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Declassified Documents Reveal Allied Intelligence Had Advanced Warning About Nazi Plans During World War II

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JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN ANCHOR: Here in Washington, dramatic new information was released Monday detailing what U.S. intelligence knew about Nazi plans during World War II, and what the Allies did and did not do with that information.

CNN's national security correspondent David Ensor has the story.

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DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The 400,000 pages of declassified documents come from the files of the wartime forerunner to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services.

Called for their relevance to Nazi war crimes, they include evidence the U.S. and British governments knew some five days in advance about Nazi plans to kill Italian Jews and did nothing to warn them. A 1943 order from Berlin said: "Seize and take to northern Italy the 8,000 Jews living in Rome. They are to be liquidated."

PROF. TIMOTHY NAFTALI, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA: The fact that we knew that the Germans intended to round up the Jews of Rome, we, that is the Allied governments had few days' warning and did nothing with this information raises some difficult moral questions.

ENSOR: The documents also include transcripts of eavesdropping on German prisoners of war by the British. In one, a German general describes his disgust as he watched the S.S. kill Jews in Latvia, the incidence captured on this film in 1941.

PROF. RICHARD BREITMAN, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: These documents are going to make it more difficult for any scholar to simply say there was one German view toward the Jews that all Germans were willing executioners.

ENSOR (on camera): Some historians say that to warn Rome's Jews could also have warned the Germans that the Allies had cracked their codes, but the two historians working with government archivists on this declassification project say that some sort of warning could and should have been made.

David Ensor, CNN, Washington.

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