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Emmel #5

Laqueur, Walter Z. The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth About Hitler's Final Solution.
Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1980.
The Terrible Secret is a work that seeks to answer the questions of what was known about
the Final Solution and why it was not believed by the public at the time. The documentation is
from a mixture of primary and secondary sources. Most of the primary sources are records from
the Nuremberg trials or newspaper accounts. Laqueur also uses personal correspondence but
complains, however, that correspondence is a tricky source at best; just because a letter was
written does not mean that its information was widely disseminated during the war. Secondly,
there is a lack of documentation about oral reports or rumors that passed among people. Laqueur
also includes an appendix that contains American State Department and British Foreign Office
material concerning the extermination of the Jews.
Laqueur first attacks the idea that there was a wall of silence in Germany about the
extermination. He makes it clear that the Germans knew something was happening to the Jews
of Europe and that they were going to the East in unprecedented numbers. They possibly did not
know about the slaughter per se, but there more than enough rumors and speculations going on.
Laqueur then describes the contact and knowledge that neutral countries had and goes on to
describe the reaction of the Allied governments during the war. It is interesting to note that
Laqueur also focuses on the time period from the invasion of the USSR until December, 1942, in
his work.

His reasoning is that the extermination began with the operations of the

Einsatzgruppen in the Ukraine before the usual crucial date of the Wannsee conference of 20
January 1942. The slaughter was mostly over by the end of 1942.

Laqueur's conclusion is that there was a decided lack of interest in the issue by the Allied
governments. It was not crucial to their war effort and in many instances the populace did not
believe the stories that came out of Europe because of wild tales of German atrocities on WW1.

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