The British White Paper on concentration camps

On 30 October 1939 the British government published a White Paper entitled Papers concerning the Treatment of German Nationals in Germany, 1938–1939. The pamphlet, issued in the series of command papers as Cmd. 6120 and sold for threepence, contained eleven documents: reports from the Ambassador in Berlin, the chargé d’affaires and the consuls in Vienna, Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich and Dresden, as well as accounts by people who had come out of the concentration camps. It was the first official document from a government at war with Germany to describe in detail what went on behind the wire of Dachau and Buchenwald.

Popular chronologies describe the event as a report on concentration camps “being built in Europe for Jews and opponents of Nazism”. The White Paper, however, was not about new or planned camps, nor did it speak of occupied Poland. It described camps that had been operating for years within Germany itself, and what had befallen their prisoners in 1938 and early 1939: political opponents of the regime, clergymen, Bible Students (Jehovah’s Witnesses) and, above all, Jews arrested in June and November 1938.

A reply to propaganda

In its introduction the government explained why it was publishing documents that “were not written for publication”. Since the beginning of the war German radio had almost daily accused the British of crimes committed forty years earlier in the Boer War, when tens of thousands of Boer women and children, as well as black Africans, had died in British concentration camps in South Africa. The introduction quoted a report from Durban of 27 September: a Nazi woman announcer had called on the Boers to rebel and asked whether they wanted to be ruled by those who had “put ground glass in the food of their children” in the camps. Hitler had long exploited the same theme. According to a telegram from the Ambassador, Nevile Henderson, of 7 March 1938, included in the White Paper, the Chancellor had told him that England had no right to criticise, since “it was the English who invented concentration camps”.

London answered this “shameless propaganda” with documents. The introduction recalled that as early as 1933 opponents of the Nazis had been locked up en masse in camps where “flogging and torture were the order of the day”, and that the regime had then excused the violence as the “first fervour of revolution”. The documents of 1938–1939 were intended to show that after five years in power nothing had changed. The government admitted openly that it had previously kept silent on purpose: as long as there was even the slightest chance of an understanding with Germany it had not wished to inflame relations, and even after the outbreak of war it had hesitated to stir up hatred. It closed with the statement that conditions in Germany recalled “the darkest ages in the history of mankind”.

What the documents contained

The first three documents concerned the Churches: the imprisonment of Pastor Martin Niemöller, leader of the Confessing Church, who after being sentenced by a court in March 1938 was not set free but sent to a camp, and an anonymous letter from a German mother complaining that children were being drawn away from Christianity. The Consul-General in Vienna described how in October 1938 gangs of the SA and the Hitler Youth had ransacked the palace of Archbishop Theodor Innitzer, and how in November, during the pogrom, nineteen Viennese synagogues had burned to the ground – as the Völkischer Beobachter itself reported with satisfaction. The Consul in Cologne related the course of the pogrom in his city.

The greater part of the White Paper dealt with the camps. Accounts gathered by a charitable organisation in the summer of 1938 came from Jewish men arrested in the June round-up, in which the criminal police throughout the Reich detained anyone with any entry at all in their files, even one dating back decades, and from so-called “asocials”. In Buchenwald they worked sixteen hours a day carrying stones, without being allowed a drink of water, and for the slightest offence received twenty-five lashes. One prisoner remembered the words with which new arrivals were greeted: every bullet costs twelve pfennigs, “and that is exactly what a Jew is worth”. Only those who could produce documents allowing them to leave Germany were released.

The Consul-General in Frankfurt, Robert Smallbones, described in December 1938 the treatment of the Jews arrested after Kristallnacht: the crowd hurling abuse at them outside the exhibition hall to which they were brought, the beatings and humiliation by SS men and police. He noted that he had been told the same thing independently by many people, who “could not all have invented the same lies at the same time”. The Consul-General in Munich reported on Dachau, where at the peak an estimated 14,000 Jews from southern and western Germany and from Austria were held, their heads shaved, in thin drill uniforms in the winter frost, several hundred to a barrack intended for a few dozen. The Consul in Dresden passed on accounts from Buchenwald, where there were twenty latrines for 10,000 prisoners, and a Jewish doctor who dressed the wounds of those who had been beaten knew of 67 deaths and estimated that some 350 people had died. The last document, an account by a Buchenwald prisoner, named the camp commandant, Karl Koch.

Reception

The White Paper caused a stir in Britain, but there was no debate. On 2 November the Conservative MP Oliver Locker-Lampson asked the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, for a day’s debate on “the White Paper on German atrocities”. Chamberlain refused: the facts “speak for themselves”, and the documents had been published so that public opinion at home and abroad could form its own judgement. Asked by the Labour member Philip Noel-Baker whether the Ministry of Information would give the publication wide publicity, he replied that this had already been done. On 8 November Ellen Wilkinson MP asked why the government, which had known of many of these facts before September 1938, had made no provision in the Munich Agreement for the protection of the Jews in Czechoslovakia, and pointed out that ministers had previously answered questions in the House of Commons by saying they had no information.

The question touched a sore spot. The publication was above all a propaganda move in the war, not the expression of a new policy towards the victims. The documents had been lying in the Foreign Office for months and were released only when they could serve to rebut German accusations. Berlin replied with accusations of its own; in those same days German newspapers published, among other things, letters allegedly found in Prague that were supposed to prove a conspiracy by British politicians against Germany. German propaganda had already accused Winston Churchill of sinking the Athenia.

Its place in the war

The White Paper of October 1939 dealt with pre-war camps, in which the prisoners were mainly citizens of the Reich. At the same time the Germans were already setting up the first camps in the occupied Polish lands, shooting the Polish intelligentsia in Operation Tannenberg and deporting Jews to the San, and after the demonstrations in Prague they were preparing to strike at the Czech students, more than a thousand of whom were sent to Sachsenhausen in November. During the war the camps described in the White Paper became part of a far larger system, and extermination centres were built alongside them.

The experience of 1939 also had another side. The British authorities remembered how after the First World War some of the stories of German crimes in Belgium had turned out to be exaggerated, and feared that the public would dismiss further reports as “atrocity propaganda”. According to surviving documents, in July 1941 the Ministry of Information recommended that such material be used sparingly and that it should deal with indisputably innocent victims, but not with Jews. When the Polish government-in-exile reported the mass extermination of the Jews in Edward Raczyński’s note of 10 December 1942 and through the account of Jan Karski, the Allies condemned it in a joint declaration on 17 December 1942, but took no rescue action commensurate with the crime. The world saw the full scale of the system foreshadowed by the accounts from Dachau and Buchenwald only in the spring of 1945, when British soldiers entered Bergen-Belsen and the Americans Buchenwald and Dachau.