Opening of UN files on Holocaust will

'rewrite chapters of history'

Archive used in prosecution of Nazis reveals detailed evidence of death camps and genocide
previously unseen by public

Opening of UN files on Holocaust will

'rewrite chapters of history'
Archive used in prosecution of Nazis reveals detailed evidence of death camps and genocide

Owen Bowcott Legal affairs correspondent

@owenbowcott

Tuesday 18 April 2017 00.01 BST Last modified on Tuesday 18 April 2017 10.42 BST

War crimes files revealing early evidence of Holocaust death camps that was smuggled out of
eastern Europe are among tens of thousands of files to be made public for the first time this
week.

The once-inaccessible archive of the UN war crimes commission, dating back to 1943, is
being opened by the Wiener Library in London with a catalogue that can be searched online.

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The files establish that some of the first demands for justice came from countries that had
been invaded, such as Poland and China, rather than Britain, the US and Russia, which
eventually coordinated the post-war Nuremberg trials.

The archive, along with the UNWCC, was closed in the late 1940s as West Germany was
transformed into a pivotal ally at the start of the cold war and use of the records was
effectively suppressed. Around the same time, many convicted Nazis were granted early

1
release after the anti-communist US senator Joseph McCarthy lobbied to end war crimes
trials.

Access to the vast quantity of evidence and indictments is timed to coincide with the
publication on Tuesday of Human Rights After Hitler: The Lost History of Prosecuting Axis
War Crimes by Dan Plesch, a researcher who has been working on the documents for a
decade.

The documents record the gathering of evidence shortly after the UN was founded in January
1942. They demonstrate that rape and forced prostitution were being prosecuted as war crimes
in tribunals as far apart as Greece, the Philippines and Poland in the late 1940s, despite more
recent suggestions that this was a legal innovation following the 1990s Bosnian conflict.

The Polish government in exile, the files also record, supplied extraordinarily detailed
descriptions to the UNWCC of concentration camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz, where
millions of Jews were gassed. The accounts had been smuggled out of occupied eastern
Europe. A charge sheet from April 1944 mention victims being forced to strip off clothing
and how “the terracotta floors in the chambers … became very slippery when wet”.

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The Wiener Library was founded in Amsterdam in 1934 by Dr Alfred Wiener to monitor Nazi
antisemitism. He shipped his collection to London on the eve of the second world war, then
worked with the British government to inform officials about Hitler’s regime and provide
evidence for the Nuremberg trials.

Now based in Bloomsbury, central London, the library supports study of the Holocaust and
genocide. It also works with the International Tracing Service to provide free help to those
searching for relatives who vanished into the concentration camps.

“The UN War Crimes Commission catalogue, which can be searched online, will be available
through our website this week,” the library’s archivist, Howard Falksohn, said. “People will
then be able to come in and look through the archive itself.

“We anticipate a lot of interest. Some of the PDF files [on to which the 900GB UN archive
has been copied] each contain more than 2,000 pages. This is the first time they will be
available to anyone in the UK. It may well be that people will be able to rewrite crucial
chapters of history using the new evidence.”

2
Plesch, who is the director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at Soas in
the University of London, had to get special permission to read the documents, which were
closely guarded by the UN in New York.

Only researchers who received authority from their government and consent from the UN
secretary general were allowed to read them, and they were not allowed to take notes or
copies. Plesch helped persuade diplomats, including the then US ambassador at the UN,
Samantha Power, to release the secret material.

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“This is a huge resource for combating Holocaust denial,” Plesch said. “The German national
authorities were never given access to the archive by the allies after the war. All of this has
never seen the light of day.”

Some of the earliest files of evidence were collected to indict Adolf Hitler directly for his role
in the coordinating and controlling massacres carried out by Nazi units in Czechoslovakia.
Much of the evidence was collected by the Czech government in exile. There are more than
300 pages detailing his orders and responsibilities. The Nazi leader was eventually indicted in
secret by a meeting of the UNWCC in late 1944 as Luftwaffe bombs fell on London.

One affidavit in the files is from a British soldier, Harry Ogden, who was captured at Narvik
in Norway in 1940, escaped from a prisoner of war camp to join Polish partisans and was re-
imprisoned in another POW camp alongside Auschwitz.

