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HIGHLIGHTS

Secret Intelligence and the Holocaust
Edited by David Bankier

In recent years, thousands of pages of Holocaust-era intelligence documents from dozens of government archives have been declassified and made available to researchers. These documents shed light on some significant questions related to the Holocaust: When did the Allies first learn about the mass murder of millions of Jews at the hands of the Nazis? How did this information made its way to the top levels of power in the United States and elsewhere? What did senior officials do with these reports, and could more have been done to prevent the Holocaust?

These were among the many questions explored at a conference held at the City University of New York in June 2003. Leading scholars of the Holocaust and World War II presented papers exploring how Allied intelligence agencies learned about Nazi plans for the “Final Solution” through their networks of spies, codebreakers, and analysts. These papers, collected in the book Secret Intelligence and the Holocaust, shed light on the uses and limitations of wartime intelligence gathering and the role these services played in potential rescue attempts. The essays also support the opinion that information collected by intelligence services can serve as evidence of atrocities when no other official archival documentation about those events is available.

Research for many of these essays was conducted using previously-unavailable intelligence records recently declassified by the United States under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1999. Many never-before-published documents are reproduced in this volume.

379 pages
illustrations
Published by Enigma Books (New York) and Yad Vashem (Jerusalem)
ISBN: 1-929631-60-X (pbk.)
Call no: D 810 .S7 S33 2006

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface	ix
Acknowledgements	xiv

The Holocaust and Intelligence Documents Gerhard L. Weinberg	1
Intelligence and the Holocaust Richard Breitman	17
How Ultra and Magic Intelligence About the Holocaust was Disseminated in the United States During World War II Robert Hanyok	49
OSS X-2 and Rescue Efforts During the Holocaust Shlomo Aronson	65
Istanbul 1942-1945: The Kollek-Avriel and Berman-Ofner Networks Tuvia Friling105
True Confessions: Allied Intelligence, German Prisoners, and Nazi Murders Norman J.W. Goda	157
The French Military Secret Services and the Holocaust, 1940-1945: Omission, Blindness, or Failure? Sébastien Laurent	171
The Best Information Service in Europe?: Vatican Intelligence and the Final Solution David Alvarez	187
Adolf Eichmann: New Information from British Signals Intelligence Stephen Tyas	213
An NKVD Residentura (Residency) in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1941-42 Piotr Wróbel	245
Foreign Intelligence in a New Paradigm: Amt VI of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) Katrin Paehler	273
Confessions of Wrong-doing, or, How to Save Yourself from the Hangman?: An Analysis of British and American Intelligence Reports of the Activities of SS-Einsatzgruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, May-December 1945 Hilary Earl	301
Police Auxiliaries for Operation Reinhard: Shedding Light on the Trawniki Training Camp Through Documents from Behind the Iron Curtain Peter R. Black	327
List of Contributors	367
Index	370