New documents reveal what U.S. government knew about Nazi death camps before World War 2

Henry Ford receiving Nazi Grand Cross

According to documents newly released by the United Nations prove that the Allied Powers of the Second World War were well aware of Germany’s National Socialist program of exterminating Jews at least two-and-a-half years earlier than was previously believed. However, despite having that knowledge, the United States and the eventual allies in the war against totalitarian Germany, Italy, and Japan did nothing to halt the Holocaust.

Not seen in more than 70 years, the documents showed that at the same time the United States, United Kingdom, and Russia had prepared indictments against dictator Adolf Hitler and his subordinates on charges of war crimes. A year before the U.S. entered the world war, the federal government was aware that Hitler’s Third Reich had already murdered two million Jews in Europe and was planning to murder five million more in purpose-built extermination camps throughout the continent, the records showed.

On its website, Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum stated that the “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.”

“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.”

The U.S. and its allies did little to halt the systematic murders. Indeed, IBM was providing its computational expertise to the extermination efforts and had an office at the Auschwitz death camp. Other American business involvement with the Third Reich included General Motors’ Opel division, which provided its “Blitz” trucks to Germany’s Wehrmacht.  (more...)

New documents reveal what U.S. government knew about Nazi death camps before World War 2