(Scotland on Sunday) Murdo Macleod - High-ranking German officers knew much more about Adolf Hitler's plans to murder millions of Jews than previously thought, according to newly revealed transcripts of conversations between captured generals. During the Second World War, British intelligence secretly bugged the cells occupied by some of the most senior German army, navy, and air force commanders who had been captured by the Allies. The transcripts have only recently been made available to researchers and show that senior Luftwaffe officers mused together at the end of 1943 that millions of Jews had already been killed. In one conversation involving Luftwaffe general Georg Neuffer, who was captured in North Africa in 1943, in which they discussed later that year how many Jews had been killed, Neuffer said: "It must be three million by now." The transcripts, which have been published in Germany by Sonke Neitzel, professor of modern history at the University of Mainz, contradict the traditional image of senior German officers as having little or no knowledge of the mass-killings.
2005-12-16 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive