Part 2 of 2
On February 27, Berlin SS and police began a roundup of a planned total of fifteen thousand Jews, largely those working in factories but including those who were married to Christians and had been previously exempt. As the roundup continued into early March, targeted Jews were confined in the Jewish Community's administration building in the Rosenstrasse. The spouses of some of those arrested flocked to the site and began a demonstration. Meanwhile, other Jews learned of the roundup in advance and went into hiding. [55]
Dulles learned of these Berlin events from Dr. Visser t'Hooft (to whom Dulles gave the code number 474), a Dutch theologian who was first secretary of the World Council of Churches and was based in Bern. Visser t'Hooft's sources in Berlin indicated that the SS was trying to remove all Jews from the capital by mid-March:
It is definitely expected that these methods of rapid and total extermination of the Jews in Germany will be extended in the coming weeks to other German regions, and very likely also to the occupied territories. Instead of deporting the Jews to Poland and having them killed in that country, the new policy is to kill them on the spot.
The last portion -- regarding killing on the spot -- was clearly inaccurate, but the report tracked important events almost as they occurred. [56]
If his recollections are accurate, Visser t'Hooft had grasped the thrust of Nazi policy toward the Jews since sometime in early 1942. The decisive event for him was hearing a Swiss businessman tell what he had witnessed during a trip to Russia. German officers had invited him to observe a mass killing of Jews -- men, women, and children machine-gunned as they lay in prepared mass graves. After hearing of this incident, Visser t'Hooft closely followed subsequent reports about Nazi actions against Jews. [57]
Dulles had a long talk with Visser t'Hooft to discover his sources about the Berlin roundup. A Swede, likely Hugo Cedergren of the YMCA, had recently been to Berlin and had the information from a Protestant pastor whose wife was non-Aryan, as well as from an official at the Swedish legation in Berlin. Dulles told Visser t'Hooft that this was a matter in which Minister Harrison took a deep interest. On the other hand,
Dulles said that the information was not fully verified, and that unspecified proposed Allied measures to hinder this new program did not seem at all practical. Dulles wrote up his conversation with Visser t'Hooft for Harrison, who responded that Riegner had given American Consul Paul Squire some additional reports about the disappearance of Jews in the privileged category, including Riegner's own uncle. [58]
The two senior American officials traded information and scrutinized sources, both of them recognizing the sensitivity of this matter in Washington. (State Department officials had earlier prohibited Harrison from allowing private individuals like Riegner to send information through diplomatic channels, but Harrison told Dulles that this prohibition no longer applied to Dulles' means of communication.) [59] Dulles also reported the public protests by the affected spouses of some of the Jews detained.
A month later British press attache Elisabeth Wiskemann told Dulles that one of her sources had confirmed Visser t'Hooft's account of the arrest of "half-Jews"; she also reported that many religious people in Berlin were hiding Jews. [60] Some of Dulles' information about Nazi measures against Jews in Berlin went from the OSS to the White House. [61]
Sometimes Washington asked Dulles to investigate allegations that the Nazis were sparing specific Jews for their own purposes.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover received a quotation allegedly from Ilya Ehrenburg's book The Great War for the Fatherland, published in the Soviet Union in 1942, which indicated that Nazi anti-Semitism was a lie: "They have their own Jews whom they spare. These Jews have on their passports two letters, W.J., meaning 'worthy Jew.''' Hoover asked Donovan to look into this, even though he was skeptical. Donovan asked Dulles (among others), who could not confirm that there were such markings on passports, although he did mention that the Nazis had given some Jews marked identity cards. Donovan quickly told Hoover of reports of two isolated cases, but said that the British had never heard of the practice and considered it improbable. [62]
Most believed their meritorious service would convince their comrades and society to accept them as "normal."
Half-Jew Wilhelm Droscher wrote in 1940 that he wanted to serve on the front to prove that he was "a great guy (Kerf)" and worthy German. He would prove his desire to be a "worthy German" by receiving Hitler's Genehmigung, being promoted to first lieutenant and receiving both Iron Crosses and the German-Cross in Gold. [153] Many did more than required, and thus one can safely assume that several died premature or unnecessary deaths attempting to prove their worthiness. Out of 1,671 Jewish and Mischling soldiers documented in this study, 7 Jews, 80 half-Jews, and 76 quarter-Jews died in battle. Some 244 received the Iron Cross, [154] I the German-Cross in Silver, [155] 19 the German-Cross in Gold, [156] and 15 the Knight's Cross (Ritterkreuz) of the Iron Cross,157 one of Germany's highest military honors.
