State and the Government Delegation for Poland.

The breakthrough came with the Bund Report, which reached London at the turn of May and June 1942 and spoke of some 700,000 Jews murdered. The Polish government, its ministers and the two Jewish members of the National Council, Szmul Zygielbojm and Ignacy Schwarzbart, publicised these figures in June and July in the press, on the BBC and at press conferences. The news was met with disbelief, however; in British government offices the memory of the atrocity propaganda of the previous war was still fresh.

In August Gerhart Riegner, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, passed on through British and American diplomatic posts a cable about a German plan to murder all the Jews of the countries under the Reich’s control. The State Department long delayed confirming it; only after Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles had done so did Rabbi Stephen Wise announce in Washington on 24 November that, according to confirmed information, some 2 million Jews had already been killed. At the end of October a great protest meeting at the Albert Hall was held in London, addressed among others by the Polish Prime Minister, General Władysław Sikorski, and on 27 November the Polish National Council adopted a resolution calling on the Allies to act. In the last days of November Jan Karski, a courier of the Polish Underground State, also reached London. He brought microfilmed documents and an eyewitness account: he had been inside the Warsaw Ghetto and the transit camp at Izbica, and the leaders of the Jewish underground had entrusted him with a desperate appeal to the Allies.

Raczyński’s note

Karski’s information and the material of the Jewish affairs section of the Home Army High Command became the basis of Polish diplomatic action. According to some studies, Raczyński, who was then in charge of the Foreign Ministry, laid it before Eden as early as 1 December. On 10 December 1942 he sent the foreign ministers of all 26 signatory states of the Declaration by United Nations a note entitled “The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland”. The document ran to 21 points on nine typed pages. It described the liquidation of the ghettos, the deportations to Treblinka, Bełżec and Sobibór, the conditions of transport and the methods of killing, and recalled earlier Polish démarches and the St James’s Palace Declaration of January 1942, in which the occupied states had made the punishment of war criminals one of their war aims. The note stressed that the Germans were aiming at the total extermination of the Jews – not only those of Poland, but also those brought there from Western and Central Europe and from the Reich itself.

In it the Polish government asked the Allies for something more than condemnation and a promise of punishment: to find means that would offer the hope that Germany might be effectively restrained from continuing to apply its methods of mass extermination. Before December was out, the Polish Foreign Ministry published the note as an English-language pamphlet, supplemented among other things by a speech by Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the National Council’s resolution and Raczyński’s broadcast on the BBC.

The declaration is often presented as a response to the Polish government’s “first official report” of 10 December. That needs qualifying. Raczyński’s note was the first formal diplomatic note by an Allied government devoted entirely to the extermination of the Jews and addressed to all the United Nations, but it was not the first official Polish report: the Polish government and its representatives had been reporting the murder of the Jews since June and July 1942, and the information campaign had intensified in November. The Allies’ decision was also influenced by the Riegner cable, Wise’s announcement in the United States and pressure from the British churches and Jewish organisations.

How the text came about

The draft statement was prepared by the British Foreign Office. Some officials, like their counterparts at the State Department, favoured caution: they feared that official confirmation of the crimes would prompt demands for rescue measures that the governments had no intention of taking – above all the admission of more refugees, including to Palestine. Eden nevertheless concluded that, given the mounting evidence and the pressure of public opinion, silence was no longer possible. Agreeing the text with Washington and Moscow took several days.

In the United States, on 8 December, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt received at the White House a delegation of Jewish leaders including Rabbi Wise, who handed him a memorandum on the fate of the Jews of Europe. Roosevelt replied that the American government knew most of the facts and agreed to a joint condemnation. According to a study by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), State Department officials were unable to block the declaration but forced changes to its wording, including the removal of a phrase saying that the reports from Europe “leave no room for doubt”. The number of victims, then estimated by Jewish organisations at about 2 million, was rendered in the text in general terms as “many hundreds of thousands”; the USHMM attributes this to Soviet reservations. The signatories included all the governments of occupied European countries in exile in London.

The House of Commons, 17 December 1942

The declaration was made in reply to a question from the Labour MP Sydney Silverman, who had received the Riegner cable in London back in August. Eden recalled that the Polish government had sent a note on the matter, widely discussed in the press, and read out the agreed text. The statement said that Jews were being transported from all the occupied countries to Eastern Europe “in conditions of appalling horror and brutality”, and that Poland had been made “the principal Nazi slaughterhouse”. The ghettos were being systematically emptied of Jews, except for a few highly skilled workers needed by war industry, and none of those taken away was ever heard of again. The able-bodied were being slowly worked to death in labour camps, while the infirm were left to die of cold and hunger or were killed in mass executions. The declaration put the number of victims of “these bloody cruelties” at many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children.

