New York Times 25 Nov 1942 (original) (raw)

This paper will begin with what might be considered a telling detail of American news reporting during the war: page 10 of the November 25th 1942 edition of the New York Times . The page includes three separate reports about the extermination of the Jews in German-occupied Europe and especially in Poland . It is a telling detail because these three reports may be taken as marking the tipping point of the accumulating evidence about the systematic mass murder of Jews being perpetrated by Nazi Germany, news that has been arriving in the West for at least a year from different places. In this case, the three reports came from what looks like completely independent sources: the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, the Polish Government in London and Rabbi Wise’s press conference in Washington. All three are about the extermination of the Jews, mostly in Poland, and so the fact that they come from independent sources strengthens their credibility, each is confirmed by the other two. What is also significant for the issues that I will be discussing here is the fact that they all have an identical dateline: November 24th, 1942. One of these three reports is especially relevant to my research, it is the one which came from the Polish government in London and as I will try to show, it is based on what some historians would later call the ‘Karski report’.