--
Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military, by Bryan Mark Rigg
When he had impeccable sources about actions against Jews, Dulles did not hesitate to tell Washington. In October 1943, after Berlin ordered a roundup of the Jews in Rome, the German consul Eitel Friedrich Mollhausen dissented; he asked Hitler and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop for instructions. Dulles later received a copy of Mollhausen's cable and decided to send it verbatim to Washington through a special means of transmission. The original document allowed Washington to see just how German officials lobbied. Mollhausen had written:
Obersturmbannfuehrer Kappler has been commissioned from Berlin, to seize the 8,000 Jews resident in Rome and take them to northern Italy where they are to be liquidated. General Stahelm [Stahel], city commander of Rome, said that this action is to be permitted only with the approval of the German Foreign Minister. I am personally of the opinion that it would be better business to transport the Jews to Tunis for work on fortifications. [63]
By the time he received this document, Dulles knew that the roundup of Jews in Rome had been carried out,
even if it turned out to be only partly effective. [64]
On at least one occasion Dulles cast a cable to OSS Washington in such a way that it revealed his basic understanding of Nazi policy against Jews. In an early March 1943 discussion of Hungary's "straddling" (shifting slightly away from its alliance with Germany),
Dulles mentioned Hungarian anti-Semitic speeches and discrimination against Jewish professionals, but pointed out that Hungary had taken in seventy thousand Jewish refugees from Poland, Croatia, and Slovakia. This balancing act was part of a reported Hungarian strategy to hold off German pressure: "[Hungarian officials] felt that if they barked at the Jews, biting them would not be necessary. Had the blocking of Germany been tried by Hungary, there would have perished in the latter country eight hundred thousand Jews." [65]
Under these circumstances, Dulles did not want to be too critical of Hungary's Jewish policy. He believed that wherever Germany extended its control, Jews would be eliminated.The new racist policy, which in cold, calculated cruelty surpasses the horrors of Magdeburg or Carthage, was revealed to me at Lisbon by a British officer who escaped the hell of the Himmler ghetto in Warsaw ... According to the officer, who was caught in Warsaw and hidden by Jews until his escape fourteen days ago, as the Jews die, disappear or are executed, new Jews are brought into the ghettos to replace them from Austria, Germany, Moravia, Bohemia, and elsewhere, keeping the maximum at the destruction centers. Eventually all Jews within the grasp of Greater Germany will be rounded up and routed to Poland, deprived of all rights, robbed, practically undressed, herded [?] into the "epidemic districts" then starved, terrorized or executed ....
-- U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, by Richard Breitman, Norman J.W. Goda, Timothy Naftali and Robert Wolfe
Dulles had a number of advantages in recognizing the scope of Nazi policy. The legation in Switzerland had gathered much relevant information before he arrived.
Dulles quickly chose a naturalized American named Gero von Gaevernitz as his chief assistant. Born and raised in Germany, Gaevernitz had excellent contacts among the anti-Nazi resistance. His mother was of Jewish origin, and he would have been very sensitive to any news about measures against German Jews. Dulles also used a number of informants who possessed a clear understanding of the Final Solution, including Eduard Schulte, the original source of information for Riegner's telegram.Given the level of reporting from Dulles and other OSS officials in Europe, the Secret Intelligence branch of the OSS hardly lacked basic information about the Holocaust. In addition, it received information in Europe and in the United States from Jewish organizations such as the Jewish Labor Committee. [66] The Polish underground and the Polish government-in-exile also contributed substantial, detailed information.
In one now-famous case, both Polish channels and the Jewish Labor Committee were involved in getting to the OSS the horrifying eyewitness account of Polish courier Jan Karski, who secretly visited the Warsaw ghetto. [67] A leader of
the Bund (a Polish party closely allied with the Jewish Labor Committee), who was among the doomed in the Warsaw ghetto, had given Karski a message to carry to the West:
What is happening to us is altogether outside the imagination of civilized human beings. They [in the West] don't believe what they hear. Tell them that we are all dying. Let them rescue all those who will still be alive when the Report reaches them. We shall never forgive them for not having supplied us with arms so that we may have died like men, with guns in our hands. [68]
This moving document reached OSS hands. How widely it was distributed within the organization and how much attention and credibility it generated are open to question. [69]
The Extermination Camps: Allied Information and ConclusionsIf Dulles was well aware of Nazi policy toward Jews, he probably did not know much about the means and sites of mass murder. To be sure, he learned that conditions in the concentration camps in Germany were horrifying. One report from a prisoner at Dachau who escaped into Lucerne estimated that one thousand of four thousand Polish priests imprisoned there during 1942-43 had died as a result of mistreatment and inadequate food. [70]
But the OSS and the FBI lacked early evidence about the internal conditions and workings of the camps, especially the extermination camps; their best sources arrived later.
The operations of the Nazi extermination camps were so secret that even transports to the camps were reported in heavily coded language. [71] Although information on the extermination camps reaching the West was fragmentary by nature, it allowed for more general conclusions. [72]
Newly released records declassified by the IWG suggest that the OSS did not actively seek information on concentration or extermination camps. Ordered late in the war to assemble specific information on German war crimes and criminals for the purpose of arrest and prosecution, the OSS seems to have done relatively little in this regard, even when valuable information fell into its lap.
Information on the extermination camps was available in London. The murderous nature of Belzec was known in London as early as April 1942, and that of Treblinka as early as July. [73] The Jewish Chronicle reported on Chelmno's gas vans in the summer of 1942, as well. [74] Information on Auschwitz-Birkenau was received in London and Washington during 1942 and 1943, partly thanks to British intercepts and partly due to the Polish underground. [75]
The British picked up a decode in November 1942 indicating that guards at Auschwitz would need six hundred gas masks. In 1942, through intercepted and decoded German radio messages, they were able to follow jumps and falls in the registered Auschwitz Jewish population as well as in the number of Jews deported by rail to Auschwitz, which was a far higher number than registered Jews. Polish underground reports on Jewish extermination activities at Auschwitz also reached London in the fall of 1942, and
reports on new crematoria reached London in March 1943. The most famous and most detailed report on Birkenau remains that of escapees Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, parts of which were available in London and Washington from mid-June 1944 as Hungary's Jews were transported there. [76]
An account written by a Polish agent code named "Wanda" in October 1943 and forwarded to the Polish government-in-exile in January 1944 was handed directly to the Americans -- to the Military Attache in March 1944 and to the OSS in April. "Up to September 1942," it said,
468,000 non-registered Jews have been gassed in Oswiecim [Auschwitz]. Between September 1942 and the beginning of June 1943 there arrived approximately 60,000 Jews from Greece ... about 50,000 Jews from Slovakia and the Protectorate, approximately 60,000 Jews from Holland, Belgium and France, 6,000 from Chrzanow and 5,000 from Kety, Zywiec, Sucha, Slemien and vicinity. Two per cent of these people are alive today ... Each convoy arriving in Oswiecim is unloaded; men are separated from women, and then packed haphazard, in a mass (mainly women and children) into cars and lorries and taken to the gas chamber in Brzezinka [Birkenau]. There they [are] suffocated with the most horrible suffering lasting 10-15 minutes, the corpses being ... cremated ... At present, three large crematoria have been erected in Brzezinka, for 10,000 people daily, which are ceaselessly cremating bodies and which the neighboring population call ''the eternal fire" ...
