Researcher Dan Plesch obtained the never before released United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) documents and used them in the research for his newly published book Human Rights After Hitler.
The previous month the commission determined that Hitler could be held criminally responsible for the acts of the Nazis in occupied countries.
These United Nations files show that the US, UK and Russian Federation knew already in December 1942 that two million Jews had been massacred and millions more were at risk of being killed, Britain's Independent newspaper reported on Tuesday.
The Independent alters that date a hair and makes a more forceful assertion, writing, "The Allied Powers were aware of the scale of the Jewish Holocaust two-and-a-half years earlier than is generally assumed.as early as December 1942, the US, UK and Soviet governments were aware that at least 2 million Jews had been murdered" and another 5 million were threatened.
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Already in December 1942, UK Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the British parliament, in a statement on behalf of the UK, the United States and the Soviet governments, that the Nazis were in the process of exterminating the Jews.
Haaretz reports the material was removed from Eastern Europe beginning in 1943, which it interprets thusly: "the West knew of Nazi war crimes before discovering concentration camps". UK's Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the British House of Commons in 1942 that the Nazis were in the process of exterminating the Jews.
Yet Viscount Cranborne, a minister in prime minister Winston Churchill's war cabinet, replied to the motion: "The noble Lord must not regard this as a Jewish problem". Dan Plesch of the University of London made the release to the public possible. He said that the Allied Powers heard witness testimony from the camps and the resistance movements.
"Among the reason given by the U.S. and British policy makers for curtailing prosecutions of Nazis was the understanding that at least some of them would be needed to rebuild Germany and confront Communism, which at the time was seen as a greater danger", Plesch writes. 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. "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 organization said.
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