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your Hitler index your Goebbels index your Heydrich index your Himmler index Hitler “expert” Prof. Jäckel your Wannsee conference file Alphabetical index (text) June 27, 2000 Allies Knew of Plan for Italy’s Jews By Michael Dobbs Washington Post Staff Writer The message from Nazi security headquarters, as deciphered by Allied code-breakers, was blunt and chilling.
Despite the reservations of some German officials in Rome, Nazi leaders were determined to push ahead with “the immediate and thorough eradication of Jews in Italy.”
Released yesterday at the National Archives as part of a massive effort to declassify World War II war crimes records, the decrypted Nazi message of October 1943 shows for the first time that the Allies had extensive and almost contemporaneous intelligence on the Nazi roundup of Italian Jews, thanks to Britain’s Enigma code-breaking operation.
It provided new evidence in a long-running debate on what the Allies knew about the Holocaust at the time and whether anything could have been done to prevent the murders of millions of Jews. The intercepted intelligence messages were circulated to a small group of British officials, including Prime Minister Winston Churchill , and also were swiftly relayed to the U.S. government.
Although Churchill was an avid consumer of raw Enigma intelligence, it is not known whether he or anyone of authority in Washington read these particular reports. Historians described the release of 400,000 pages of material — from the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency — as a major step for understanding the secret war between the Allies and Nazi Germany.
The documents include some of the most closely guarded secrets of the war, dealing with OSS sources and methods, the so-called “crown jewels” of the American wartime intelligence operation.
While hailing the documents’ release, which was made possible by the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, historians and some U.S. officials expressed frustration over the protracted declassification process. “We are encountering some very disturbing truths” with the release of these documents, said Eli Rosenbaum , director of the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting office. “Too much has been kept secret for too long.”
Among troubling questions raised by the documents is why Allied prosecutors failed to bring war crimes charges against SS General Karl Wolff , who played a key role in the deportation of thousands of Italian Jews. There has been speculation that the Allies permitted Wolff to go free because of his contacts with Allen Dulles , the Eisenhower-era CIA chief who then was serving as an OSS agent in Switzerland, and because of Wolff’s role in arranging the Nazi surrender in Italy.
Wolff was held in an Allied internment camp until he was released in 1949. He lived outside Munich until he was arrested in 1962 in connection with the deaths of 300,000 Jews at the Treblinka death camp.
He was tried in West Germany and sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. “This raises some very difficult moral questions,” said Elizabeth Holtzman , a former U.S. congresswoman and one of the authors of the war crimes declassification law. “Was this the beginning of an effort to protect Nazi war criminals after the war?”
The OSS documents are expected to shed more light on the extent to which successive U.S. governments made use of former Nazis such as Wolff in waging a new intelligence war against the Soviet Union and its communist allies. Previously declassified records have shown that the Allies recruited hundreds of high-ranking German scientists and helped some SS officials leave Europe for South America in return for their cooperation.
While historians have known that British cryptographers succeeded in breaking the SS security service code in the summer of 1943, the content of messages dealing with deportation of Italian Jews was previously classified. The messages were typically deciphered within three or four days. An OSS officer stationed at Bletchley Park, the British code-breaking headquarters, had access to the messages as soon as they were deciphered and transmitted them