As from 20.6.1943 mass convoys have been arriving in the Oswiecim camp (Brzezinka), including: one convoy from Nice (870 persons), one convoy with more than 500 persons from Berlin, 800 people from Salonika. Two convoys with 1,600 persons from Brandenburg, one convoy from Sosnowiec, one convoy from Lublin, containing 391 people. These convoys contained 80% Jews and 20% Gypsies from Greece and southern France. Possibly 10% of these people have remained alive in the camp, the remaining 90% were immediately taken to the gas chambers and gassed ... "
The report that contained Wanda's account noted that the Poles "asked that the report be given publicity." [77]
It was never made public.Most reports on camps came to the OSS from British intelligence, and they have long been declassified. A Polish political escapee named Szadowski, who had been at the Auschwitz main camp from June 1940 to March 1942 and then at Birkenau until his escape in 1943, reported in person to British intelligence in October 1944. [78] According to his British interrogator, "Szadowski ... shows surprisingly accurate knowledge of conditions in Oswiecim and his account tallies perfectly with all the information at our disposal." Szadowski's detailed account was thus compared with many other accounts received by the British. Yet
Szadowski seems to have been interrogated mostly on mundane issues like barrack size, the camp barbers, availability of cigarettes, and the location of horse stables. Szadowski surely had much to say on Birkenau's gas chambers and crematoria, but his account of these amounts to a half-page of a twenty-five-page report. Since his report was based on interrogation, one must assume that this was the interrogator's choice. [79]
In November 1944, the British interrogated an escaped former officer-cadet of the Polish Air Force named Henryk Rygiol, whose family still lived near Birkenau. Rygiol had been interned in Auschwitz and used as a rail worker. The tales of other inmates supplemented his own observations to British intelligence-observations which included the murder of 450,000 Hungarian Jews from May to July 1944. "Twenty-one ovens were burning day and night, " reported Rygiol, a fact which he said "could be confirmed by anyone in the area." Rygiol also reported on other atrocities such as attacks by dogs on female prisoners, and he named a number of perpetrators, including the Commandant Rudolf Hoss.
Rygiol's inflated claim that up to 7 million Jews had been killed at Auschwitz might have detracted from his other comments concerning German atrocities there. The maps provided from his interrogation, in any event, were of strategic targets such as the detention camp at Mylowitz, used as a collection point for the movement of Polish workers to France. Of the three detailed diagrams provided by Rygiol for British intelligence, none was of Birkenau. [80] Rygiol's interrogation reinforces other historians' comments that strategic concerns at the Auschwitz complex, not the mass extermination of Jews, were of top importance to the Allies. [81]
Similarly, when U.S. intelligence assembled data on Germany's victims, the driving force was strategic. The OSS borrowed information from French intelligence on the use of labor from the Dora concentration camp to assemble German V-2 rockets; it studied German documents seized by French agents from Natzweiler-Struthof, which contained statistics on the death of inmates there. The OSS learned from various sources that ait raids over prisoner of war camps caused considerable loss of life among prisoners, including fifty-two killed on the night of February 2, 1945, at Stalag XIII B. [82] The OSS studied the numbers, locations, and health conditions of Russian, Polish, French, Dutch, Belgian, Yugoslav, and Italian slave laborers in Germany, who, it was thought, could support Allied operations through sabotage if supplied with weapons via parachute.
The OSS assembled detailed statistics and locations for each national group of slave laborers in Germany. It concluded that advance "OSS ... organizers ... would be sufficient to create strong foreign worker nuclei to which quantities of arms could be dropped." [83]
The OSS was very cool to the idea of using eager Jews from Palestine either as commandos or as agents in southeastern Europe, even though the Jewish Agency offered everything from personnel to organizational structure. [84] Jews who were not prisoners were not part of the OSS' strategic thinking, and Jewish camp prisoners were not either. In the view of the OSS, there was no serious military need to study the camps where Jews were held.Toward the end of the war, lower-level Allied intelligence officials undertook studies intended to convey a sense of the German camp system as a whole. This effort was mainly a British one, with the OSS simply receiving British reports. These reports were flawed, possibly because those who compiled the reports, as a result of bureaucratic compartmentalization, lacked access to the best intelligence then available.
