Journal Sample
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Reflection Sample:
Entry #1 "Allied Intelligence Intercepted Earlier Word of Holocaust", San Francisco Chronicle, Tuesday, July 3, 2001
According to the article in the SF Chronicle, the Allies may have known about the Nazi's plan to exterminate the Jews as early as March 1942. Previously, historians had generally believed that the Allies didn't learn until August of 1942 that the Jews were being exterminated.
The declassified document believed to have been obtained by the British and US intelligence in March, 1942 came from a Chilean envoy to Czechoslovakia who may have been working for German intelligence. The document described the Nazi policy towards the Jews.
Many questions have risen concerning this new information. Elizabeth Holzman, former US Congresswoman and member of the panel set up by the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 remarked, "the next question is why our government-not to mention the British-did nothing in response." Panel member Thomas Baer said, "warnings from the Allies to the Jews of Europe of a planned genocide never came...warnings would not have stopped the Holocaust, but they could have saved lives."
Richard Brietman, chief historian for the government agency overseeing declassification of wartime records at the National Archives and Records Adminstration responded to these scathing remarks by saying "why would an British or American official pay particular attention to the views of an unknown Chilean diplomat in Prague?" "In any case, both governments were so concerned about their formidable military problems that this item might have made no impression."
My observations
I question whether four months would have made much of a difference for the number of Jews and others who were victims of the Holocaust. I do question why the British and US intelligence did not pay attention to the Chilean envoy...was this again another example of Anglo superiority? Perhaps we thought that the Chilean envoy was not to be trusted or that the intelligence reports were not clearly written or accurate. Whatever our reason for ignoring this early warning, there is no excuse for our ignoring the warnings of August 1942, when according to what we discussed in class, ex-concentration camp inmates went to Britain and the US and gave eyewitness accounts of the atrocities that were happening. Even after this, we did nothing.
Our inaction reminds me of our hesitancy in addressing the genocide in Rwanda where 800,000 people were systematically slaughtered in ethnic conflict. Also, this topic resonates with the Bosnian Conflict from 1992-1995, where Bosnian Serbs committed ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing "is a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas. (Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 780).