American and British WWII military intelligence authorities may have been aware of Adolph Hitler's "Final Solution" plan for the "eradication" of the Jews of Europe as early as 1942, according to documents just declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998.

According to a July 2, 2001 National Archives press release, by March 20, 1942, a surreptitiously obtained document appears in the files of the United States Coordinator of Information (COI), a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, clearly discussing the Nazi intent to eradicate European Jewry. The document is a translated copy of a dispatch filed by a Chilean diplomat on November 24, 1941.

The document sheds new light on the longstanding question of how much the Western powers knew of the Holocaust. According to Thomas H Baer, "Warnings from the allies to the Jews of Europe of a planned genocide never came. The Nazi murders depended on secrecy and subterfuge. Warnings would not have stopped the Holocaust, but they could have saved lives." Baer is a public member of the Interagency Working Group (IWG), a group that coordinates the government-wide effort to declassify federal records related to Nazi and Axis war crimes,

Another IWG member, Elizabeth Holtzman added, "This recently declassified document helps pinpoint how much officials within our government knew about the Holocaust and when they knew it. The next question is why our government--not to mention the British--did nothing in response. It is unbearable to think that plans to 'eradicate' a Jewish population were a matter of such indifference."

The National Archives press release goes on to describe the 1941 dispatch apparently received by the Chilean diplomat. (The Nation Archives uses the alternate spelling of dispatch - "despatch.")

The Chilean Despatch

During German occupation, Prague was no longer a capital of a country and most foreign diplomats had departed. The former Chilean consul, Gonzalo Montt Rivas, however, was able to resume his post because of friendly relations between Nazi Germany and neutral Chile. His location and good connections provided a unique vantage point for discerning the Nazi agenda and actions in Nazi-occupied territories, a perspective not afforded to most Western diplomats.

Prompting his despatch was a decree to be issued by Nazi Germany on November 25, 1941, announcing that Jews who had left Germany and were living abroad could not be German subjects (they had lost their citizenship by laws issued in 1935) and that all remaining assets of these Jews automatically were forfeited to the Reich.

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