By the late 1940s, the US and British governments were winding down prosecutions of Nazis.
President Harry Truman made anti-communism, rather than holding Nazis to account, a
priority, Plesch says. “Even action against the perpetrators of the massacre of British RAF
officers attempting to escape from prison camp Stalag Luft III, a flight made iconic by films
such as The Great Escape, was curtailed.”

Allied forces knew about Holocaust two

years before discovery of concentration
camps, secret documents reveal

3
7/24

The Independent
Andrew Buncombe9 hrs ago

© Provided by Independent Print Limited The Allied Powers were aware of the scale of the
Jewish Holocaust two-and-a-half years earlier that is generally assumed, and had even
prepared war crimes indictments against Adolf Hitler and his top Nazi commanders.

Newly accessed material from the United Nations - not seen for around 70 years - shows that
as early as December 1942, the US, UK and Soviet governments were aware that at least two
millions Jews had been murdered, that a further five million were at risk of being killed and
were preparing charges. Despite this, the Allied Powers did very little to try and rescue or
provide sanctuary to those in mortal danger.

Indeed, in March 1943, Viscount Cranborne, a minister in the war cabinet of Winston
Churchill, said the Jews should not be considered a special case and that the British Empire
was already too full of refugees to offer a safe haven to any more.

4
 ©
Provided by Independent Print Limited Several countries indicted Hitler and other senior Nazi leaders
for war crimes (UNWCC) “The major powers commented [on the mass murder of Jews] two-and-
a-half years before it is generally assumed,” Dan Plesch, author of the newly
published Human Rights After Hitler, told The Independent.

“It was assumed they learned this when they discovered the concentration camps, but they
made this public comment in December 1942.”

Mr Plesch, a professor at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS
University of London, said the major powers began drawing up war crimes charges based on
witness testimony smuggled from the camps and from the resistance movements in various
countries occupied by the Nazis. Among his discoveries, were documents indicting Hitler for
war crimes dating from 1944.

In late December 1942, after the US, UK and others issued a public declaration about the
Jewish slaughter, UK Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the British parliament: “The
German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories
over which their barbarous rule extends, the most elementary human rights, are now carrying
into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people.”

Mr Plesch said that despite the collection of evidence and the prosecution of hundreds of
Nazis - a judicial process that has been overshadowed by the trial of the Nazi leadership at
Nuremberg - the Allied Powers did little to try and help those in peril. He said efforts by
President Franklin D Roosevelt’s envoy to the United Nations War Crimes Commission
(UNWCC), Herbert Pell, were pushed back by anti-semites in the US State Department.

Mr Pell would later claim that individuals within the State Department were concerned that
America’s economic relationship with Germany after the war would be damaged if such
prosecutions went ahead. After Mr Pell went public with the scandal, the State Department
agreed to the prosecution of the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg, something that gathered pace
after the highly publicised liberation of the concentration camps in the summer of 1945.

5
“Among the reason given by the US and British policy makers for curtailing prosecutions of
Nazis was the understanding that at least some of them would be needed to rebuild Germany
and confront Communism, which at the time was seen as a greater danger,” writes Mr Plesch.

Mr Plesch said the archive on which he based his research was closed to researchers for 70
years. Those wishing to read the UNWCC archive required the permission not only of the
person’s own national government, but the UN Secretary General. Even then, researchers
were for several years not permitted to make notes.

Former US UN Ambassador Samantha Powers took the action that made the archive
available.

Mr Plesch said that new material provided a further “cartload of nails to hammer into the
coffins” of Holocaust denial – not that further evidence was required.

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance memorial in Israel, says on its website that
“information regarding mass murders of Jews began to reach the free world soon after these
actions began in the Soviet Union in late June 1941, and the volume of such reports increased
with time”.

It refers to the December 1942 declaration condemning the extermination of Jewish people.

“Notwithstanding this, it remains unclear to what extent Allied and neutral leaders understood
the full import of their information,” it adds. “The utter shock of senior Allied commanders
who liberated camps at the end of the war may indicate that this understanding was not
complete.”