One case in point is a newly declassified "List of German Concentration Camps." Compiled by the German and Austrian Intelligence Branch of Britain's primary information agency, the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), the List was revised every few months based on collected intelligence. The version of the List in recently declassified OSS records is dated June 21, 1944 (three months after the previous update), and it lists 144 camps. [85] In war information made publicly available,
PWE played down the plight of Europe's Jews. [86] The June 1944 List should be seen in this context. It contained the peculiar comment that
reliable information is hard to obtain. In the German Press individual camps have never been mentioned by name ... The reports of even inmates of the camps need interpretation. Inmates may not be told the correct name of the camp to which they are taken and may identify it by a railway station. [87]
The report also acknowledged confusion as to the nature of the concentration camp system itself:
"There are several types of camp which may be confused with concentration camps, but should probably not be included on a list of concentration camps." These other types, though, included not extermination camps but work camps (Arbeitslager) and prison camps (Straflager).
Theresienstadt was the only camp out of 144 on the PWE list where the notation "for Jews" was included. Chelmno was simply noted as being 64 kilometers northwest of Lodz. Oswiecim (Auschwitz) was included in the list with no special distinction at all, and Brzezinki (Birkenau) was said to be "possibly associated with Oswiecim." [88] Death camps Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, all shut down by this time, were still thought to be in operation but received no special distinction beyond their location. [89]
Given what information was available from other sources by mid-1944,
the List of Concentration Camps seems inept. British analysts surely knew the German press contained nothing on extermination camps in Poland, but they also knew that one could look in other places, most of which were in London, for information such as escapee reports and intercepts. The OSS knew this too.
Britain's most comprehensive wartime analysis of concentration camps, written by the British secret intelligence service, MI-6, was completed in April 1945 as an appendix to a chapter in The German Basic Handbook. Parts of the report were used at the Nuremberg trials of the major war criminals later that year. The appendix on concentration camps is thirty-six pages long and includes enormous detail, broad attempts at analysis, and its own sub-appendix that attempts to list every known German camp, including transit camps, labor camps, and so on -- more than three hundred in all. The detail is such that MI-6 surely began work on the concentration camp appendix much earlier than April 1945; the appendix can thus be seen as an inventory of what British intelligence understood (or chose to say) about the camp system in the later part of the war, and perhaps as what the OSS understood, too.
The OSS does not seem to have ever undertaken such a study on its own. [90]
MI-6 failed to comprehend the aims of the German camp system. The report included no information from escapees, the Polish underground, intercepts, or censorship. Key parts of the appendix were based on sources from liberated western camps such as Drancy in France, while for the East it depended on Soviet radio broadcasts regarding camps recently liberated in Poland. None of it seems to have been built on what had been learned about Belzec and Treblinka via the Polish underground, and none of it came from detailed intercepts or reports on Auschwitz-Birkenau that had reached London. Perhaps the appendix foreshadowed official thinking about Jewish displaced persons in 1945, according to which Jewish refugees, despite their statelessness and the horrors of their wartime experience, were to receive no preferential treatment. [91]
The appendix noted that "the Concentration Camp system is coeval with the Nazi regime," but it never acknowledged that Jews were the primary victims of the same regime. [92] MI-6's analysis of concentration camps incorrectly sewed Jews into the broad quilt of Nazi Germany's many racial and political enemies:
The victims [of concentration camps] are ... of two kinds. The first consists of persons considered dangerous to the regime: Jews, anti-Germans from the occupied countries, members of oppositional political groups who have tried to make friendly contacts with prisoners of war, Germans who have had sex-relations with members of "Helot" races such as Jews or Poles, disgruntled German workers who have grumbled once too often, listeners to foreign broadcasts, and, in general, "politically unreliable" individuals. The second kind includes persons believed to have committed robberies with violence, black-market swindlers, officials who have been denounced as bribe-takers, racketeers or alleged racketeers of various species, and other non-political offenders.
British analysts had a clear sense of group badges worn by camp inmates. [93] But it was also known at the time that throughout the concentration camp system Jews were hardly on a par with German racketeers. Otherwise, badges would not have been needed at all. Yet the appendix argues that "reports indicate a practice of discriminating racially, as regards both discipline and living conditions, against other people besides the Jews." [94]
MI-6 analysts acknowledged in the concentration camp appendix that a "Death Camp System" existed (it counted eleven death camps in all) and that in 1942 the death roll among all German prisoners in Europe rose drastically as a result.
There are certain camps which function mainly, if not exclusively, as centres for the mass extermination of prisoners ... a report that the death-rate of the Concentration Camps as a whole rose during 1942 to 12 per cent per month does not appear to be exaggerated.
The statement by Yrba and Wetzler that "on principle only Jews are gassed," was ignored in this appendix. [95] Instead MI-6 erroneously tied the entire system of camps -- extermination camps included -- to the labor needs of the Reich and the need to move local populations far from potential bases of resistance. It reads:
During the latter half of 1942, the transportations from the western camps into Poland grew, and were only partly offset by the despatch to German camps of Polish and Russian contingents. Deportations were part of the system. Thus in 1942 Jugoslav "political" prisoners were to be found confined in Norway. (Our of 900 sent to Narvik in July, 550 had died, mainly of disease and neglect, by October of that year). But the intake of fresh inmates in the west was also increasing. Despite the transportations to Poland, the evidence points to no permanent depletion of numbers elsewhere.
At one point MI-6 even explained the purpose of German camps in Poland as the accommodation of runoff from camps in Germany itself:The size of those [camps] in Germany, indeed, may partly have been kept down by means of systematic deportations of their surplus to the great camps of Poland.
The [death] camps served as a "pool" or reservoir which could be used to smooth out irregularities in the supply of their human material from the rest of Europe.
