, as Everywhere Else” –The Murder of the USSR Jews as Reflected in Intelligence Reports Submitted by Soviet Partisans

The article examines the Soviet Partisan Movementʼs intelligence reports, which dealt with the Holocaust in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, during the years 1941-1945. Its main research question relates to the level of knowledge the soviet rulers possessed concerning the fate of the Jews, which have been stranded behind the frontline. The large scope of documents from different archives in the former Soviet Union shows, that the partisan intelligence service did deal with the Holocaust theme in its periodical reports. The article examines these reports by the following parameters: reporting period; geographical scope; contents; consecutiveness; the time elapsed between report and reported event; types of sources and their reliability; the rank of “intelligence consumers” in the soviet governing hierarchy. It shows documental evidences to the fact that partisan intelligence reports concerning the Holocaust of the Soviet Jewry covered the entire period of the killings and almost the entire territory of the German occupation, described all the “central” events of the Holocaust, all the killingʼs methods and all the victimʼs groups (men, women, children and elderly), were consecutive, quite timely (taking into account the difficult conditions in the wartime environment ) based on diverse sources and were presented to the highest echelons of the Soviet regime. The most important conclusion of the partisan intelligence was its unequivocal claim, that the mass-murder of the Soviet Jews was in fact genocide.. On its basis, the author provides the answer to the articleʼs main research question, claiming that the rulers of the Soviet Union, including the most highly placed, knew about the Holocaust, sometimes concurrently with the killings. The information they possessed afforded them a clear alternative – the implementation of much more active information and propaganda measures than those actually taken, measures that would have shown the World the truth of the German atrocities against the Jews.