Wartime codebreakers missed clues to Holocaust

[emad]

Jamie Wilson in Washington
Monday August 1, 2005
The Guardian

Coded Nazi messages intercepted by Britain could have exposed the scope of the Holocaust years before the liberation of the death camps, but Allied codebreakers failed to fully understand the information they had, according to United States government analysis of intelligence from the era.

In what is being likened to the intelligence failures before the September 11 attacks, German military and police communications from as early as 1941 provided lurid but fragmentary accounts of the massacres and deportations, and later even statistics on the numbers killed in concentration camps.


According to the report titled Eavesdropping on Hell, by Robert Hanyok, a historian with the National Security Agency's centre for cryptologic history, British and US efforts to sort evidence were hampered by case backlogs and a shortage of translators, as well as the two allies' reluctance to share information about German communications.

According to a summary of the report in the New York Times, one of the most harrowing messages codebreakers overlooked was intercepted on January 11 1943 and detailed the 1,274,166 Jews killed under Operation Reinhard at four death camps - Lublin, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka - during 1942.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1540193,00.html

[leveymg]

1. They knew more than they'll ever admit, in both cases. n/t

[Talismom]

2. Right! And people will be more than happy to believe them. n/t

[Johnyawl]

3. What could the allies have done...

...even if they'd managed to put it all together and realized what the Nazis were doing?

Even in mid '42 Britain was barely hanging on, they'd just lost the battle of Tobruk, Rommel was pushing them back across north Africa, and driving towards the Suez canal. The Soviets were getting their butts kicked, driven deep back into their own territory; the siege of Stalingrad(which was the turning point on the eastern front) was just starting. The US was still trying to get on a total war footing, rushing ill trained and ill equiped military forces into battle from New Guinea to north Africa. Both Germany and Japan would remain on the offensive until 1943, when the allies would start scoring significant victories on all fronts, and begin to roll them back.

So what could they have done with that information? Not a damn thing. Those camps were in the heart of German controlled territory, and Britain, the US and the USSR would have to fight their way in to take control of them and put a stop to the horror. And that's just what they did, in 1945. Which was as quickly as they could get there.

[Kraklen]

4. What could they have done?

Offered Jews asylum for one thing.

[Johnyawl]

10. It was too late by the time they were getting these messages

We were already at war. The time for offering the Jews asylum was in the '30s. Which we did on a limited basis, but then no one knew, or could even imagine, what the Nazis were about to undertake.

[wrlwnd]

5. They could have done a lot

Including easily disabling the railroad lines to Auschwitz and Treblinka in 1944.

[newyawker99]

7. Hi wrlwnd!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[Johnyawl]

11. Yes, that's the one thing we could have done in '44 & '45

We had air superiority, and were bombing Germany pretty much at will. It would have at least slowed down the death rate.

[jmowreader]

13. They would have found other ways...

to kill their victims.

Okay, let's play what-if: What if we would have been able to destroy all of the rail lines leading to Auschwitz? They would have increased the murder rate at other camps (a Nazi-style gas chamber is not hard to construct--just block up all the windows in a barracks and cut a hole in the ceiling to insert the Zyklon B), changed to other forms of transport like trucks, or began German versions of the Bataan Death March.

If you were going to use bombs to stop the killing at Auschwitz, you would have to bomb Auschwitz itself. You would have killed many innocent people (the ones who were laborers in Prescott Bush's chemical plant as well as the ones preparing to be murdered) but would have saved all those who might have come after them.

[moondust]

6. The Guardian article suggests

they could have bombed more railroad lines leading to the camps.

[Fescue4u]

8. Sounds like another case of LIHOP

nothing ever changes.

[wli]

9. everyone knows they knew the whole time and didn't care

It's a lot more callous than LIHOP even, though not quite MIHOP.

[SmokingJacket]

12. It's hard for some to believe anything is as bad as it actually is...

so often people are shocked, Shocked! that things turn out to be so horrible: Abu Ghraib and Rwanda are two examples off the top of my head.

So much easier to just assume everything is going along as normal...

Once you acknowledge the horror, you have to do something about it. Better just to look away...