The World Jewish Congress today published a study tracing the history of the Nazi campaign against the Jews from its earliest stages of discrimination, through plans for the wholesale removal of Jews from Europe, to the “final solution”–mass murder. The study was compiled on the basis of evidence introduced at the Nuremberg trials but not previously published in popular form.
Gen. Telford Taylor, chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trial, in a preface to the study, dispels the conception that the Nazi mass murders of Jews were conducted in secrecy. “The idea that the ‘final solution’ was a deep secret, known only to Hitler, Himmler and the SS special units is a myth,” he declares.
Gen. Taylor discusses the role of various strata of German society in the Nazis genocidal activities including the medical profession, chemists, industrialists and bankers, diplomats and the military, revealing that all these professions were deeply implicated in the Nazi campaign, and that the entire German population bears a deep moral responsibility for the gas chambers, concentration camps and crematoria which were the instruments of mass murder of millions of Jews.
Dr. Nehemiah Robinson, director of the W. J. C. Institute of Jewish Affairs, in an introduction to the study published under the title “From Discrimination to Annihilation,” warns against the dangers of neo-Nazi recrudescence in Germany. He expresses the opinion that one of the roots of the present rise of neo-Nazism lies in the failure to implement fully the denazification program in either West or East Germany, owing to the split between East and West and the competitive efforts to attract the support of Germans. The study was prepared by Anatole Goldstein.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
