The Scandalous Cover Up

It lookedlike a major exposé, The Guardian's headline on Tuesday blared"Opening of UN files on the Holocaust will rewrite chapters ofhistory" while the Times of Israel echoed the prevailing sentiment,"Allies knew of the Holocaust in 1942, 2 years before previouslyassumed, UN documents prove." International headlines presumed the Allieshad little or no knowledge about the millions of Jewish children, women and menbeing murdered in Nazi death camps.

Nothingcould be further from the truth, according to the United Nations War CrimesCommission (UNWCC) dating back to 1943. The archives are supposed to officiallyopen to researchers today - just three days before Yom Hashoah. In an Op-Ed, mycolleague and "Nazi Hunter," Efraim Zuroff wrote "What ascandal!! Imagine what they could have done to stop the murder once they foundout, think of all the lives which could have been saved."

True,the Allies were informed and therefore allowed the genocide to happen, if notcomplicit through non-action. Zuroff writes that "in the summer of 1942,reports about the specific Nazi plan for the mass annihilation of all the Jewsof Europe reached the West."

And as anyHolocaust expert will attest, historians had revealed this truth decades ago.In fact, my colleague in New York, Mark Weitzman, said these documents wereopened decades ago and that he had looked into them at Simon Wiesenthal'srequest in 1991. As a result of looking into them, Weitzman uncovered criticalinformation about Haj Amin al-Husseini, "the notoriously anti-Jewish grandmufti of Jerusalem [who] sought Adolf Hitler's help for an Arab version of the'Final Solution'" (JTA, July 22, 1991).

As earlyas 1941, al-Husseini wanted Germany and Italy to "accord to Palestine andto other Arab countries the right to solve the problem of the Jewish elementsin Palestine and other Arab countries, in accordance with the interest of theArabs and, by the same method, that the question is now being settled in theAxis countries" (JTA).

Given theextent of the atrocity committed by the the Nazis and the silence of the lambs(the allies in this case), it is indeed scandalous that the archives remainedrelatively closed to the public. This was hardly the intent (I am sure) of Mr.Alfred Wiener who fled Germany in 1933 and had the foresight to found TheWiener Library to document evidence of Nazi persecution of the Jewish people.New revelations (at least for me) include that Adolf Hitler was indicted forwar crimes at least seven times and that some Eastern Bloc countries,particularly Poland, were collecting evidence for war crimes charges.

Interestingly,according to reports, the Polish government in exile supplied detaileddescriptions to the UNWCC of concentration camps such as Treblinka andAuschwitz, where millions of Jewish people and others were gassed and diedhorrific deaths. By 1945, six million Jews and millions of others were murderedby the Nazis. Similarly, the Czech government in exile collected more than 300pages detailing Hitler's orders and responsibilities, particularly incoordinating and controlling massacres carried out by Nazi units inCzechoslovakia.

It isbelieved that the UNWCC was closed and suppressed in the late 1940s toessentially end war crimes trials, as West Germany became a key ally of theWest and Nazi war criminals immigrated to North and South America. There was amassive cover up - "In the West (Germany), many convicted Naziperpetrators were pardoned, and those who had initially escaped attention wereprosecuted ever less frequently. Doctors who had participated in the murder ofpatients continued to practice medicine, Nazi judges continued to preside overcourtrooms, and former members of the SS, SD, and Gestapo found positions inthe intelligence service or, like many members of the Nazi CriminalInvestigation or Order Police, joined the police force" (Topography ofTerror, 2014;379).

Thus, theopening of the UNWCC files is only one more demonstration of a conspiratorialmass cover up instituted to protect the perpetrators, never thevictims. Why should it have remained inaccessible for more than seventyyears? To protect those with blood on their hands or those who remained silentduring the murders. With evidence sealed, many Nazi war criminals and theircollaborators literally got away with murder.

We willnever forget. On Monday April 24th, FSWC will be holding a Yom Hashoah memorialat its office at 5075 Yonge Street, 9th floor in the evening.

ShabbatShalom,

‍

‍

Avi