Most of the information for the appendix seems to have come from Belzec and Maidanek, and though Auschwitz-Birkenau and Chelmno were mentioned briefly as death camps, so were camps that were not death camps at all, such as Gusen (near Linz) and Neuengamme (near Hamburg). Sobibor did not appear at all in a list of more than 330 camps. Neither, astonishingly, did Treblinka, about which a great deal had been known in London for three years.
Death camp victims, said the appendix, were of two types. Large parts were "unwanted populations" belonging to "Helot races," namely Poles and Jews. MI-6 did not distinguish between the two, and the appendix reveals no sense that Nazism viewed the Jews as a singular threat, rather than as just "unwanted" people.
The intelligence analysts overlooked twelve years of apocalyptic anti-Semitic rhetoric coming from Berlin [96] and numerous reports of exclusively Jewish transports from all over Europe to Poland. MI-6 did nor acknowledge Jews as the primary victims of the extermination camps.
Certain populations, according to MI-6, were killed simply because they represented unwanted mouths to feed or because they were in the way, occupying areas needed for German colonization. The second category of death camp victims, according to the report, were "worked-out" victims of all nationalities condemned to death because they were no longer fit or were security liabilities after their labor on certain sensitive projects, such as V-2 rockets. MI-6 also misunderstood, to a degree, the methods of human extermination.
"From Majdanek, " said the report, came the now familiar account of the disinfectant-gas chamber where prisoners were murdered by "so-called cyclone" (Zyklon) gas. Yet MI-6 also believed errant reports that electrocution in a metal-floored shower installation was the primary means of execution at Belzec.It is hard to fathom how analyses of this nature could have misrepresented so many aspects of the German system this late in the war. A great deal of information was readily available on extermination camps and also on the singling out of Jews for mass murder. After the war, when war criminals were arrested en masse, this information was used to assemble names.
In May 1945, British Military Intelligence (MI-14) handed the OSS a list of over five hundred German concentration camp officers, compiled "during a period of several years," so that these men could be arrested if encountered. Most of the names came from western camps liberated by the Allies such as Mauthausen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Natzweiler, and Flossenburg. None came from Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, or Chelmno, but 102 of the names -- roughly 20 percent -- were from Auschwitz, and many of these had been learned as early as September 1942. [97]
On December 15, 1944, William Donovan relayed instructions from the War Department that the OSS was to help the Judge Advocate General Division with the assembly of names and evidence for eventual war crimes arrests and prosecution. [98] But with the war in Europe at a crucial stage -- the Germans would launch the second Ardennes offensive the following day -- the OSS does not seem to have done much in this regard using its own records.
In all, newly released OSS records concerning German camps reflect the strategic priorities of the war and thus confirm earlier historical findings regarding Allied intelligence and the Holocaust. The OSS was able to assemble hard-to-find information on German camp prisoners for strategic projects, as its detailed work on slave laborers in Germany shows. The OSS does not seem to have taken much detailed interest in German camps as they concerned the extermination of Jews. The "Wanda" report mentioned above was not sought by OSS officials -- it fell into the OSS' lap. Information assembled on Auschwitz, such as it was, was gathered by British interrogators, not American ones. The OSS seems to have undertaken no general study concerning the German extermination of its Jewish prisoners.
_______________
Notes:1. William J. Casey, The Secret War Against Hitler (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1986), 218, quoted in Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 254.
2. Arnold H. Price, My Twentieth Century: Recollections of a Public Historian (Tubingen: Universitas Verlag Tubingen, 2003), 87.
3. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1911-1950 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 307.
4. Shlomo Aronson, "Preparations for the Nuremberg Trials: The O.S.S., Charles Dwork, and the Holocaust," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no. 2 (1998): 266-70; Barry M. Karz, "The Holocaust and American Intelligence," in The Jewish Legacy and the German Conscience: Essays in Memory of Rabbi Joseph Ascher, 297-307, ed. Moses Rischin and Raphael Ascher (Berkeley, CA: Judah L. Magnes Museum, 1991).
5. Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 273-74.
6. H. Montgomery Hyde, Secret Intelligence Agent (New York: Sr. Martin's Press, 1982), 33-34, 104-05.
7. For a sample, Rivas G. Montt [sic], Chilean Consul, Prague, to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Santiago, Chile, 6 Sept. 1941, NA, RG 65, 62-65008-24-1-(1-100), boxes 26-27.
8. In at least one case, William Stephenson personally solicited Donovan's reaction to Argentinian diplomatic reports from Berlin. See British Security Coordination (Bill) to William J. Donovan, 27 June 1942, NA, RG 226, entry 210, box 400, folder 9085. For documents that clarify Q (the designation for British Security Coordination), see To Q, 13 July 1942, A, RG 226, entry 210, box 326, folder -- British Data; and Allen W. Dulles to David Bruce, 17 July 1942, NA, RG 226, entry 92, box 103, folder 9452.
9. Donovan was selected Coordinator of Information on June 17, 1941, and formally appointed on July 11, after opposition from the Office of Naval Intelligence and G-2 (Army Intelligence) had been overcome. British intelligence officials had lobbied heavily for the establishment of a unified American intelligence organization and for Donovan's appointment as director. Stephenson fed Donovan other prized intelligence. See Thomas F. Troy, Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), 43-70, 83; and more generally: Troy, Wild Bill and Intrepid: Donovan, Stephenson, and the Origin of CIA (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).
