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封印されたホロコースト―ローズヴェルト、チャーチルはどこまで知っていたか
They were ordinary people not necessarily motivated by politics or hate. But they were killers on behalf of the German state, members of the Order Police and frontline ethnic cleansers in the massacres that became the Holocaust. Their role has long been underestimated or even overlooked by historians. Until now that is, in a major work which presents a wealth of fascinating new evidence on the planning of the greatest of all crimes.
Richard Breitman takes a detailed look at the thinking of the Nazi leaders, and at how the Holocaust was planned. He investigates the work of men such as the "able, but dull" Kurt Daluege whose role as head of the Order Police was far greater than many had previously believed. And he presents new evidence, much of it culled from files which have remained secret for half a century, showing just what the Allies know about the wholesale slaughter of 6 million Jews. The British code crackers who broke the German cyphers began to piece the story together from mid-1941. But the Government was preoccupied with World War II, not the beginning of the Holocaust, and disclosure that the facts were known would have alerted the enemy to the fact that coded German messages were being intercepted. Meanwhile, in the US, says Breitman: "many State Department officials chose not to believe or to act on what evidence they had."
Rich in detail, Official Secrets is a valuable addition to the wealth of published material on the Holocaust, presenting hitherto undisclosed information which has remained secret for far too long. --Stuart Russell
Tankobon Hardcover
First published October 1, 1998
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July 22, 2013
Steven Speilberg was right all along, the allies knew about the holocaust being perpetrated by the Nazis but deliberately ignored it.
This book givens in painstaking detail the news of the mass murder being passed on to allied hands during the war by several individuals, bystanders, survivors, witnesses, death camp escapees, consulate officials and several others who in their own bit tried to pass on whatever info they could to the allies in the vain hope that something would be done to stop the killings. They probably hoped that the genocide could be exposed to the allies with the result that it could be stopped altogether.
Alas, none of it happened, all news of atrocities received by the Allies was debunked, deliberately shoved under the carpet, ignored, not passed on, labeled as figments of imagination. Many of these came from official channels in Europe and news media. I was shocked to learn that other than the more famous testimonials of persons such as Rudolph Verba there were hundreds of others who risked their lives to pass on the info and got nothing in return, sadly not even a token of empathy and an acknowledgement from the Allies that mass murder was being planned and implemented across Europe and Russia. Allied decision not to bomb the rail lines to Aushwitz is a case in point.
The holocaust was officially acknowledged with media being allowed to post images of holocaust on the front pages after the British liberated Bergen Belsen and Americans the Dachau concentration camp.
This is a disturbing book, it reveals the killing statistics and news of genocide in a matter of fact tone. The sad outcome is that the British and Americans knew about the holocaust from the initial stages of war itself but simply kept quiet. President Roosevelt did make an ultimatum like appeal to the Germans to stop the Hungarian Jew’s deportations but that was it.
If I may quote from Schindler’s list, “Whoever saves one life saves the World entire”.
The fact of the matter is that they could have saved Jewish lives…but they decided not to.
This book givens in painstaking detail the news of the mass murder being passed on to allied hands during the war by several individuals, bystanders, survivors, witnesses, death camp escapees, consulate officials and several others who in their own bit tried to pass on whatever info they could to the allies in the vain hope that something would be done to stop the killings. They probably hoped that the genocide could be exposed to the allies with the result that it could be stopped altogether.
Alas, none of it happened, all news of atrocities received by the Allies was debunked, deliberately shoved under the carpet, ignored, not passed on, labeled as figments of imagination. Many of these came from official channels in Europe and news media. I was shocked to learn that other than the more famous testimonials of persons such as Rudolph Verba there were hundreds of others who risked their lives to pass on the info and got nothing in return, sadly not even a token of empathy and an acknowledgement from the Allies that mass murder was being planned and implemented across Europe and Russia. Allied decision not to bomb the rail lines to Aushwitz is a case in point.
The holocaust was officially acknowledged with media being allowed to post images of holocaust on the front pages after the British liberated Bergen Belsen and Americans the Dachau concentration camp.
This is a disturbing book, it reveals the killing statistics and news of genocide in a matter of fact tone. The sad outcome is that the British and Americans knew about the holocaust from the initial stages of war itself but simply kept quiet. President Roosevelt did make an ultimatum like appeal to the Germans to stop the Hungarian Jew’s deportations but that was it.
If I may quote from Schindler’s list, “Whoever saves one life saves the World entire”.
