‘They Are Killing All Us Jews’: 1941–1944

Chapter 6 addresses the reporting of the continuing persecution and the enactment of the extermination of the Jews, and traces the frequency and accuracy of the coverage, the moment the press exposed the full extent of the industrial dimension of mass murder, and the use of photographs in these accounts. The chapter argues that despite Nazi secrecy and a series of complex and mitigating forces influencing the uneven approaches to reporting genocide, news reached Australia of the existence of the extermination camps and the annihilation of the Jews. How did the press gain their information about the destruction of the Jews, how were news sources from Europe regarded, and did the press minimise the suffering of the Jewish victims? The chapter considers how the journalists represented and collectively remembered the pre-war oppression of European Jews and the ensuing cataclysmic events leading up to the liberation of the extermination and concentration camps in 1944 and 1945.