The Bund Report

At the turn of May and June 1942 a letter from the underground leadership of the Bund, the Jewish socialist party, written in occupied Warsaw on 11 May, reached London. It was addressed to the Polish government and described, town by town and month by month, the murder of the Jews on Polish soil since June 1941. The authors estimated the number of those killed at 700,000, and of the camp at Chełmno on the Ner they wrote that Jews were being killed there with gas in specially adapted vehicles. Their conclusion was unequivocal: the Germans had set about murdering all the Jews of Europe.

In histories of the war the document is usually called the Bund Report. War chronologies place under 1 June 1942 “the first reports in the West that gas was being used to kill Jews deported ‘to the East’”. This is a simplification. News of Chełmno had reached the Polish authorities in London earlier, and this was not the first report of mass murder of Jews either. The Bund Report was, however, the first that the West treated as material for public announcement: in June 1942 the BBC, Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski, the National Council of the Polish Republic and the British press all spoke of the murder of the Jews in Poland.

What was known before

From the summer of 1941, in the occupied territories of the USSR, including the former eastern lands of Poland, the Einsatzgruppen, the police and their auxiliaries shot Jews in their tens of thousands, as at Babi Yar or at Ponary near Wilno (Vilnius). On 8 December 1941 the first German extermination camp began operating at Chełmno on the Ner, where people were killed with exhaust fumes in gas vans. From mid-January 1942 transports from the Łódź Ghetto were sent there. In those same days the Wannsee Conference co-ordinated the “Final Solution of the Jewish question” across Europe, and in the spring the camps at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka went into operation.

The first known account by an escapee from Chełmno, Szlama Ber Winer, was written down in February 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto by members of Emanuel Ringelblum’s underground Oyneg Shabes archive. Winer used the name Grojnowski; the form “Grojanowski” became established in the literature. His account was passed to the Polish underground, and a short mention of the killings near Koło appeared in February in the clandestine “Biuletyn Informacyjny” (Information Bulletin). According to the historian Dariusz Stola, at the end of May 1942 London also received two lengthy reports from the commander of the Home Army, Brigadier General Stefan Rowecki, which spoke of massacres in the east, of signs that the “action” was being extended to central Poland, and of several thousand Jews having been put to death with gas at Chełmno.

This information arrived late, in fragments and without wider resonance. Even the St James’s Declaration of the governments of the occupied countries in January 1942, which announced the punishment of war crimes, did not mention the Jews by name. British newspapers wrote about terror in occupied Poland, but reports of the murder of Jews were lost on the inside pages or in the Jewish press.

The letter of 11 May

Before the war the Bund had been the strongest party of Jewish workers in Poland. In the Warsaw Ghetto it operated clandestinely, ran an underground press and kept in contact with the Polish Socialist Party and the Government Delegation for Poland. Authorship of the letter is attributed above all to Leon Feiner, a Kraków lawyer and member of the Bund’s central leadership, who was hiding on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw and acted as the party’s liaison with the Polish underground. The document was transmitted through the channels of the Polish Underground State. Its exact route and the date it was received in London have not been established beyond doubt in the literature; at any rate, by the beginning of June its contents were known in London.

The report described the successive stages of the killing: the mass executions in the former eastern lands of Poland after the outbreak of the German–Soviet war, then the murders in the Warthegau and the deportations from the ghettos of the General Government. For individual towns it gave approximate numbers of victims. It described Chełmno in particular detail: Jews from the surrounding small towns and from Łódź were brought there and killed in sealed vehicles that were at the same time gas chambers. According to Stola, it was the first document from occupied Poland to state outright that what was happening was the implementation of a plan for total extermination. The authors recalled Adolf Hitler’s announcement that, whatever the outcome of the war, he would annihilate the Jews of Europe – an announcement repeated on 30 January 1942 as well – and wrote: “Millions of Polish citizens of Jewish nationality face immediate annihilation.”

The estimate of 700,000 dead was, in May 1942, too low rather than too high: present-day research speaks of a far greater number of victims on Polish soil and in the occupied territories of the USSR. The Bund did not confine itself to description. It appealed to the Polish government “as the guardian and representative of the entire population inhabiting the Polish lands” to induce the Allied states to retaliate against Germans living on their territory. Only the threat of such reprisals, in the authors’ view, could stop Hitler.

June in London

In London the Bund’s spokesman was Szmul Zygielbojm, a pre-war trade-union activist and a councillor in Warsaw and Łódź. After the capital capitulated in 1939 he had been one of the hostages taken by the Germans. In December 1939 he escaped from Poland and, after spending time in Belgium and the United States, reached London in March 1942, where he took a seat on the National Council, a quasi-parliament attached to the government-in-exile. The Council’s other Jewish member was the Zionist Ignacy Schwarzbart. The report arrived just as the Polish authorities were themselves preparing a protest against a new wave of terror in the occupied country.

On 2 June the BBC broadcast the main information from the report, including the figure of 700,000 murdered Jews. As historians note, it did not emphasise the report’s most important conclusion: that the killing was systematic and included everyone. On 6 June the Council of Ministers adopted a note of protest to the Allied governments which contained a paragraph on the Jews: the extermination of the Jewish population was taking place “on an unbelievable scale”; in Wilno, Lwów, Kołomyja, Stanisławów, Lublin, Rzeszów and Miechów tens of thousands of people were being massacred; and the Jews in Poland were suffering the most terrible persecution in their history. On 9 June Sikorski repeated these words in a radio address to occupied Poland. The next day, 10 June, the National Council adopted an appeal to the parliaments of the free nations to protest against German crimes in Poland and to announce that the perpetrators would be punished. According to Stola, the appeal spoke in general terms of the population of Poland and did not mention the Jews separately.

