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

Breitman, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809038196 ISBN 13: 9780809038190

Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub, 1998

Synopsis

Examines evidence of Nazi war crimes gathered by British intelligence

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 is professor of history at American University, editor in chief of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and the author of a biography of Heinrich Himmler. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife and family.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0809038196
• ISBN 13: 9780809038190
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 325