10. COI distribution, 26 Sept. 1941, based on despatch of 25 Aug. 1941, NA, RG 226, entry 16, box 3, folder 450-494, document 468.
11. Mario Barros Van Buren, La Diplomacia Chilena en la Segunda Guerra Mundial, (Santiago, CL: Empresa Editora Arquen, 1998) 83, 118-20. Montt's name is listed in Fritz Berber, ed., Jahrbuch fur Auswartige Politik 6, (1940): 11. Our thanks to Gerhard Weinberg for this reference.
12. Diccionario Biografico de Chile (Santiago: Empresa Periodistica Chile) eighth edition, 1950-52, and twelfrh edition, 1962-64. We are grateful to Pascale Bonnefoy for the references.
13. [British] Summary, 13 Sept. 1941, of Chilean despatch, 24 June 1941, copy in NA, RG 226, entry 16, box 32, folder 7000-7377, document 7346.
14. Montt to Foreign Minister, 6 Sept. 1941, Chilean National Archives, Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Chile, vol. 149 (1941), file E 3-10-1-1. Translated copy in NA, RG 65, 62-65008-24-1, boxes 26-27.
15. Conti [Montt] to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Santiago, Chile, 1 Nov. 1941. Translated copy of "Evacuation of Jews from Bohemia and Moravia" in NA, RG 65, 62-65008-24-178-156, box 27, folder -- Secret Intercepts -- South America.
16. [British] Intelligence report, 4 Feb. 1942, regarding Chilean despatch from Prague, 15 Nov. 1941, copy in NA, RG 226, entry 16, box 49, folder 11250-11300, document 11280. The consul is incorrectly identified as E. C. Conti. For explanation of the mistake, see below.
17. Montt to Minister of Foreign Affairs, 6 Sept. 1941, Chilean National Archives, Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Chile, vol. 149 (1941), file E 3-10-1-1. Translated copy of "Anti-Jewish Measures in Warsaw and Prague" in NA, RG 65, 62-65008-24-1-(1-100), boxes 26-27, folder -- Secret Intercepts -- South America.
18. This decree is published by H. G. Adler, Der verwaltete Mensch: Studien zur Deportation der juden aus Deutschland (Tubingen: Mohr, 1974), 500-04. For analysis, see Martin Dean, "The Development and Implementation of Nazi Denaturalization and Confiscation Policy up to the Eleventh Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 16, no. 2 (2002): 217-42.
19. See the British translation dated 20 Mar. 1942 in NA, RG 226, entry 210, box 386, folder 6. The diplomat's name is not given in the British version. The Spanish original may be found in the Chilean National Archives.
20. See the British translation NA, RG 226, entry 210, box 386, folder 6.
21. See Notizen aus der Besprechung am 10.10.41 uber die Losung von Judenfragen, copy in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), RG 48.005, roll 3. There is a reference to the press conference in Peter Witte et al., eds., Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941-42 (Hamburg: Christians, 1999), 231n26.
22. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis (London: Penguin, 2000), 420; Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991), 170-214.
23. Heydrich Fernschreiben for Lammers, for Bormann, 9 Oct. 1941, NA, RG 242, T-120, roll 1026, frames 406029-34; Hitler's appointment schedule, NA, RG 242, T-84, roll 387, frame 516. On October 21 Himmler had discussed with Heydrich his "Vortrag b. Fuhrer."
24. Kershaw, Nemesis, 488.
25. See Witte, et al., Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers, 241 n61, referring to a discussion among Himmler, Tiso, Tuka, and Mach on 20 Oct. 1941.
26. Montt to Foreign Ministry, 18 Oct. 1940, vol. 148 (1940), Chilean National Archives.
27. NA, RG 226, entry 16, box 32, document 7346.
28. NA, RG 226, entry 16, box 49, folder 11250-11300, document 11280.
29. We are grateful to Pascale Bonnefoy for this information.
30. Nelson D. Lankford, The Last American Aristocrat: The Biography of David K.E. Bruce, 1898-1977 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 125-28.
31. Conti [Montt] to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Santiago, Chile, 1 Nov. 1941. Translated copy of "Evacuation of Jews from Bohemia and Moravia," in NA, RG 65, 62-65008-24-156, box 27, folder -- Secret Intercepts -- South America. Also, J. Edgar Hoover to Adolf A. Berle and Huie, 1 May 1942, ibid.
32. Montt's despatches of November 18 and 20, 1941, dared 20 and 23 Mar. 1942, NA, RG 226, entry 210, box 386, folder 6.
33. See Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 40, 61-62.
34. Ibid., 152.
35. Ibid., 91.
36. See the collection of interviews conducted by the OSS Division of Oral Intelligence in NA, RG 226, entry 210, boxes 258, 261, and 264.
37. Rado to Buxton, 8 Aug. 1942, NA, RG 226, entry 210, box 258, folder 2.
38. Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York: Hill and Wang 1998), 129; Witte, et al., Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers, 401 n44.
39. From Beirut to Dear Allen, 17 Feb. 1943, NA, RG 226, entry 16, box 330, folder 31750-31903, document 31770.
40. These letters all seem to be in NA, RG 226, entry 16. Some of those of intelligence value were copied to other agencies.
41. The first letter docs not state that it is part of a series of articles, but the second one notes it is the second article (although the first one had not yet arrived in New York), and the third one notes it is the third article. NA, RG 226, entry 16, boxes 252, 257, and 259, documents 26896, 27275, and 27428.
