Only 89 persons in Germany knew that Hitler’s “final solution” for the Jewish question was mass annihilation of the Jews, a former SS general, Gottlieb Berger, today told the court here which is trying former SS General Karl Wolff for the wartime murder of 300,000 Jews.
Berger said that he himself did not know that Jews were being exterminated “only because they were Jews,” believing they were being rounded up by the Nazis only for deportation to Madagascar. He said he found out about the Auschwitz mass murder program only in 1943. He declared that the “secret” of Hitler’s real aims against the Jews, and the names of the 89 who knew the facts in that regard, had been kept locked in a vault.
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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.
