Richard Breitman

The End of the “Final Solution”?: Nazi Plans to Ransom Jews in 1944

It first seemed to be a simple, if fantastic, deal: Blut gegen Waren , Jewish blood in exchange for goods. On 18 May 1944 two emissaries flew into Intanbul on special missions for high Nazi authorities. The first, Joel Brand of the Jewish Rescue Committee in Budapest, explained that he came with a proposal from Adolf Eichmann. If the Allies provided Nazi Germany with ten thousand trucks for use exclusively on the eastern front, as well as large quantities of tea, coffee, cocoa, soap, and assorted war materiel, Eichmann and Germany would spare the lives of approximately eight hundred thousand Jews then in German-occupied Hungary. But Brands travel companion, Andrea Gyorgy (alias Bandi Grosz), a Jewish convert to Catholicism and a smuggler as well as agent for several intelligence services, claimed that he had a separate and more complicated mission: to contact Allied authorities and initiate peace negotiations between Nazi Germany and the West at the expense of the Soviet Union. After brief discussions with Jewish officials in Istanbul, Brand and Gyorgy separately crossed the border into British-held Syria, trying to reach Palestine. Suspicious of both men and both offers, British officials arrested them and sent them to intelligence headquarters in Cairo for extensive interrogation, which kept them out of action.

Roosevelt and the Holocaust

To write about Franklin Roosevelt’s reaction to the Nazi murder of approximately six million Jews is to engage in speculation. As far as is known, he said very little about it and wrote virtually nothing. It does not follow, however, that FDR was unconcerned or indifferent to Nazi mass murders of Jews.1 Some of his comments and his actions during the late 1930s seem to indicate the contrary; he wanted to get Jews out of Germany before the murderers gained full sway.2

A Deal with the Nazi Dictatorship?: Himmler's Alleged Peace Emissaries in Autumn 1943

During the second world war, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union declared that nazi Germany had to surrender unconditionally. For his part, Hitler was determined to fight on to complete victory or defeat, but not everyone on the German side was so rigid. Unofficially, some subordinate nazi officials sought to explore the possibilities of a compromise peace. Reliable evidence of what ensued is hard to come by, however, because of gaps in the documentary record, wartime disinformation by intelligence officials and postwar fictions. In selections from his (alleged) wartime diaries first published in 1947, Felix Kersten, physician and masseur to Heinrich Himmler, presented a detailed and dramatic account of his initiative to bring about a separate peace between nazi Germany and the West in late 1943. Kersten met in Stockholm an American named Abram

Lasting Effects of the Holocaust

Rolf Bickel and Dietrich Wagner, directors. Verdict on Auschwitz: The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963–1965. Amherst, MA: DEFA Film Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2005. Version I, 180 min. DVD, German with English subtitles; Version II, 60 min. DVD, English voiceover and subtitles; informational booklet, 36 pp. Set

U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis: Banking on Hitler: Chase National Bank and the Rückwanderer Mark Scheme, 1936–1941

99.95 (educational use/academic libraries), ISBN 1-82971-00003-3.

U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis: The Nazi Peddler: Wilhelm Höttl and Allied Intelligence

W ith chase national bank assistance , the Nazi government earned dollars in the United States through the sale of special German marks—known as Ruckwanderer (“returnee”) marks—to U.S. residents of German descent. The currency scheme began in the late 1930s and lasted until the June 1941 executive order freezing German assets. Newly declassified FBI records offer a far more detailed picture of how and why the Nazi regime gave Germans abroad generous terms to move back to Germany and how they financed these subsidies through seized Jewish assets. The Development of the Ruckwanderer Mark Scheme After Hitler came to power and began to re-arm, Germany continued to import large quantities of American goods. In 1939 alone, for example, Germany imported 197 million Reichsmarks worth of American foodstuffs, raw materials, and finished goods (including lead, copper, aluminum, and oil) while exporting RM 125 million worth of goods to the United States. It needed dollars to finance its trade deficit. The Reich Ministry of Economics (RWM) under Hjalmar Schacht experimented with several ways to acquire dollars through its subsidiary office, the Reich Office for Foreign Exchange Control, created in December 1933 and led by Dr. Hans Hartenstein. A sure method of raising dollars lay in selling marks to Germans who wished to return to Germany temporarily or permanently, or to Germans living abroad who simply wished to purchase goods there. The problem lay in fair compensation in marks for Germans who wished to exchange dollars.

