Terrible Secret

Walter Laqueur is distinguished scholar at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. He was a long-time director of the Wiener Library in London, and editor of the Journal of Contemporary History, Washington Papers , and Washington Quarterly . He was professor for many decades at the universities of Brandeis, Harvard, Tel Aviv, and Georgetown.

• Introduction; 1: Germany: A Wall of Silence?; 2: The Neutrals: ‘Unanimous and Reliable Reports’; 3: The Allies: ‘Wild Rumours Inspired by Jewish Fears’; 4: The News from Poland; 5: The Jews in Nazi-Occupied Europe: Denial and Acceptance; 6: World Jewry: From Geneva to Athlit; Conclusion

"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 "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