Ce que les Alliés savaient de l’Aktion Reinhardt

Abstract

On March 17, 1942 begins the first gassings of Jews in the General Government in the killing’s center of Belzec. In early April, the Polish Government in exile in London received a report on the first convoy of Polish Jews sent to that destination. Then nobody had anymore news. Who knows what the Allies had learned about Auschwitz ; it is not yet even sure they knew about Aktion Reinhardt. This article gives an overview of historical studies on what governments and public opinion, in Britain and in the United States, knew about the murder of Polish Jews. It shows how a large amount of information on the Holocaust reached the West during summer and fall 1942, at the height of the genocide in the General Government. It gives evidence that the information was widely reported to public opinions, through the work of Jewish associations and newspapers in the US, and how the Government retained it and delayed as long as possible to answer the question of saving the Jews of Europe. When the question was finally formally addressed in Washington, Aktion Reinhardt was completed.