The fact of the matter is that they could have saved Jewish lives…but they decided not to.
March 16, 2024
ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE ON GERMAN, AND WESTERN REACTIONS TO THE HOLOCAUST
Historian Richard Breitman wrote in the Introduction to this 1998 book, “A barbaric regime equipped with modern technology and organizational skills committed monstrous crimes in the course of a war for world domination and a projected racial utopia. As defeat neared, high officials and subordinates tried to destroy the mountain of physical and documentary evidence of the murder of millions. They failed, but they created large gaps in the historical record… they made it difficult for historians to reconstruct how the Nazi leaders had planned the Holocaust, with tens of thousands of Germans and non-Germans serving as mass executioners… For nearly a quarter century, scholars have discussed whether Adolf Hitler envisioned a Holocaust in advance and ordered it once he got the opportunity, under the cover of war. Or did Nazi officials … improvise genocide in the middle of the war after other, lesser forms of persecution of Jews failed to end their problems and when the wartime climate heightened German animosities toward Jews?” (Pg. 3)
He continues, “Debate over these questions revived and escalated in the 1990s in the wake of an academic duel between two American specialists on the Holocaust who chose the same case study… the activites of Reserved (Order) Police Battalion 101, which in 1942-3 carried out a gruesome series of mass executions of Jews in small towns… [Christopher] Browning and [Daniel Jonah] Goldhagen offer radically different descriptions of and explanations for this behavior… Browning concludes that peer pressure and the climate of war led most of them to follow orders despite the availability of an escape to other tasks… Goldhagen decided that virulent anti-Semitism was at the root of police atrocities… this eliminationist anti-Semitism … was entrenched in German culture.” (Pg. 5-6)
He continues, “The new evidence I present and analyze in this book indicates that larger numbers of Order Policemen were involved in the first phase of the Holocaust, and this lends some support to the narrowed argument that ordinary Germans approved of, and took part in, the Holocaust. I also examine contrary evidence that suggests high Nazi authorities did not find these Order Police executioners quite so willing or easy to employ…. In short, the evidence I present here suggests an interpretation of German attitudes that is in some ways different from either scholars’ views.” (Pg. 7)
He reports, “Himmler… used underlining and a margin line to highlight many passages in ‘Mein Kampf,’ among them Hitler’s retroactive solution for Germany’s defeat in World War I: ‘If … during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under [subjected to] poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the battlefield, the sacrifice of millions on the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary, twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the future.’ The idea of using poison as against some Jews was already planted in not only Hitler’s mind but also Himmler’s.” (Pg. 16-17)
Were written orders always necessary? He recounts, “Franz Walter Stahlecker, head of Einsatzgruppe A, revealed that he had received fundamental orders … that were not to be written down but transmitted only orally.” (Pg. 44)
He asks, ‘Would unbiased policemen, at the start of a war initiated by Germany, agree that mass murder of large numbers of any other group be necessary to protect Germany in a strictly military sense? Many German policeman carried out orders because of the weight of authority, but they could rationalize the orders probably because they had already internalized basic prejudices from the atmosphere in the Third Reich… They perceived Jews and Bolsheviks as the fundamental enemies of the German people, and they accepted Nazi propaganda that the Jews were behind Bolshevism. It did not take much special ideological training to move these police to kill. It also did not take the specter of defeat on the battlefield.” (Pg. 52)
He notes, “It took German historians several decades before they were able to discredit the myth that the regular German Army had little or nothing to do with the Holocaust or crimes against humanity generally. And some of those responsible for such crimes, like the ones in Novgorod, were never punished.” (Pg. 99)
He recounts, “During 1942… a number of camps, Auschwitz among them, reported by radio almost daily the number of additions and subtractions to the camp prisoner population. They also broke down their total… by the major categories---Germans, Jews, Poles, and Russians… These statistics covered only the total number of prisoners registered at the Auschwitz camps. The death total included those shot or beaten to death as well as those who died of disease or starvation. They OMITTED all Jews (and the smaller number of Gypsies) selected for gas chambers immediately upon arrival.” (Pg. 115)
He states, “Gerhart Riegner, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva… had been sending Washington … regular reports of Nazi atrocities and killings of Jews in Eastern Europe… After receiving Reigner’s telegram … on August 29, [Rabbi Stephen] Wise sent it to … Summer Welles, President Roosevelt’s number-two man in the State Department, with a cover letter vouching for Riegner… Welles urged Wise to refrain from any publicity until further investigation confirmed or refuted the story. Decades later, there would be harsh charges that Wise did not do enough in response to Riegner’s telegram. The criticism is… overstated; not all the critics paid attention to what Wise actually knew or did not know at the time… Wise adhered to Welles’s request and so did the other Jewish organizations.” (Pg. 139, 142)
