The apathetic response of the world to the horrors of the Holocaust has been researched and covered extensively, but newly uncovered documents reveal just how deep the apathy ran. The documents, which have come to light for the first time in 70 years after being archived in the United Nations, reveal that the Allies were aware of the atrocities perpetrated against the Jews of Europe much earlier in the war than previously thought -- but did nothing to stop them. Based on the newly available U.N. documents, researcher Dan Plesch of the University of London wrote the book "Human Rights After Hitler." Britain's Independent newspaper interviewed Plesch, who said that prior to the discovery of the new material, the prevailing belief had been that the Allies found out about the slaughter of Jews in 1944, when they learned about the Nazi concentration camps. But Plesch explains that the Allies knew about the Holocaust some two and a half years earlier. They had received reports both from the camps themselves and from the resistance movements in Nazi-occupied areas. According to the Independent interview, by December 1942, the U.S., Britain, and the Soviet Union knew that at least 2 million Jews had been murdered by the Nazi regime and that 5 million more were in mortal danger. Moreover, at that stage, the three countries were already working on compiling a base of evidence to charge Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler with war crimes, but they still took no steps to intervene. The Independent reports that in March 1943, Viscount Cranborne, a British peer and minister in Prime Minister Winston Churchill's war cabinet, said that Jews should not be considered a "special case." Cranborne said the British Empire was already full of refugees and could not offer safety to any more. Plesch told the Independent that anti-Semites in the U.S. State Department rejected efforts by then-U.S. envoy to the United Nations War Crimes Commission Herbert Pell to help the Jews of Europe. Pell later said that some members of the State Department were concerned about what would happen to U.S.-German trade relations if the U.S. pressed ahead with war crimes charges against Nazi leaders. This public claim by Pell prompted the State Department to bring the Nazi leadership to trial at the Nuremberg proceedings. "Among the reason given by the U.S. and British policymakers 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 in "Human Rights After Hitler." Plesch told the Independent that before the U.N. documents on which he based his book were made public, anyone who wanted to review them needed not only permission from their own government, but also from the U.N. secretary general. Generally, a few years would elapse between the bureaucratic runaround and the time researchers were actually granted access to the documents. Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Powers was the official who initiated the move to open the documents on the Allies' knowledge of the Holocaust. According to Plesch, the new evidence provides a "cartload of nails to hammer into the coffins" of Holocaust denial.
