See title. I'm curious to know when the first mentions of the holocaust were. I've seen some things to suggest they were long after WWII, and it took until the 70s for it to appear in encyclopedias and dictionaries. However on the contrary we have books like If This Is a Man by Primo Levi which was published in October 1947, only two years after he left Auschwitz, and published a few months earlier was Diary of a Young Girl in June of 1947. Are there any earlier? News reports, survivor accounts, whatnot?
Nope. As early as 1899 in a dictionary, supposedly.
https://communities.win/c/ConsumeProduct/p/19AKmV1794/thread-on-the-holocaust-definiti/c (See the xcancel link in the comments)
And if you read through the Megathread, you'll see this posted:
>Pages from the 1947 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica on jews and the holocaust (BIG thanks to u/TallestSkil for these pictures from his copy):
https://postimg.cc/nMDmygFG (Entry on the holocaust)
https://postimg.cc/QFXWWMpf (Entry on the concentration camps)
https://postimg.cc/bs0tJn2G (The tail end of the generic entry for “jews,” with no mention whatsoever of wartime events)
https://postimg.cc/qzHK4wgV (The entry for refugees)
>Per u/TallestSkil: Note that the above entries were written two years after the end of World War II, one year after the conclusion of the highly publicized Nuremberg Trials. This is one of the most authoritative informational books of the era and there is not a single word of genocide mentioned, not even in passing.