Ultra - Holocaust Intelligence

Holocaust Intelligence

Historians have long attempted to establish when in the war the Allies recognized the full extent of German plans to eliminate the Jews, specifically, the extermination-camp system.

The U.S. Nazi War Crimes Disclosures Act of 1999 made it official policy to declassify all Nazi war criminal records held by the U.S. Government and led to release of over 600 decrypts and translations of intercepted messages. Robert Hanyok concludes that Allied communications intelligence, "by itself, could not have provided an early warning to Allied leaders regarding the nature and scope of the holocaust." The decrypts did alert British authorities to many massacres in the occupied zones of the USSR, but revelations about the concentration camps were gleaned from other sources such as Jan Karski and American diplomats in Switzerland.

In retrospect, a decrypted message referring to "Einsatz Reinhard", from January 11, 1943, listing the number of Jews and others gassed at four death camps the previous year, clearly outlined the system, but codebreakers did not understand what the message was. In summer 1944, Arthur Schlesinger, then an OSS analyst, interpreted the intelligence as an "incremental increase in persecution rather than... extermination."