Bibliography of the Holocaust

[6] This brief mention broadcasts certain basic elements of the Racynski's note, which was not officially circulated as a brochure under the heading "The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland" until several weeks later.

Early book-length works from survivors of the camps that became widely available immediately after the war include Kogon's Theory and Practice of Hell (1st published in 1946 as Der SS-Staat: Das System de Deutschen Konzentrationslager), and Rousset's Other Kingdom (1946).

Even reports that record massacres, camps and extermination centers in the East during the war such as Raczyński's Note; the Black Book of Polish Jewry (which confines its sample to Poland, and understates, for a variety of reasons, the full scope of ongoing mass-murder);[9][10] the Black Book of Soviet Jewry (which was compiled and presented for publication during the war but not circulated until after the war); and the Vrba–Wetzler report (which is contains the testimony of two prisoners escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau, published alongside the testimony of the Jerzy Tabeau, the Polish Major in Auschwitz Protocols) speak only to limited areas within the system of extermination, do not present a full picture of the killing, and were scarcely made available to the larger public due to an editorial policy that questioned the statistics at the time.

[10] The Black Book of Soviet Jewry did not circulate during the war, while the Vrba–Wetzler report (April 1944) saw a limited and circumscribed distribution (though it convinced the regent of Hungary to halt transports in June 1944, which had until then been proceeding at a rate of 12,000 deportees per day).

The Black Book of Polish Jewry and even earlier reports in the Allied press presented details, but these documents significantly understate the scale of the killings – due in part to limited information, and in part to a (retrospectively) misplaced sense of discretion and sensitivity to the prevailing attitude of antisemitism amongst all Western powers, whether Allied or Axis: there was a desire to make the reports speak to an audience unconcerned about the fate of Jews.