THE ALLIES WERE AWARE THE HOLOCAUST WAS UNDERWAY AS EARLY AS 1943, ACCORDING TO NEWLY REVEALED UN WAR CRIMES FILES. THEY WERE PREPARING TO INDICT HITLER AND OTHERS ‘LONG BEFORE D-DAY.’
UN files point to early knowledge of Holocaust
Kept secret for nearly 70 years, a trove of United Nations war crimes files made public this week contains early evidence of Nazi death camps that was smuggled out of Eastern Europe into Allied hands.
“It was unknown that the Allies prepared prosecutions of Adolf Hitler and the rest of the Nazis for the death camps in Europe while the Nazis were still in power and while they were still running occupied Europe,” says British historian Dan Plesch, whose new book Human Rights After Hitler delves into the files of the UN War Crimes Commission (UNWCC).
“There are many such dossiers of legally prepared indictments of Hitler and other Nazis for many of their crimes, including the extermination of the Jews, and these were drawn up long before D-Day.”
Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London, said in an interview that as early as 1942, Allied leaders publicly condemned a Nazi project to exterminate Jews that they knew was underway.
The full extent of the Holocaust, which killed six million Jews, was revealed when concentration camps were liberated in the final stages of the Second World War, but the Polish government in exile had earlier provided descriptions of atrocities in camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka.
Plesch said that the early evidence suggests that in 1942 and 1943, more could have been done to rescue Jews from the Nazis by using escape routes through France and the Balkans — parts of Europe that were not yet under Nazi control.
“You can’t say that people didn’t know,” Plesch said. “They did know and still didn’t act.” And once the war was over, he added, “there was a great deal more evidence and a great deal more that could have been done to prosecute than was done.”
Allied states including Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. created the UNWCC in 1943 and co-operated on the investigation of more than 36,000 international criminal cases between 1943 and 1948. Plesch writes in Human Rights After Hitler that an American shift in emphasis from punishing Nazis to combating communism led to the closing of the UNWCC.
“The commission’s files contained indictments against thousands of Nazis who were then allowed to go free,” he writes. While people remember the trials of top Nazi officials at Nuremberg, the UNWCC’s pursuit of underlings has been largely forgotten.
At the urging of U.S. intelligence officials, the UNWCC files were classified and public access was prohibited. More recently, researchers were granted access on the condition that they not take notes. Plesch led an effort to persuade diplomats to release the secret material.
He said he stumbled upon the vast archive when he found reference to a UNWCC form outlining charges brought by Canada against SS commander Kurt Meyer. Meyer was convicted of ordering the 1944 murders of 20 Canadian prisoners of war.
Plesch said the evidence of war crimes in the files “provides a whole hardware store of nails to hammer in the coffin of Holocaust denial. This is a huge trove of prosecutions of the Holocaust from during World War II, legally authorized documentation.”
He said the archive also offers a lesson today as atrocities continue to be committed in Syria and elsewhere.
“They had a very effective, low-cost system for prosecuting low-level perps, and we badly need something like that today,” he said.
“If they could be taking evidence from people escaping from under the jackboot of the SS, why aren’t we doing the same when it comes to people escaping from Syria?”