Published: 25 June 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
ON DECEMBER 17, 1942, Britain’s foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, rose from his seat in the House of Commons and revealed that the Nazis were now carrying out Hitler’s oft-repeated threat to “exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.” He went on to condemn “this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination”.
After he had delivered the statement, which had been coordinated with other Allied governments, MPs stood in the chamber and observed a minute’s silence.
By this time, the BBC had already reported evidence of the mass murder of Jews in eastern Europe. News of the unfolding horror was also transmitted through its European outlets, such as the BBC Polish Service, to the very scene of the greatest crimes.
But there was a peculiar and troubling exception: the silence of the BBC’s broadcasts to Hungary concerning the fate of the Jews.
That silence was a deliberate policy. It is one, moreover, that remained in place right up to the moment that the Germans, rightly fearing that Hungary’s authoritarian ruler, Admiral Miklós Horthy, was about to abandon his allegiance to the Axis and switch sides, occupied the country 75 years ago this spring.
FULL STORY ‘Don’t mention the Jews’: How wartime BBC failed to issue Holocaust warnings (Times of Israel)
Photo: British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden opens an Organisation for European Economic Co-operation council meeting in Paris, circa 1948-1957 (Public domain)
