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Allied forces knew about Holocaust

two years before discovery of
concentration camps, secret
documents reveal
Archive shows Adolf Hitler was indicted for war crimes in 1944
Andrew Buncombe New York | @AndrewBuncombe | Monday 17 April 2017 23:00 BST

The Allied Powers prosecuted hundreds of Nazis for war crimes against Jewish people
Wikipedia

The Allied Powers were aware of the scale of the Jewish Holocaust two-and-
a-half years earlier than is generally assumed, and had even prepared war
crimes indictments against Adolf Hitler and his top Nazi commanders.

Newly accessed material from the United Nations – not seen for around 70
years – shows that as early as December 1942, the US, UK and Soviet
governments were aware that at least two million Jews had been murdered
and a further five million were at risk of being killed, and were preparing
charges. Despite this, the Allied Powers did very little to try and rescue or
provide sanctuary to those in mortal danger.

Indeed, in March 1943, Viscount Cranborne, a minister in the war cabinet

of Winston Churchill, said the Jews should not be considered a special case
and that the British Empire was already too full of refugees to offer a safe
haven to any more.

Several countries indicted Hitler and other senior Nazi leaders for
war crimes (UNWCC)

“The major powers commented [on the mass murder of Jews] two-and-a-half
years before it is generally assumed,” Dan Plesch, author of the newly
published Human Rights After Hitler, told The Independent.

“It was assumed they learned this when they discovered the concentration
camps, but they made this public comment in December 1942.”

Mr Plesch, a professor at the Centre for International Studies and

Diplomacy at SOAS University of London, said the major powers began
drawing up war crimes charges based on witness testimony smuggled from
the camps and from the resistance movements in various countries occupied
by the Nazis. Among his discoveries were documents indicting Hitler for
war crimes dating from 1944.

In late December 1942, after the US, UK and others issued a public
declaration about the Jewish slaughter, UK Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden
told 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.”

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Mr Plesch said that despite the collection of evidence and the prosecution of
hundreds of Nazis – a judicial process that has been overshadowed by the
trial of the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg – the Allied Powers did little to try
and help those in peril. He said efforts by President Franklin D Roosevelt’s
envoy to the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), Herbert
Pell, were pushed back by anti-semites in the US State Department.

Mr Pell would later claim that individuals within the State Department were
concerned that America’s economic relationship with Germany after the
war would be damaged if such prosecutions went ahead. After Mr Pell went
public with the scandal, the State Department agreed to the prosecution of
the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg, something that gathered pace after the
highly publicised liberation of the concentration camps in the summer of
1945.

“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,” writes Mr Plesch.

The Wiener Library

@wienerlibrary

Join us for the #booklaunch of Dr Dan Plesch's 'Human Rights

After Hitler' (4 May): bit.ly/2oJ6ZCk @GUPress #humanrights
8:04 PM - Apr 13, 2017

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Mr Plesch said the archive on which he based his research was closed to
researchers for 70 years. Those wishing to read the UNWCC archive
required the permission not only of the person’s own national government,
but the UN Secretary General. Even then, researchers were for several years
not permitted to make notes.

Former American ambassador to the UN Samantha Powers took the action

that made the archive available.

Mr Plesch said the new material provided a further “cartload of nails to

hammer into the coffins” of Holocaust denial – not that further evidence
was required.

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance memorial in Israel, says 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”.

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It refers to the December 1942 declaration condemning the extermination

of Jewish people.

“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.”

The UNWCC archive is this week being presented to the Wiener Library in
London, the world's oldest Holocaust archive and Britain's largest collection
on the Nazi era, where it will be available for scholars to access online.

Ben Barkow, the library’s director, said Mr Plesch’s findings may not change
the general understanding of the Holocaust, but were interesting and had
significance to scholars.
He said Mr Plesch had doggedly continued to search a difficult-to-access
archive that most scholars had assumed contained nothing new. “People
didn’t recognise the value of it,” he said.

He said the material uncovered by Mr Plesch was particularly interesting

because it showed that 70 years ago, the international community was
considering the issue of sexual crimes as part of the broader war crimes
narrative. He said: “It shows that this was not something that was only
thought about after events like Rwanda.”

More about: | Adolf Hitler | The Holocaust | Nazis | War Crimes