The German slaughter of Jews during World War II may have begun long before anyone previously has believed.
According to newly available documents, British intelligence intercepted hundreds of German cables detailing the 1941 slaughter of at least 500,000 Russian Jews during the German invasion of Russia.
This was one year before the Nazis began the mass extermination of Jews in death camps.
The documents, which show that London knew about the mass murder of Jews as early as the summer of 1941, remain classified in Britain.
Richard Breitman, an American University history professor, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for 1.3 million pages of British intelligence information on the German cables. The cables are in the possession of the U.S. National Security Agency and can now, thanks to Breitman’s request, be found at the National Archives reading room in Washington.
In addition to providing a new glimpse at the German slaughter of Russian Jews during its 1941 invasion, the information bolsters theories that ordinary German police units willingly participated in the killing of Jews alongside the elite SS troops.
“In yesterday’s cleansing action in Slonim, carried out by Police regiment center,” one commander wrote July 18, 1941, “1,153 Jewish plunderers were shot.”
The document is one of the earliest known pieces of evidence on Germany’s execution of Jews.
“This shows a much wider range of units and individual participation in mass executions in the first phase of the Holocaust,” said Breitman, who plans to publish a book on his findings.
Additional information on the killings is expected to be available shortly at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Officials are sorting and cataloguing about 15,000 pages of information turned over last month by Russia that includes information on the same period.
While the British documents present only a partial history over a three-month period, during which British agents could decipher the German codes, the cables shed new light on the murder of hundreds of thousands.
One document Breitman reviewed from a German commander in Russia dated Aug. 7, 1941, reported that the “total number of executions in territory under my jurisdiction has now exceeded 30,000.”
Said Breitman in a telephone interview: “The British government had overwhelming evidence almost from the beginning of the Holocaust” that Jews were being killed in mass executions.
“The information had to have come to the United States during the war,” Breitman said, adding that the documents he has reviewed do not give a glimpse as to when Washington received the information.
Despite media reports to the contrary, Breitman said he does not believe that the new information will lead historians to conclude that 7 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
“This may raise the number of victims in the first phases of the Holocaust as we find reports we did not know about,” he said.
But challenging the widely held view that 6 million Jews died, he said, “Conservative scholarly estimates are in the rage of 5.1 to 5.2 million Jews” killed by the Nazis.
“There’s probably going to be a slight increase in the number of victims,” he said.
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