The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth About Hitler's "Final Solution" - Softcover

Laqueur, Walter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1412849411 ISBN 13: 9781412849418

Publisher: Routledge, 2012

Synopsis

This book seeks to answer three vital questions about the worldwide response to Hitler’s "Final Solution": When did information about the genocide first become known to Jews and non-Jews? Through what channels was this information transmitted? What was the reaction of those who received word of the slaughter?

Walter Laqueur’s quest focuses on the period between June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and December 1942, by which time the United Nations had confirmed the news about the mass killings in a common declaration. By the end of 1942, Chelmno, Belzec, Auschwitz, Maidanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka were fully operational and two and a half million Jews had already been killed.

According to Laqueur, word started to spread soon after extermination began. But there is no easy, straightforward answer to the wider question of why there was a failure to read and correctly interpret the signs in 1941; why so many individuals and governments actually chose to deny the reality of genocide when faced with incontrovertible evidence. A probing and disturbing work, The Terrible Secret explores one of the most perplexing aspects of the Holocaust, a political and psychological riddle of general significance to the understanding of the history of our times.

About this title

About the Author:

Walter Laqueur was director of the Institute of Contemporary History in London and served as chairman of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington until 2000. He was founder and editor of the Journal of Contemporary History and other publications. Laqueur taught at Georgetown, Harvard, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Brandeis University, and Tel Aviv University.

Walter Laqueur was director of the Institute of Contemporary History in London and served as chairman of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington until 2000. He was founder and editor of the Journal of Contemporary History and other publications. Laqueur taught at Georgetown, Harvard, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Brandeis University, and Tel Aviv University.

Review:

“Laqueur makes it quite clear that everybody knew what was happening. Germany was a sieve, and information poured out in a flood for anyone who would listen, read, or ask questions. And 'everybody' included the Jews in Germany and in Eastern Europe as well as Jewish Leaders in the United States and Britain . . . [A]s Laqueur puts it, the victims-to-be didn’t believe their fate-to-be.”

—Arnold Beichman, National Review

“Laqueur has uncovered the reasons why contemporary reports on the 'Final Solution' were not believed . . . The level of analysis and sensitivity exhibited here make this work valuable to both scholars and the general reader.”

—Donald J. Dietrich, Library Journal

“The Terrible Secret is not a study of the inadequate responses (relief and rescue efforts) by Western governments to the Final Solution. Laqueur by and large limits himself to how much was known and where the information came from . . . [M]ost readers will go away overwhelmed by the weight of his evidence that the outside world knew a good deal about the 'terrible secret' by December 1942, which is Laqueur’s stopping point.”

—Richard Breitman, Central European History

“[Laqueur] presses his facts to yield a single shocking point, and the result is close to a landmark study, not of the Holocaust directly but of the way in which people at every level of involvement responded to incoming information about the massacres and death camps . . . [Laqueur’s] approach always has been to study a specific problem within definite limits, in this case the problem of determining 'who knew what and when. . . .' Very much like a detective novel, each chapter plays out the same drama, among the victims, among Germans, among the Allies, as we watch the gathering weight of evidence slowly overcome the will not to believe.”

—Terrence Des Pres, The New Republic

“The so-called 'Final Solution' was developed by Adolph Hitler and his Nazi advisors to justify the genocide of European Jews. One of the heart breaking historical questions is why other nations, including the United States, were so slow to perceive and respond to the systematic mass murders that by the end of 1942 had already accounted for the killing of more than two and a half million Jews by means of extermination camps such as those at Chelmno, Belzec, Auschwitz, Maidanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. That is the question addressed in "The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler's Final Solution", a 282 page compendium by Walter Laqueur (Distinguished Scholar, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C.). Examining the history of personal, press, and governmental intelligence reports coming out of Europe, "The Terrible Secret" is a model of exhaustively meticulous scholarship and a seminal work that is highly recommended for academic library Holocaust Studies reference collections and supplemental reading lists.”

—Library Bookwatch

“Who knew when? And why was it not believed? . . . [T]he book as a whole is compelling and chilling.”

—Kirkus Review

“Professor Laqueur’s examination here of whether knowledge is necessarily the same as belief is by far the more important and original contribution of this book than his account of how and when information about the various stages of the killing of Europe’s Jews in Russia and Poland got out . . . [T]his book deserves to be widely read and its lessons and general approach borne in mind by all those involved in the subject.”

—John P. Fox, International Affairs

“The 'terrible secret' of what the Nazis called the 'final solution' and of what we have come to call the 'Holocaust' . . . was never much of a secret at all, Walter Laqueur tells us in this fascinating volume. . . . Although some of the questions Laqueur raises remain unanswered, either because they are unanswerable or because the evidence is still not in (from the Vatican, for example), there is no longer any doubt that Allied governments were much more aware of this terrible secret than they were ever willing to admit.”

—Karl A. Schleunes, Modern Europe

“After the Second World War, an often-heard German excuse was that ‘we did not know.' . . . Walter Laqueur has set himself the uncontroversial task of finding out whether in 1941-42 people did know of the Final Solution, and when . . . As Walter Laqueur, soberly, shows, it was impossible to keep all this secret.”

—Norman Stone, London Review of Books

“A masterpiece . . . the lessons implicit in this book—a classic of justice—go far beyond the enormity of their occasion.”

—George Steiner

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1412849411
• ISBN 13: 9781412849418
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 283