Sub-title: What the Nazis Planned - What the British and Americans Knew.
This book deals with what is an emotive subject and that is, what exactly did the Allies know about the Holocaust.
Churchill in parliament was recorded saying,
Quote:
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" I have this morning received an informal message from General Eisenhower saying that the new discoveries, particularly at Weimar, far 'surpass anything-previously exposed. He invites me to send a body of Members of Parliament at once to his Headquarters in order that they may themselves have ocular and first-hand proof of these atrocities. The matter is of urgency. . . . I have come to the conclusion that eight Members of this House and two Members of the House of Lords should form a Parliamentary Delegation, and should travel out at once to the Supreme Headquarters. . . . Photographs will be shown of the Members in these gruesome scenes. . . . The object of this visit is to find out the truth. . . ." (Official Report, Cols. 390-391.)
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Taken from
Buchenwald Camp - the Report of the Parliamentary Delegation CMD 6626 (This author’s collection)
The above quote gives an example of what was publicly announced and what was privately known through intelligence sources and this is subject undertaken by Brietman. He uses as his source material the various declassified decrypts from both sides of the Atlantic.
The evidence that he produces is at time gruesome as they include details of the death totals of various Aktions and Einsatzgruppen activities. Dr R V Jones in his book,
Most Secret War, gives an example of what use these figures were routinely put to be the Nazis, in Jones’s case, it was to help encipher the test results of V1 rockets.
However, it is clear that the Allied government knew more than they would freely admit to, and this causes problems, because it raises the question of why they did not do anything about it. Why not bomb the camps, the trains, the killing grounds? To those of us who study the Holocaust then theses are questions that have be answered and Brietman goes some way towards answering them from official sources.
As for the information released to the public, I have a book called
I was Hitler's Prisoner by Stefan Lorant, who spend time in a pre war concentration camp published in 1935.
Brietmans book is a good study book for one aspect of the Holocaust which has still to be thoroughly researched.