By late 1944, newspapers in the US, Britain, Australia and other Western nations were starting to report the horrors of the Nazi Final Solution. This report is from the Canberra Times (Australia) on November 27th 1944:

NEW YORK, Sunday.

“In the first detailed government report on German mass murders, the War Refugee Board has released accounts of organised atrocities at Birkenau and Auschwitz in Poland, transcending the horrors of Lublin, where 1,500,000 were murdered, says the Washington, correspondent of The New York Times.

He says that the report states that up to 1,763,000 were murdered in torture chambers at Birkenau alone in the two years to last April. Many thousands were also killed by phenyl injections, brutal beatings, starvation, shooting and mutilations.

The Board said that it was an undeniable fact that the Germans had deliberately and systematically murdered millions of innocent civilians, Jews and Christians alike, throughout Europe. This unprecedented campaign of terror and brutality was part of the German plan to subjugate the free peoples of the world.

The report said that physical and mental torture reduced the morale of prisoners so low that they killed one another as a novelty or sought escape through hopeless charges against machine guns or high-voltage fences. The Germans allowed certain prisoners to escape so that they could be hunted down by dogs.”