The Polish Government-in-Exile today made public a report stating that at least 1,000,000 Jews have already been annihilated by the Nazis in Poland and that Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Gestapo, has ordered the extermination of one-half of the entire Jewish population in occupied Polish territory by the end of this year.
Declaring that 250,000 Jews were massacred by the Nazis in Poland during the month of September, the report says that in the Warsaw ghetto there are only 40,000 Jews left of the approximately 500,000 who were confined there since the establishment of the ghetto. More than 250,000 Jews have been deported from Warsaw since July in addition to tens of thousands deported during the previous months. Of the latest 250,000 victims, only 4,000 were actually sent to forced labor at the Russian front, the remainder were all exterminated, including women with babies. in arms, the statement of the Polish Government declares.
Describing the mass-expulsion of the Jews from the ghettos, the Polish Government states that the victims were herded into cattle cars. The cars, which had a normal capacity of forty, carried 150 persons each. The Nazis covered the floors of the cars with lime which was sprinkled with chlorinated water shortly before the departure of the train. When the trains arrived at their destinations, half of the passengers were dead from suffocation. The survivors were taken to special “exterminating camps” near the townships of Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobidor where they were murdered in wholesale massacres.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
