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Location: USA
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U.S. tipped to Holocaust in '42

Fri May 14, 6:08 AM ET

By Richard Willing, USA TODAY

U.S. intelligence officials learned within months of the U.S. entry into World War II
that Nazi Germany planned mass killings to eliminate Jews, scholars reviewing
newly declassified reports said Thursday.

But the U.S. government gave the information low priority in August 1942, the scholars
concluded, not acknowledging that Germany had a plan to exterminate Jews until six
months later. (Related site: National Archives group)

"It was an intelligence failure," said Richard Breitman, an American University Holocaust
historian who studied the documents. "The early information was not assimilated or
used correctly."

Breitman was part of a team of scholars, citizens and government officials who reviewed
more than 240,000 pages of documents at the National Archives related to Nazi and
other World War II-era crimes. The material was from files of the FBI , CIA and its predecessor,
the Office of Strategic Services.

The documents show a federal intelligence unit was formed to interview Jews who
immigrated from Axis countries in 1941 and 1942. One, Joseph Goldschmied, described how Germans
seized money and property from Jews in his hometown, Prague, Czechoslovakia, and sent thousands
to die in the Theresienstadt detention camp.

"If Hitler remains true to his program of destroying all European Jewry - he will have achieved this
goal soon," Goldschmied said in August 1942.

The scholars said the declassified documents also show:

• The CIA recruited as intelligence sources 23 Germans who appeared to have perpetrated
war crimes.

• The U.S. Army protected an additional 100 German spies, including their leader Reinhard Gehlen,
who had knowledge of Soviet Russia.

• The FBI and CIA helped Nazis or Nazi collaborators with intelligence value elude war-crimes
prosecution.

• The agencies pressured the Immigration and Naturalization Service to let war criminals
working with American authorities resettle in the USA.

American intelligence recruited the ex-Nazis in the Cold War fight against communism, some
documents show. The professors say many of the ex-Nazis had little long-term value.

The documents include a previously unknown description of a tea party hosted by Adolf Hitler
on July 20, 1944, that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini attended. Hours earlier, Hitler had
just missed being assassinated by a bomb planted by some of his senior officers.

The firsthand account from a translator, said Hitler gobbled candy-colored pills and raved for a half-hour
"in a fit of frenzy" with "foam on his lips," questioning whether "the German people are worthy
of my great ideas."

"I don't know why I didn't go over to the Allies there and then," said the translator, Eugen Dollmann,
in a conversation after his capture in 1945.

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