He suggests, “the reality of widespread though limited anti-Semitism would help explain why a good number of Germans had helped the Gestapo to enforce racial laws from 1935 on or used the Gestapo to help settle scores against particular Jews by denouncing them for making negative comments about the Nazi regime… Still, the presence of widespread anti-Semitism did not mean that all Germans were eager and willing executioners.” (Pg. 159-160)
He recalls, “During 1941, Nazi public accusations had included that charge that American Jews had developed plans to sterilize all Germans under the age of sixty, so that virtually any punishment meted out to Jews would seem justified. While this particular claim might seem bizarre… threats of horrible treatment of all Germans upon Germany’s defeat, common in official Nazi propaganda … helped to keep the German people behind them and the government. They specifically cited the sterilization plan.” (Pg. 163)
He summarizes, “If Western governments had officially recognized Nazi extermination policy earlier, the calls for rescue and relief measures would have come earlier and have generated more political pressure.” (Pg. 176) But he also suggests, “popular anti-Semitism had some influence on police behavior, as it had … on German public reaction to the influx of information about genocide. But the authorities also heavily relied on … deception and secrecy in handling both the police and the German public. If all German police had been ‘willing executioners,’ there would have been less official concern and far less urgency behind the push toward the use of gas chambers as a means of mass murder.” (Pg. 226)
He concludes, “the record generally shows that in 1942 and 1943 the U.S. government and the British government did not try to do what might have worked. This makes it very difficult, long after the fact, to demonstrate that saving more Jews had been impossible.” (Pg. 233)
He laments, “It would be nice to be able to conclude that the Allied governments, recognizing that they had given insufficient attention to the Holocaust during the war, had finally opened all their files about World War II and the Holocaust to scholars. As of this writing, however, they have not done so… Governments that withhold critical information from the historical record and the public long after the events do their countries and the world no service. But the habit of secrecy is very hard to break. No democratic politician or official can in the end control future assessments of him or her by historians, but the longer the critical sources are kept secret, the longer such control is possible.” (Pg. 245-246)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying Western responses to the Holocaust.
Historian Richard Breitman wrote in the Introduction to this 1998 book, “A barbaric regime equipped with modern technology and organizational skills committed monstrous crimes in the course of a war for world domination and a projected racial utopia. As defeat neared, high officials and subordinates tried to destroy the mountain of physical and documentary evidence of the murder of millions. They failed, but they created large gaps in the historical record… they made it difficult for historians to reconstruct how the Nazi leaders had planned the Holocaust, with tens of thousands of Germans and non-Germans serving as mass executioners… For nearly a quarter century, scholars have discussed whether Adolf Hitler envisioned a Holocaust in advance and ordered it once he got the opportunity, under the cover of war. Or did Nazi officials … improvise genocide in the middle of the war after other, lesser forms of persecution of Jews failed to end their problems and when the wartime climate heightened German animosities toward Jews?” (Pg. 3)
He continues, “Debate over these questions revived and escalated in the 1990s in the wake of an academic duel between two American specialists on the Holocaust who chose the same case study… the activites of Reserved (Order) Police Battalion 101, which in 1942-3 carried out a gruesome series of mass executions of Jews in small towns… [Christopher] Browning and [Daniel Jonah] Goldhagen offer radically different descriptions of and explanations for this behavior… Browning concludes that peer pressure and the climate of war led most of them to follow orders despite the availability of an escape to other tasks… Goldhagen decided that virulent anti-Semitism was at the root of police atrocities… this eliminationist anti-Semitism … was entrenched in German culture.” (Pg. 5-6)
He continues, “The new evidence I present and analyze in this book indicates that larger numbers of Order Policemen were involved in the first phase of the Holocaust, and this lends some support to the narrowed argument that ordinary Germans approved of, and took part in, the Holocaust. I also examine contrary evidence that suggests high Nazi authorities did not find these Order Police executioners quite so willing or easy to employ…. In short, the evidence I present here suggests an interpretation of German attitudes that is in some ways different from either scholars’ views.” (Pg. 7)
He reports, “Himmler… used underlining and a margin line to highlight many passages in ‘Mein Kampf,’ among them Hitler’s retroactive solution for Germany’s defeat in World War I: ‘If … during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under [subjected to] poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the battlefield, the sacrifice of millions on the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary, twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the future.’ The idea of using poison as against some Jews was already planted in not only Hitler’s mind but also Himmler’s.” (Pg. 16-17)