42. Richard Breitman previously speculated that the author was Gerald M. Mayer, who represented the Office of War Information post in Switzerland and worked closely with Dulles there; see Breitman, Official Secrets, 129. Mayer's itinerary roughly corresponds with the author's, but the wider series of "Dear Allen" letters raises other possibilities. Mayer was not the only former or active journalist in Europe who took an interest in Nazi persecution of Jews.
43. Witte, et al., Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers, 400, 400n43.
44. We have drawn this portrait generally from Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 1-145.
45. On Dulles' trip, see Grose, Gentleman Spy, 148-51.
46. Staight to Dolbeare, 30 Nov. 1943, NA, RG 226, entry 107, box 3, folder 43 -- Rocket Weapons.
47. Walter Laqueur and Richard Breitman, Breaking the Silence: The German Who Exposed the Final Solution (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1994), 115-49.
48. To OSS R&A from Harrison, 11 Aug. 1942, NA, RG 226, entry 4, box 1, folder 2-Bern.
49. See the account in Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-1945, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 153-57.
50. Laqueur and Breitman, Breaking the Silence, 156-60.
State Department experts (like those in the British Foreign Office) resisted the conclusion that Nazi Germany was pursuing a systematic policy of mass extermination of Jews, or that the Allied governments should publicly denounce it. This debate has been studied in detail by a number of previous historians (see n. 52 below), most recently by Breitman, Official Secrets, 141-54.
51. Reams to Travers, 15 Dec. 1942, NA, RG 59, file 52D-408, box 3, folder-Bermuda Conference Background. Quoted in Breitman, Official Secrets, 173.
52. The period between August 1942 and the Allied Declaration of December 17, 1942, is recognized as a critical learning period in all of the following works, each of which has somewhat different interpretations about the period of inaction that followed: Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (1968; Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1983); Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938-1945 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970); Saul S. Friedman, No Haven for the Oppressed: United States Policy Toward Jewish Refugees, 1938-1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973); Monty N. Penkower, The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); David S. Wyman, [ur=http://survivorbb.rapeutation.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=3607l]The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust[/url], 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1984); Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
53. On the speech, see Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 207.
54. David Bankier, "The Use of Antisemitism in Nazi Wartime Propaganda," in The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (Bloomington: Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2002), 48.
55. Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 209-48. Many aspects of these events have been revised, on the basis of German documents, by Wolf Gruner, "The Factory Action and the Events at the Rosenstrasse in Berlin: Facts and Fictions about 27 February 1943 -- Sixty Years Later," Central European History 36, no. 2 (2003): 179-208. Dulles' intelligence sources were too imprecise -- they were wrong about some details -- to resolve issues now disputed among historians, but two different informants, discussed below, suggested that SS officials in Berlin had a radical view about eliminating the remaining Jews. These sources also support the view that public protest and sheltering of Jews who went into hiding helped to frustrate SS hopes.
56. Bern to Secretary of State for OSS-SI, 10 Mar. 1943, NA, RG 226, entry 134, box 171, folder 1079.
57. Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler's "Final Solution" (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 99.
58. Undated Visser t'Hooft report, L. H. to A.W. D., 13 Mar. 1943, and A. W. D. for the Minister, 15 Mar. 1943, NA, RG 84, Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, American Legation Bern, General Records 1942-48, Economic Section, box 13, 1943, 840.1 Jews.
59. Harrison's handwritten addendum, in L. H. to A.W. D., 13 Mar. 1943, Ibid.
60. Harrison, Legation [Dulles] to Secretary of State [SI], 1 Apr. 1943, NA, RG 226, entry 134 Washington Registry: Radio and Cables Files, box 171, folder 1079. See also Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 244. On Wiskemann's letter [15 Apr. 1943-B arrived from Berlin on 13 Apr.] to Dulles, see NA, RG 226, entry 210, box 376, folder 5. Those with one Jewish parent who were treated as Jews because of their identification with the Jewish community were among those rounded up. There is some evidence of more far-reaching plans to deport all whom the Nazis considered half-breeds (Mischlinge), which were not carried out. See Scoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 203-07.
61. Grose, Gentleman Spy, 179.
62. SI to Drum, Bern, 16 Mar. 1943, and Burns, Bern to SI, 5 Apr. 1943, NA, RG 226, entry 134, box 165, folder 1057; and NA, RG 226, entry 134, box 171, folder 1079, D-27 to Bern, document CD 16945. Hoover to Donovan [undated], and Donovan to Hoover, 5 Apr. 1943, NA, RG 65, 65-430 15-37x.
63. This document came from the anti-Nazi official in the German Foreign Office, Fritz Kolbe, one of Dulles' best sources. See Bern to SI, 30 Dec. 1943 (IN 8021 and 8020), NA, RG 226, entry 210, box 463, folder 2. For the most recent account of Fritz Kolbe's espionage work, based in part on newly declassified material, see Greg Bradsher, "A Time to Act: The Beginning of the Fritz Kolbe Story, 1900-1943 " Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration 34, no. 1 (2002): 7-26.
64. See chapter 3.
65. Bern to Secretary of State, 2 Mar. 1943, NA, RG 226, entry 134 Washington Registry, Radio and Cables Files, box 171, folder 1079, D-27 from Bern, 16 June 1942-31 July 1943, document CD 15751.
66. Arthur Goldberg to Dulles, 20 July 1942, and Goldberg to Bowden, 2 Sept. 1942, NA, RG 226, entry 134, box 98, document 10641 B.