The governments and the National Committee declared that such events could only strengthen the resolve of all freedom-loving peoples to overthrow the barbarous Hitlerite tyranny. They reaffirmed their “solemn resolution” that those responsible for these crimes should not escape retribution, and undertook to press on with the necessary practical measures to that end. Questioned by members, Eden gave an assurance that the leaders and the actual perpetrators of the crimes alike would be treated equally and held to account.

The MP James de Rothschild spoke, thanking the government for an eloquent and just condemnation. Other members asked whether the victims might be able to escape to neutral countries, and Daniel Lipson urged that it be made clear that this was not war but murder. The Labour member William Cluse proposed that the House honour the victims by standing in silence. The Speaker, Edward FitzRoy, ruled that this could only be a spontaneous gesture by the whole House, and the members rose from their seats. The press later wrote that this was an honour normally reserved for news of a sovereign’s death. In the House of Lords the declaration was read the same day by the Lord Chancellor, Viscount Simon. Viscount Herbert Samuel pressed to know whether concrete steps could not be taken to save the victims, especially the children.

Response around the world

The declaration made the front pages on both sides of the Atlantic. On 18 December The New York Times carried the front-page headline “11 Allies Condemn Nazi War on Jews”. The Times noted that the House of Commons had risen spontaneously, and the Manchester Guardian wrote that nothing comparable had ever happened there before. The BBC broadcast the text in many languages, including in its programmes for occupied Europe, and Raczyński gave a talk on the BBC about the fate of Poland’s Jews. The London weekly The Jewish Chronicle called the crime the most terrible massacre ever committed.

In the Soviet Union the press published the text of the declaration, and on 19 December the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs issued its own lengthy statement on the Hitlerite authorities’ plan to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. In the years that followed, however, Soviet propaganda generally did not single out the Jews from among the “peaceful Soviet citizens” murdered by the occupier.

In occupied Poland news of the declaration arrived through clandestine radio listening and the underground press. A few days earlier, on 4 December 1942, the Council to Aid Jews, “Żegota”, had been set up in Warsaw under the Government Delegation – the only organisation of its kind in occupied Europe financed and supported by a government-in-exile. German propaganda, directed by Joseph Goebbels, presented the whole campaign as the work of “Jewish” agitation in London and Washington.

The limits of the declaration

The declaration contained condemnation and a threat of punishment, but not a word about rescuing those who were still alive. Asked in the Commons about asylum for refugees, Eden replied that there were “great geographical and other difficulties” in the matter. The British government feared an influx of refugees and a change in immigration policy for Palestine, and in Washington the State Department continued to obstruct the passing on of information and the issuing of visas. The demands that Karski had brought from the leaders of the Jewish underground, taken up by the Polish government – that the Allies respond with reprisals, for example by bombing targets in Germany in retaliation for the murder of the Jews, or by dropping leaflets warning the Germans – were not accepted.

Even so, the declaration changed the position. For the Allied governments the murder of the Jews ceased to be an unconfirmed “report” and became a fact officially acknowledged by the great powers. From then on no one could claim that the crime had been unknown. On the other hand, the lack of any further steps caused growing bitterness among Jews and Poles in London in the months that followed.

The declaration’s place in the history of the war

December 1942 was the moment when the Allied governments officially acknowledged that Adolf Hitler and his state were carrying out the planned extermination of the Jewish people. By the time the declaration was issued, according to many estimates, the majority of Poland’s Jews had already been murdered in the Operation Reinhard camps and other killing sites; in 1942 alone the Germans killed more of them than in any other year of the war. The statement did not stop a single transport.

Over the following months pressure on the governments grew, but achieved little. The Bermuda Conference, convened by Britain and the United States in April 1943, ended without any practical decisions. On 12 May 1943, while the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was being crushed, Szmul Zygielbojm took his own life in London in protest against the indifference of the world. Only in January 1944 did Roosevelt set up the War Refugee Board, which undertook real rescue work. The promise to punish the perpetrators, repeated in the Moscow Declaration of October 1943 – which, moreover, no longer mentioned the Jews as victims – was partly fulfilled at the Nuremberg trials and in later trials of war criminals.

For historians the declaration of 17 December 1942 is at once a testimony and a reproach: proof that the Allies knew about the Holocaust and named it publicly, and an example of how far knowledge stood from action. For Poland it meant recognition of the efforts of its government and underground, which had given the world the earliest and fullest accounts of the crime being committed on occupied Polish soil. In July 1944 Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote to Eden that this was probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.