Historians say warning might have saved Italian Jews from Auschwitz

WASHINGTON - British and American intelligence agents had information in 1943 that could have been used to save some Italian Jews from the Nazis' Auschwitz death camp, historians said Monday.

At a news conference releasing some 400,000 pages of newly declassified documents at the National Archives, historians said Western officials might have been able to warn Jews in Rome that they were about to be rounded up and deported.

The declassified documents from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War II forerunner to the CIA, included messages of the Nazi SS security service between Berlin and Rome in late 1943 that were intercepted and decoded by British intelligence and shared with U.S. intelligence.

They also included conversations among German POWs secretly recorded by the British and information gathered by the OSS using an anti-Nazi German informant.

The intercepted messages showed Nazi security forces were planning to seize Jews in Rome.

''The release...raises the historical question once again of what Allied governments knew about the Holocaust during World War II and might have been done with information they possessed,'' said historian Richard Breitman in a report he co-authored for the U.S. government's Nazi War Criminals Records Interagency Working Group.

The co-author of the report, historian Timothy Naftali, said perhaps British Prime Minister Winston Churchill or American President Franklin Roosevelt should have made a statement warning the Jews.

''It is clear that had a statement been made on the radio to the effect that Allied forces feared for the safety of Romans, and particularly the Jews of Rome, this might well have had an effect on decisions made by people to get out,'' Naftali said.

''I find it disheartening that there was no more use of some of this information at the time,'' said Breitman.

But Naftali also warned against a ''rush to conclusions.'' He and others said it is unclear in hindsight whether taking action on the information would have compromised British intelligence gathering.

Others said it was unclear whether Jews could have acted on the information had they received it.

The interagency working group was established in January 1999 to coordinate a large-scale effort by U.S. federal agencies to find, declassify and release U.S. records relating to Germany's Nazi regime.

Federal agencies have resisted opening their files for half a century, saying national security was at stake. Supporters says the panel's work provides an insight into how U.S. intelligence agencies and others used Nazi war criminals in the Cold War years.

Historians said this was the most significant finding by the panel, which has released more than one million pages of documents gathered from the Department of Defense, the OSS, Justice, State, FBI and other agencies.