Reports on the mass murders carried out by the Einsatzgruppen began to filter into the United States and England very shortly after the Aktionen themselves. As early as July 1941, the Yiddish daily press in New York revealed that hundreds of Jewish citizens had been slaughtered by Nazi soldiers in Minsk, Brest-Litovsk, Lvov, and elsewhere. Additional reports arrived in subsequent months, and in late October 1941, The New York Times carried a story on its inside pages concerning the murder of thousands of Jews in eastern Poland and the Ukraine. In March 1942, the Jewish and the general press reported the mammoth dimensions of the genocide for the first time.
On May 18, The New York Times carried a report by a United Press correspondent who had been trapped in Germany when the United States entered the war. Reaching Lisbon with a group of American citizens who had been exchanged for citizens of the Axis countries, the correspondent revealed that the Germans had machine-gunned to death more than 100,000 Jews in the Baltic countries, nearly as many in Poland, and more than twice as many in western Russia.