For a long time the press was silent. On 24 June the London “Dziennik Polski” ran the front-page headline “Terror in Poland: mass shooting of Jews”, and on 25 June “The Daily Telegraph” published a substantial article based on figures supplied by Zygielbojm. The paper wrote of 700,000 murdered Jews, of “the greatest massacre in the world’s history”, of mobile gas chambers and of Chełmno. Stola believes that the almost simultaneous publication of this news was the result of a campaign planned by the Polish Foreign Ministry, and the Minister of Information, Stanisław Stroński, later told the National Council that his ministry had helped Zygielbojm with his contacts with journalists.

An internal BBC directive of 24 June recommended giving the news of the extermination of the Jews full publicity. Over the following days those who spoke about it on the radio included the Labour leader Arthur Greenwood, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Arthur Hinsley, and Zygielbojm himself, who spoke in Yiddish. Some studies date his first BBC broadcast as early as 2 June; the Jewish Historical Institute links his participation to the broadcast of 26 June, which spoke of 700,000 victims and of gassing at Chełmno. On 29 June the British section of the World Jewish Congress called a press conference at which Schwarzbart and Ernest Frischer, a representative of the Czechoslovak State Council, estimated the losses of the Jewish people in occupied Europe at a million killed and dead.

The broadcasts from London were listened to in the Warsaw Ghetto. In June Ringelblum noted that Oyneg Shabes had fulfilled a great historical mission: the world had learned of what the archive had been gathering and passing on. The archive’s second secretary, Eliasz Gutkowski, recorded on 27 June that “very sensational news” had reached the ghetto. In the same notes Ringelblum also wrote bitterly that the ghetto’s inhabitants had earlier suspected the Polish authorities in London of keeping silent about the fate of the Jews.

Disbelief

The report was received with reserve, even among Poles and Jews in London. The socialist Adam Pragier recalled that he had said at the time that nobody would believe that 700,000 people had been killed, and that the Bund should have written seven thousand, since that figure could have been put to the British. Zygielbojm himself at first doubted the accuracy of the figures in the letter, and accepted them only when he found confirmation in reports from the Government Delegation. Schwarzbart, his political rival, warned the Jewish press against “exaggeration in inflating the figures”. The Foreign Minister, Edward Raczyński, later admitted that he had doubted the Bund’s news, just as he had doubted that total extermination was possible, and that in dealings with the Foreign Office one had to be careful not to lay oneself open to the charge of exaggeration.

As early as 27 June “The Daily Telegraph” cautioned that it was not known whether the figure of 700,000 victims could be accepted as accurate. Historians, among them Walter Laqueur, point out that British government offices and newspaper editors were weighed down by the experience of the previous war, when Allied propaganda had spread invented stories of German atrocities; new reports of crimes were therefore received from the outset with a large measure of scepticism. Zygielbojm later wrote home that local opinion “was not inclined to believe that such monstrosities could really be taking place” and treated them as ordinary war propaganda. Even the Polish government, when it published its own figures in July, adopted a figure of more than 200,000 murdered Jews, about a third of that given by the Bund, with the proviso that it covered only cases proven beyond all doubt. No government took up the demand for reprisals.

Place in the war

The June campaign reached its peak at a press conference on 9 July 1942, at which the Deputy Prime Minister, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, Zygielbojm and Schwarzbart presented the evidence of crimes in Poland in the presence of the British Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken. From the second half of July, however, the subject faded. Meanwhile, on 22 July, the Germans began the Great Deportation (Grossaktion Warschau) in the Warsaw Ghetto, in which by the autumn they had deported more than 250,000 people to Treblinka and murdered them. News of it reached London in July, but for several months it did not become the subject of any wider campaign.

In August the Riegner telegram from Bern reached the Allies with news of a plan to murder all the Jews of Europe, and in the autumn the courier Jan Karski, who had been inside the ghetto and in the transit camp at Izbica, left Warsaw carrying another letter from the Bund and a message from Feiner. On 10 December 1942 the Polish government sent the Allied states the Raczyński Note on the mass extermination of the Jews, and on 17 December the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, read out in the House of Commons a joint declaration by eleven Allied governments and the French National Committee which for the first time officially condemned Germany’s policy of exterminating the Jews and announced that those responsible would be punished. The declaration was not followed by the action the Bund had asked for. On 12 May 1943, after the fall of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Zygielbojm took his own life in London, leaving a letter in which he wrote that responsibility for the crime fell above all on its perpetrators, but indirectly also on all humanity, on the Allied nations and governments, which had taken no real steps to stop it.

The Bund Report was therefore not the first news of the Holocaust, but it was the first to break through in the West into radio, government notes and the mainstream press. It also showed how wide the gap was between knowledge and understanding: the figures were known as early as June 1942, but for many months they were treated as uncertain, exaggerated or propaganda, while most of the victims of the Holocaust died precisely in 1942–1943.