by Eli Leon and Israel Hayom Staff
Hat tip: Dr. Jean-Charles Bensoussan
Allied leaders had information about Nazi atrocities from the camps themselves and from resistance fighters, researcher Dan Plesch tells Independent newspaper • Member of Britain's war cabinet said Jews should not be considered a "special case."
One of the documents proving
the Allies knew about the Holocaust but did nothing to stop it
An aerial view of the
Auschwitz extermination camp
|
Photo credit: Gettyimages 
The apathetic response of the world to the
horrors of the Holocaust has been researched and covered extensively,
but newly uncovered documents reveal just how deep the apathy ran.
The documents, which have come to light for
the first time in 70 years after being archived in the United Nations,
reveal that the Allies were aware of the atrocities perpetrated against
the Jews of Europe much earlier in the war than previously thought --
but did nothing to stop them.
Based on the newly available U.N. documents,
researcher Dan Plesch of the University of London wrote the book "Human
Rights After Hitler." Britain's Independent newspaper interviewed
Plesch, who said that prior to the discovery of the new material, the
prevailing belief had been that the Allies found out about the slaughter
of Jews in 1944, when they learned about the Nazi concentration camps.
But Plesch explains that the Allies knew about
the Holocaust some two and a half years earlier. They had received
reports both from the camps themselves and from the resistance movements
in Nazi-occupied areas.
According to the Independent interview, by
December 1942, the U.S., Britain, and the Soviet Union knew that at
least 2 million Jews had been murdered by the Nazi regime and that 5
million more were in mortal danger.
Moreover, at that stage, the three countries
were already working on compiling a base of evidence to charge Nazi
dictator Adolf Hitler with war crimes, but they still took no steps to
intervene.
The Independent reports that in March 1943,
Viscount Cranborne, a British peer and minister in Prime Minister
Winston Churchill's war cabinet, said that Jews should not be considered
a "special case." Cranborne said the British Empire was already full of
refugees and could not offer safety to any more.
Plesch told the Independent that anti-Semites
in the U.S. State Department rejected efforts by then-U.S. envoy to the
United Nations War Crimes Commission Herbert Pell to help the Jews of
Europe. Pell later said that some members of the State Department were
concerned about what would happen to U.S.-German trade relations if the
U.S. pressed ahead with war crimes charges against Nazi leaders. This
public claim by Pell prompted the State Department to bring the Nazi
leadership to trial at the Nuremberg proceedings.
"Among the reason given by the U.S. and
British policymakers 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 writes in "Human Rights After Hitler."
Plesch told the Independent that before the
U.N. documents on which he based his book were made public, anyone who
wanted to review them needed not only permission from their own
government, but also from the U.N. secretary general. Generally, a few
years would elapse between the bureaucratic runaround and the time
researchers were actually granted access to the documents.
Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha
Powers was the official who initiated the move to open the documents on
the Allies' knowledge of the Holocaust.
According to Plesch, the new evidence provides a "cartload of nails to hammer into the coffins" of Holocaust denial.
Eli Leon and Israel Hayom Staff
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=41843&hp=1
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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