Were written orders always necessary? He recounts, “Franz Walter Stahlecker, head of Einsatzgruppe A, revealed that he had received fundamental orders … that were not to be written down but transmitted only orally.” (Pg. 44)
He asks, ‘Would unbiased policemen, at the start of a war initiated by Germany, agree that mass murder of large numbers of any other group be necessary to protect Germany in a strictly military sense? Many German policeman carried out orders because of the weight of authority, but they could rationalize the orders probably because they had already internalized basic prejudices from the atmosphere in the Third Reich… They perceived Jews and Bolsheviks as the fundamental enemies of the German people, and they accepted Nazi propaganda that the Jews were behind Bolshevism. It did not take much special ideological training to move these police to kill. It also did not take the specter of defeat on the battlefield.” (Pg. 52)
He notes, “It took German historians several decades before they were able to discredit the myth that the regular German Army had little or nothing to do with the Holocaust or crimes against humanity generally. And some of those responsible for such crimes, like the ones in Novgorod, were never punished.” (Pg. 99)
He recounts, “During 1942… a number of camps, Auschwitz among them, reported by radio almost daily the number of additions and subtractions to the camp prisoner population. They also broke down their total… by the major categories---Germans, Jews, Poles, and Russians… These statistics covered only the total number of prisoners registered at the Auschwitz camps. The death total included those shot or beaten to death as well as those who died of disease or starvation. They OMITTED all Jews (and the smaller number of Gypsies) selected for gas chambers immediately upon arrival.” (Pg. 115)
He states, “Gerhart Riegner, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva… had been sending Washington … regular reports of Nazi atrocities and killings of Jews in Eastern Europe… After receiving Reigner’s telegram … on August 29, [Rabbi Stephen] Wise sent it to … Summer Welles, President Roosevelt’s number-two man in the State Department, with a cover letter vouching for Riegner… Welles urged Wise to refrain from any publicity until further investigation confirmed or refuted the story. Decades later, there would be harsh charges that Wise did not do enough in response to Riegner’s telegram. The criticism is… overstated; not all the critics paid attention to what Wise actually knew or did not know at the time… Wise adhered to Welles’s request and so did the other Jewish organizations.” (Pg. 139, 142)
He suggests, “the reality of widespread though limited anti-Semitism would help explain why a good number of Germans had helped the Gestapo to enforce racial laws from 1935 on or used the Gestapo to help settle scores against particular Jews by denouncing them for making negative comments about the Nazi regime… Still, the presence of widespread anti-Semitism did not mean that all Germans were eager and willing executioners.” (Pg. 159-160)
He recalls, “During 1941, Nazi public accusations had included that charge that American Jews had developed plans to sterilize all Germans under the age of sixty, so that virtually any punishment meted out to Jews would seem justified. While this particular claim might seem bizarre… threats of horrible treatment of all Germans upon Germany’s defeat, common in official Nazi propaganda … helped to keep the German people behind them and the government. They specifically cited the sterilization plan.” (Pg. 163)
He summarizes, “If Western governments had officially recognized Nazi extermination policy earlier, the calls for rescue and relief measures would have come earlier and have generated more political pressure.” (Pg. 176) But he also suggests, “popular anti-Semitism had some influence on police behavior, as it had … on German public reaction to the influx of information about genocide. But the authorities also heavily relied on … deception and secrecy in handling both the police and the German public. If all German police had been ‘willing executioners,’ there would have been less official concern and far less urgency behind the push toward the use of gas chambers as a means of mass murder.” (Pg. 226)
He concludes, “the record generally shows that in 1942 and 1943 the U.S. government and the British government did not try to do what might have worked. This makes it very difficult, long after the fact, to demonstrate that saving more Jews had been impossible.” (Pg. 233)
He laments, “It would be nice to be able to conclude that the Allied governments, recognizing that they had given insufficient attention to the Holocaust during the war, had finally opened all their files about World War II and the Holocaust to scholars. As of this writing, however, they have not done so… Governments that withhold critical information from the historical record and the public long after the events do their countries and the world no service. But the habit of secrecy is very hard to break. No democratic politician or official can in the end control future assessments of him or her by historians, but the longer the critical sources are kept secret, the longer such control is possible.” (Pg. 245-246)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying Western responses to the Holocaust.
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