 Friday May 14, 2004
U.S.
tipped to Holocaust in '42 By Richard Willing
USA TODAY U.S. intelligence
officials learned within months of the
U.S. entry into World War II that Nazi
Germany planned mass killings to eliminate
Jews,
scholars
reviewing newly declassified reports said
Thursday. But the U.S. government gave the
information low priority in August 1942,
the scholars concluded, not acknowledging
that Germany had a plan to exterminate
Jews until six months later.  David
Irving comments: ALL of this
may be news to scholar Richard
Breitmann, if not to my old
friend Bob Wolfe, but
these documents have been in the
public domain for many years --
though not in the archives
Breitman is referring to.
I read
the Eugen Dollmann report
in about 1970. I also interviewed
Dollmann, who later owned a hotel
in Munich, at length for
Hitler's
War.
Theresienstadt
was not, of course, an
extermination camp and Breitman
knows it.
As for General
Reinhard Gehlen, head of
Fremde Heere Ost in WW2 and
later chief of the federal German
foreign Intelligence service, he
revealed his work for the
Americans in detail in his
memoirs, The Service,
which I translated for
publication in 1970.  |
"It was an intelligence failure," said
Richard Breitman, an American
University Holocaust historian who studied
the documents. "The early information was
not assimilated or used correctly."Breitman was part of a team of
scholars,
citizens and government officials who
reviewed more than 240,000 pages of
documents at the National Archives related
to Nazi and other World War II-era crimes.
The material was from files of the FBI,
CIA and its predecessor, the Office of
Strategic Services. The documents show a federal
intelligence unit was formed to interview
Jews who immigrated from Axis countries in
1941 and 1942. One, Joseph
Goldschmied, described how Germans
seized money and property from Jews in his
hometown, Prague, Czechoslovakia, and sent
thousands to die in the Theresienstadt
detention camp. "If Hitler remains true to his program
of destroying all European Jewry - he will
have achieved this goal soon," Goldschmied
said in August 1942. The scholars said the declassified
documents also show: - The CIA recruited as intelligence
sources 23 Germans who appeared to have
perpetrated war crimes.
- The U.S. Army protected an
additional 100 German spies, including
their leader Reinhard Gehlen,
who had knowledge of Soviet
Russia.
- The FBI and CIA helped Nazis or
Nazi collaborators with intelligence
value elude war-crimes
prosecution.
- The agencies pressured the
Immigration and Naturalization Service
to let war criminals working with
American authorities resettle in the
USA.
American intelligence recruited the
ex-Nazis in the Cold War fight against
communism, some documents show. The
professors say many of the ex-Nazis had
little long-term value. The documents include a previously
unknown [sic.
not so] description of a tea
party hosted by Adolf Hitler on
July 20, 1944, that Italian dictator
Benito Mussolini attended. Hours
earlier, Hitler had just missed being
assassinated by a bomb planted by some of
his senior officers.  Robert
Wolfe, formerly of the National
Archives, second from left, is joined
by fellow contributors, to discuss
their work 'U.S. Intelligence and the
Nazis,' Thursday, May 13, 2004 in
Washington. From left: American
University history professor Richard
Breitman; Wolfe; University of Virginia
Associate Professor Timothy Naftali;
and Ohio University Associate Professor
of History Norman Goda. The firsthand account from a translator
said Hitler gobbled candy-colored pills
and raved for a half-hour "in a fit of
frenzy" with "foam on his lips,"
questioning whether "the German people are
worthy of my great ideas." "I don't know why I didn't go over to
the Allies there and then," said the
translator, Eugen Dollmann, in a
conversation after his capture in
1945. 
Hitler's
Germany donated 53 Million Crowns to
the Bank of Jewish Self-determination
in Theresienstadt-
Survivor
states ("to avoid the increasingly
frequent accusation that world Jewry
exaggerates the Holocaust") that
Theresienstadt was an organized ghetto
and not an extermination camp
-
New
book: US intelligence often used former
"Nazis"
|
write to David
Irving