ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the truth behind claims that British codebreakers knew Nazi police operating behind the German troops invading the Soviet Union were murdering thousands of Jews but that they and the British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who read their messages, did nothing about it. These claims were first published in 1998 in the book Official Secrets:What the Nazis Planned,What the British and Americans Knew by Professor Richard Breitman. He argued that instead of using the intelligence to show the world the plight of the Jews the British ‘simply hoarded’ it. Churchill should have told the world, warning the Jews in countries like Romania and Bulgaria, which were as yet not under German occupation, of what was going on. Professor Breitman also criticised the British for failing to provide the intelligence reports as evidence to the International Tribunal at Nuremberg at which those Nazis accused of war crimes were tried. His allegations were repeated in a number of newspaper articles publicising the book, and often based on interviews with him, which carried headlines such as: ‘Britain Accused of Hiding Facts on Holocaust’; ‘Should Churchill have Acted?’; and ‘MI6 Concealed Extermination of Jews’.1
