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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.
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,’ 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.