Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew - Softcover

Breitman, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809001845 ISBN 13: 9780809001842

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 1999

Synopsis

An important new work based on newly declassified archives.

As defeat loomed over the Third Reich in 1945, its officials tried to destroy the physical and documentary evidence about the Nazis' monstrous crimes, about their murder of millions. Great Britain already had some of the evidence, however, for its intelligence services had for years been intercepting, decoding, and analyzing German police radio messages and SS ones, too. Yet these important papers were sealed away as "Most Secret," "Never to Be Removed from This Office"-and they have only now reappeared.Integrating this new evidence with other sources, Richard Breitman reconsiders how Germany's leaders brought about the Holocaust-and when-and reassesses Britain's and America's suppression of information about the Nazi killings. His absorbing account of the tensions between the two powers and the consequences of keeping this information secret for so long shows us the danger of continued government secrecy, which serves none of us well, and the failure to punish many known war criminals.

About this title

Review:

Historians have long debated whether the origins of the Holocaust can be traced to a German tradition of anti-Semitism that Adolf Hitler was able to channel to his advantage (a view taken by Daniel Goldhagen in his book Hitler's Willing Executioners), or whether, instead, the mass murder of Europe's Jewish population was the byproduct of the Nazi war against neighboring states (Christopher Browning's position in Ordinary Men). In Official Secrets, American University historian Richard Breitman proposes an explanation that lies somewhere in between: whereas most ordinary Germans approved of the persecution of Jews, he maintains, the German leadership nonetheless took pains to keep the facts of the Final Solution out of the public eye, fearful that those ordinary Germans might not have approved of wholesale slaughter. Widening the scope of his inquiry, Breitman points out that the Holocaust was well mapped out in the pages of Mein Kampf, which the Allied leaders had studied well before war broke out. Those leaders also knew, thanks to detailed intelligence reports and intercepted German radio messages, of the existence of extermination camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka. Breitman examines why the Allies did so little to oppose the Holocaust as it unfolded--or, as he puts it, why "the U.S. government and the British government did not try to do what might have worked." His thoughtful answers are likely to excite further debate among historians. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author:

Richard Breitman, professor of history at American University, is the author of Architect of Genocide, a biography of Himmler. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0809001845
• ISBN 13: 9780809001842
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336