British military intelligence knew as early as July 18, 1941 the daily details of the Nazis’ “final solution” against Soviet Jews as well as the mass killings of Russian soldiers and other non-Jewish Soviet peoples. British code breaking operations — called ULTRA and Triangle — were immediately distributed to Prime Minister Winston Churchill as well as to the French and, possibly, American intelligence.
These revelations are contained in a detailed article by Charles Allen, Jr. in the spring issue of Reform Judaism, the nationally circulated magazine of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, that will be out in June. An advance copy of the article was made available to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Allen is a journalist who is internationally known for his work on Nazi war criminals and their utilization by American intelligence agencies. Last month he wrote a three-part series for the JTA on gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, the “butcher of Lyon,” and how American intelligence aided his escape in 1951 to Latin America. The series, which was given world wide distribution by the press, radio and TV, also detailed the help Barbie received at the time from the Vatican and the International Red Cross as well as his later employment by the CIA.
EVIDENCE FOR THE REVELATION
Allen’s evidence for his article in Reform Judaism was gathered from a little-read series of massively detailed studies called “British Intelligence in the Second World War” (1981). Some of the major findings are:
* Item: “Between 18 July and 30 August 1941 (Ordnungspolizei/SS) police decrypts (British deciphering of the SS secret code) on at least seven occasions gave details of mass shootings in the central sector (of European Russia) of victims variously described as ‘Jews,’ ‘Jewish plunderers,’ or ‘Russian soldiers’ in numbers varying from less than a hundred to several thousand.’
* Item: “On 7 August 1941, the SS Cavalry Brigade reported that it had carried out 7,819 ‘executions’ to date in the Minsk area…”
* Item: “… on the same day (7 August 1941), von dem Bach (General der Waffen-SS Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, later in charge of all Nazi anti-Partisan and anti-Jewish warfare), commander of the police in the central sector, reported that 30,000 executions had been carried out since the police arrived in Russia ….”
* Item: “… on September 12, 1941 … near Ovruch, Police Regiment South disposed of 1,255 Jews ‘according to the usage of war’.”
British decrypts of Nazi Army, SS and collaborator military-police units revealed the details of massive impressment of Soviet citizens for slave labor in the Third Reich.
The study — Appendix V in Volume Two of the three-volume set — also shows that daily information on “the daily return of prisoners at Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and seven other concentration camps” were carefully logged by British intelligence which kept population rosters on the camps from 1942.
Significant reductions in camp populations were accounted for “primarily by deaths.” In Auschwitz, the British (incorrectly) inferred from the reports, “illness” was the “main cause of deaths, but (this) included … shootings and hangings.”
The study stated: “There were no references in the (SS police) decrypts to gassing.” As the years passed, references to the concentration and death camps became “infrequent.”
As early as the fall of 1941, an SS chief in Berlin “warned police commanders throughout Russia that there was a danger that matters of great secrecy, such as the exact number of executions, might be deciphered by the enemy.” This alarm neither deterred the Nazis nor prompted the British (French and Americans) to reveal the “terrible secret.”
SAYS HOLOCAUST STUDIES WILL NEED REWRITING
Allen wrote in Reform Judaism that virtually all of the authoritative studies on the Holocaust will have to undergo “considerable rewriting” for having “failed to take into account the certain and earliest knowledge that was (and remains) contained in ULTRA and Triangle.”
Allen concluded: “Looming even larger and far more scandalous than the Allied failure to bomb the rail lines into Auschwitz are the ‘terrible secrets’ of ULTRA and Triangle which, if fully released, will unleash a veritable hurricane in the post-Holocaust world.”
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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.
