Berlin – Newly released documents provided by the United Nations revealed on Tuesday that the Allied Powers were well aware of the Jewish Holocaust at the hands of Nazi Germany at least two-and-a-half years earlier than commonly believed, according to The Independent.
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The documents, not seen for more than 70 years, showed at the same time that the Allies, made up of the United States, Russia and the United Kingdom, had prepared war crime indictments against Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and his top subordinates.
A full year after America entered World War II, the records show, the West knew that the Third Reich had already massacred two million European Jews and were planning to eliminate five million more in concentration camps spread throughout the continent.
The popular narrative among western countries is that the gross barbarity of the Nazi Holocaust was not apparent until Allied forces liberated Jews and other minorities from European extermination camps in May of 1945. These new records now show that the West was at least somewhat aware of the situation in December of 1942.
Despite this, the Allied Powers did little to stop the genocide, with one minister in the UK war department, Viscount Cranborne, commenting that Jews were not a special case and that Britain was burdened with too many refugees as it was.
Speaking with The Independent, Dan Plesch, a professor at the Center for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS University of London who analyzed the documents, said that “The major powers commented [on the mass murder of Jews] two-and-a-half years before it is generally assumed.”
“It was assumed they learned this when they discovered the concentration camps, but they made this public comment in December 1942,” he added.
Plesch discovered during his research that the testimonies of numerous camp prisoners were smuggled to Allied forces, prompting the triumvirate to make a joint deceleration on the Jewish slaughter to the British parliament.
“The German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule extends, the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people,” UK Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the legislative chamber.
Antisemitism in the US State Department, however, stopped efforts to help the Jewish victims, who were more concerned with preserving America’s economic ties with Germany after the war.
Former US president Franklin D Roosevelt’s envoy to the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), Herbert Pell, would later go public with the information, “embarrassing” the State Department to move forward with prosecutions against Nazi war criminals culminating into the Nuremberg trials.
“Among the reason given by the US and British policy makers for curtailing prosecutions of Nazis was the understanding that at least some of them would be needed to rebuild Germany and confront Communism, which at the time was seen as a greater danger,” Plesch said.
The documents were finally released after former US envoy to the UN, Samantha Power, lobbied for the archive to go public, according to The Independent.
Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum stated on its website that “information regarding mass murders of Jews began to reach the free world soon after these actions began in the Soviet Union in late June 1941, and the volume of such reports increased with time.”
“Notwithstanding this, it remains unclear to what extent Allied and neutral leaders understood the full import of their information,” it adds. “The utter shock of senior Allied commanders who liberated camps at the end of the war may indicate that this understanding was not complete.”
So now they can no longer say (the fiction) that they didn’t know.
It has been common knowledge for years that the Allies intercepted and decyphered German military daily reports from the Eastern Front, containing reports on the number of Jews killed and their locations. That was from 1941. The Allies later argued that they could do nothing for fear of compromising the fact that they had decyphered the code and were using it for desperately-needed information on German military plans. That argument makes sense, and any military in the world would have done the same thing. The political statements were not usually official positions, but personal statements by official – who were by and large totally indifferent to Jewish suffering.
In the USA certain well-placed families blocked efforts to do anything as correctly stated in the article, and of course no one should ever forget the part played by ‘rabbi dr’ Steven Weis.