67. See Breitman, Official Secrets, 148, 288n41.
68. For this eloquent document, NA, RG 200, National Archives Gift Collection, Duker/Dwork Papers, box II, folder 107-Report ... Polish National Council (quoted at greater length in Breitman, Official Secrets, 149).
69. It is worth noting that Abraham Duker and Charles Dwork salvaged this copy for the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS, and that other copies have not been found in the OSS collection.
70. Memorandum on the Visit of L [Lunders] on Jan. 14 [report dated 15 Jan. 1942], NA, RG 226, entry 210, box 375, folder 4, document WN 13, 925.
71. Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas, "A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during 'Einsatz Reinhard' 1942," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 15, no. 3 (2001): 468-86.
72. See Breitman, Official Secrets, 94; Martin Gilbert, "What Was Known and When," in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994), 539-52; Mitoslav Karny, "The Vrba and Wetzler Report," ibid., 553-68. Also Yitzak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987): 349ff.
73. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, 349-51.
74. Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945 (London: Institute of Jewish Affairs; New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 150. See also Laqueur, Terrible Secret, 74ff, 219-23.
75. See Breitman, Official Secrets, 115-17. Martin Gilbert mentions a report dated Apr. 18, 1943, written in London by a member of the Polish underground, and adds that the report made little impression in London since it was never made public. Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981), 130.
76. Karny, "The Vrba and Wetzler Report," 558-62. For the text see Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Werzler, The Extermination Camps in Auschwitz (Oswiecim) and Birkenau in Upper Silesia [Vrba-Wetzler Report] (Washington, DC: Executive Office of the President, War Refugee Board, n.d.). Available in photocopy format at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Library.
77. For the report see F.L. Belin to Dr. William L. Langer, 10 Apr. 1944, and enclosed "Description of the Concentration Camp at Oswiecim," NA, RG 226, document 66059, identical with Military Attache report 20 Mar. 1944, NA, RG 165, box 3138, folder -- Poland 6950.
In fact, the report, while overestimating the numbers in some cases, such as Greece (only 36,151 Jews arrived from 20 Mar. 1943 to 16 May 1943), was remarkably accurate on others. The total for Jews arriving from Holland, Belgium, and France from September 1942 to June 1943 was 66,378. For calculations see Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989). This report from Wanda is also discussed in Richard Breitman, ''Auschwitz Partially Decoded," in The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? ed. Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 33. See also See Richard Breitman, "Auschwitz and the Archives," Central European History 18 (I985): 371-72.
78. "Oswiecim Concentration Camp," dated by hand 26 Oct. 1944, NA, RG 226, entry 16, document 98885.
79. This suggestion is borne our by the analysis in Laqueur, Terrible Secret, 66-7. Poles were in fact interrogated by British military intelligence officers, though
one wartime Polish emissary would later comment that his Foreign Office interrogators had little interest in what he had to say about Poland's Jews.80. Report No. PWIS (H) /LDC 1469, NA, RG 226, entry 190, box 801, folder 17.
81. See especially Dino A. Brugioni, "The Aerial Photos of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex," in Bombing of Auschwitz, 52-4.
82. OSS Paris Report, No. FF-4777, 5 Mar. 1945, NA, RG 226, entry 190, box 784, folder 10. Natzweiler-Srruthof (in Alsace) was liberated on November 23, 1944.
83. HQ & HQ Detachment, Office of Strategic Services, European Theater of Operations, United States Army (Main) APO 413, 3061/406, 9 Jan. 1945, Written By Gerald Miller, Chief-SO Branch, NA, RG 226, entry 190, box 784, folder 10. See also Supreme Headquarters/Allied Expeditionary Force/G-3 Division (Main), SHAEF/I7240/25/Ops (C), GCT/370-15/Ops (C) 14 Feb. 1945, NA, RG 226, entry 190, box 784, folder 6.
84. See chapter 2.
85. On PWE's reluctance to report on the mass murder of Jews, see Breitman, Official Secrets, 102-3, 155-58.
86. On Foreign Minister Anthony Eden's role, see Arieh J. Kochavi, Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 141-42. There was more Jewish emphasis in the wake of the declaration in 1942. Breitman, Official Secrets, 159.
87. The Polish exile press and the English language Jewish Press, which contained numerous reports, are not mentioned.
88. "P.W.E. German and Austrian Intelligence, List of German Concentration Camps," 21 June 1944, NA, RG 226, entry 190, box 801, folder 17.
89. Himmler decided on the liquidation of the three Reinhard camps in March 1943. Belzec was closed in July, Treblinka in November, Sobibor in December. Arad, BeLzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, 370-76.
90. The report is part of a larger work by MI-6 on the German police system and is titled "Appendix to Chapter VI -- Concentration Camps," located in NA, RG 65, 65-47826-12-330, boxes 50-52.
91. Arieh J. Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics: Britain, the United States, and Jewish Refugees, 1945-1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 32ff.
92. "Appendix to Chapter VI -- Concentration Camps," located in NA, RG 65, 65-47826-12-330, boxes 50-52, 1.
93. Ibid., 23.
94. Ibid., 10.
95. Vrba-Wetzler Report, 16.
96. Jeffrey Herf, "Anti-Semitism as Hatred and Explanation: Goebbels' Major Public Statements," paper presented at German Studies Association, Annual Meeting, October 2001, Washington, D.C.
97. MI-14, War Office, "German Concentration Camp Personalities " NA, RG 226, entry 190, box 801, folder 17.
98. Donovan to List S, 15 Dec. 1944, NA, RG 226, entry 190, box 536, folder 124.