‘One More Horror Camp’: 1944–1945

During an unseasonably warm spring, startling news about the ‘horror camps’ in Germany emerged in April 1945. Chapter 7 examines the reporting of the liberation of Majdanek extermination camp in Poland in July 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1945, and later the concentration camps in Germany in April and May 1945. The Australian journalists’ coverage of the camps and their encounters with survivors, the recognition of Jewish suffering, and the editorial handling of these horrifying accounts and photographs will be the focus of Chap. 7 . I argue that the outraged response of the journalists in bearing witness to this immense human tragedy ushered in a new style of journalism in Australia: personal and intimate, subjective and emotional. The Australian accounts revealed a keen awareness of the power and limitation of journalism and a determination to alert readers to genocide, along with the troubling suggestion of a denial of prior knowledge of what was taking place. It engages with central debates about the use and pedagogical responsibility of viewing images of atrocity, in addition to charting the evidential use of these photographs.