The Ustaša: Murder and Espionage

N o case illustrates the moral , political, and operational complexities in the postwar intelligence world better than that of Wilhelm Hottl, an SD intelligence officer. Hottl established contacts with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC), the West German Defense Ministry, and even the KGB. The release of his voluminous CIA Name File, which comprises over 1600 pages, along with previously withheld OSS records, substantially fills out what has been known about Hottl from Army Counterintelligence records. Hottl was an unapologetic Nazi who helped to expropriate assets from and annihilate Jews, particularly in Hungary in 1944. He was, furthermore, an unusually corrupt man who wove intricate lies as he built contacts, stashed secret funds, and enhanced his personal standing. He maintained these traits his entire life. Hottls career serves as a mirror, reflecting the nature of each intelligence organization that had contact with him. In the end, U.S. intelligence agencies determined to crush him professionally and bury all evidence of contact with him once the possibility was clear that he was working for the Soviets and that his past association with the United States could become public knowledge. Hottls Nazi Background Hottls SS personnel records comprise one of the longest SS officer files. Born in Vienna in 1915, Hottl became a dedicated Nazi even as a student. His association with Nazi groups began illegally in Austria—even before Hitlers takeover in Germany. In 1931, at age 16, Hottl joined the NS-Schulerbund; he joined the SS at age 18.

The Failure to Provide a Safe Haven for European Jewry

A number of u.s. intelligence records declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 provide new evidence and insight into the activities of officials of the Independent State of Croatia, a wartime ally of Nazi Germany. Under the leadership of Ante Pavelic, the Ustasa (oo-sta-sh) regime in Croatia persecuted and carried out atrocities against Jews and Serbs while maintaining amicable relations with the Vatican. At the end of the war, the Ustasa regime collapsed, but Pavelic, after a number of mysterious episodes, was able to escape to Argentina in 1948. Meanwhile the United States Army used Father Krunoslav Draganovic, a senior Ustasa functionary who had helped suspected war criminals to escape from Italy after the war, as an agent against the Communist government of Yugoslavia. Background: The Ustasa and the War Ante Pavelic began his career as a Croatian separatist in the multi-ethnic, Serbdominated Yugoslav kingdom established after World War I. Pavelic went into exile in 1929, when King Alexander proclaimed a royal dictatorship in Yugoslavia. In 1930, at age forty, Pavelic founded the Croatian Liberation Movement—also known as the Ustasa (“rebels”)—a group of Croatian emigres pledged to conspiracy and terrorism in the aim of an independent Croatia. The Ustasa received financial and logistical support from Fascist Italy and Hungary, both enemies of Yugoslavia that expected to gain territorially if that state were destroyed.

Messages of Murder: A Study of the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Service, 1941-1943.@@@Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

Virtually all of the specialists on American reaction to the Holocaust agree that America collectively paid little attention to Nazi persecution of the Jews and failed to offer refuge to most of those Jews who might have escaped a Nazi-dominated continent. These conclusions have both moral and political dimensions: Government policies that saved lives would have served U.S. national interest as well. (I will concentrate in this chapter on government policies, and on the works primarily about government policies, rather than on the role of Jewish organizations.) Yet the handling of the moral dimension poses problems for the historian, for moral sensibilities often differ.1

The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution

This book is a study of the reports of the Einsatzgruppen, the four SS extermination squads that followed in the wake of the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. It was the Einsatzgruppen that began the systematic massacre of Jews and other undesirables. These killings are the principal focus of this book and are analyzed in central chapters from several perspectives. These reports provide a virtually complete and self-contained body of documents and are a fertile source for historians of Third Reich and the Holocaust.