Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Know

Breitman's important, dispassionate study adds to the already considerable body of evidence that Britain's top intelligence analysts knew, as early as September 1941, that the Germans were systematically carrying out mass murder of Jews in Nazi-occupied Soviet territories and planning their liquidation in the lands they conquered. Drawing on newly declassified British decodes of intercepted German police wireless-telegraphy messages, the author, an eminent Holocaust scholar and American University professor of history, establishes the crucial role of the battalions of the German Order Police, run by Gestapo bureaucrat Kurt Daluege, the arch-rival of Security Police chief Reinhard Heydrich. Breitman concludes that many police executioners obeyed the orders to murder Jews without compunction because they had long since internalized the pervasive anti-Semitic prejudice. In this respect, his study lends support to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, though Breitman qualifies this by arguing that while Jew-hatred was an integral part of 1930s Germany's political and social life, the Nazi regime had to reinforce and radicalize this prejudice in various sectors of society. Breitman also reviews the failure of both the British and Americans to rescue European Jewry and delivers a damning indictment of the U.S. news media for failing to make clear to the American people the true nature of Nazism. His meticulously documented study makes a compelling case that the Western powers could have made a significant difference in saving Jewish lives earlier, if the political will to do so had existed. Editor, Elisabeth Sifton. (Oct.)