Secret documents reveal UN indicted Hitler for war crimes before his death
Longstanding assumptions have been broken: Adolf Hitler was indicted as a war criminal for actions by the Nazis during the Second World War before he died, according to the Independent.
According to a new book, “Human Rights After Hitler”, by British academic Dan Plesch, says that in December 1944, Hitler was put on the UN War Crimes Commission’s first list of war criminals. A month before, the commission established Hitler could be held criminally responsible for the acts of the Nazis in occupied countries, as the book states.
By March 1945, a month before Hitler’s death, “the commission had endorsed at least seven separate indictments against him for war crimes.”
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A document from 15 December 1944 that was submitted to the commission by Czechoslovakia accuses Hitler and five members of “the Reich government”, some of the Nazis most responsible for the Holocaust, of “murders and massacres-systematic terrorism”.
The book written by Plesch also shows that the Allied Powers were aware of the scale of the Holocaust two-and-a-half years earlier than what is assumed. In the book, it is said that the US and British governments were told about Hitler’s extermination camps in the early years of World War II – a fact that could be proven “beyond doubt” by legally certified documents, government transcripts and interviews with torture victims.
Both governments acknowledged the existence of extermination camps but did almost nothing to stop the mass murders.
The Czech and Polish government made the earliest condemnations of Nazi atrocities in a joint statement, in November 1940. In 1942, the American, British and Soviet governments and their allies made a public declaration “that explicitly condemned Hitler’s ongoing extermination of European Jews”.
“The records overturn one of the most important accepted truths concerning the Holocaust: that, despite the heroic efforts of escapees from Nazi-occupied Europe, the allies never officially accepted the reality of the Holocaust and therefore never condemned it until the camps were liberated at the end of the war,” Plesch wrote.
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