A Déjà Scoop About the Holocaust   

The front page, above-the-fold headline in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post promised dramatic disclosures. "Decoded Cables Revise History of Holocaust: German Police Implicated; British Knew," read the head over the lengthy piece by veteran diplomatic correspondent Michael Dobbs.

The story trumpeted the news that the British knew about the extermination of Jews at an early stage of Germany's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, but had failed to publicize it. According to the Post, within three days of their transmission starting in July 1941, German police signals detailing the killing of Soviet Jews were intercepted by British codebreakers. By implication, the inaction was another sad chapter in the West's well-known neglect of European Jewry.

The Post story was carried by newspapers from coast to coast. Reuters, the London Times and the New York Times all ran their own versions of the historical breakthrough.

One problem: The "new evidence" was old news.

"They're wrong," says Churchill biographer and World War II historian Martin Gilbert. "What more can you say? These facts were known. In those four words you can really complete your article."

The ostensibly sensational disclosures were first revealed — albeit briefly — in 1981 in an official history of "British Intelligence in the Second World War." Although not exactly a bestseller, the dryly written tome's disclosures had been repeated by 1994 in at least three major World War II histories, including two by Gilbert. The four books, including the British intelligence history, were not inaccessible, but stocked by Washington, D.C.'s main Martin Luther King Library, located within blocks of the Washington Post.

The episode is a cautionary tale of re-reporting as "news" old disclosures rendered newsworthy by fresh detail and clever packaging. It is an occupational hazard that reporters writing from declassified documents — be they from World War II or the Cold War — grapple with constantly. But it's a hazard more thorough reporting and less hype can minimize.

In the Post's case, the errors of omission and context were magnified because of the story's prominent play and constant reference to "new" documents. The documents were new in the sense they were pried loose from the secret National Security Agency by Richard Breitman, a tenacious history professor at American University in Washington, D.C. The documents remain classified in England.

Among the 1.3 million pages of documents, Breitman discovered 282 pages that showed British intelligence intercepted and decoded military messages indicating not only the executions of Jews in the Soviet Union, but also that regular German police, and not just hardened SS murder squads, were doing the killing. Some historians, including Breitman, see the second point as significant, adding fuel to a historical debate that more ordinary Germans than first believed assisted in the Holocaust. This point was stressed by the Post as a key disclosure. But some prominent historians disagreed with the coverage.

"They said the documents were 'unpublished' when they had been published at least in part," says military historian and London's Daily Telegraph Defense Editor John Keegan. "I'm quite sure the gist of the story was in those quotations used in 1981."

Gerhard Weinberg, whose widely reviewed 1994 "A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II" contained references to the codebreaking, says the press coverage "suggested more than the facts warranted."

Dobbs, who recently broke the story about Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's grandparents being Jewish concentration camp victims, says he was aware of the 1981 intelligence history but was constrained by space. "With hindsight, I think the article would have benefited by mentioning [the] official history and being more explicit about exactly what was new about these cables," he says.

But the official history provided only a few details, Dobbs adds. "There is a difference between things coming available and official historians having access in their capacity as official historians mentioning them in two pages of a 1,000-page book."

Dobbs says he was unaware that the intercepts were mentioned in three other books.

Breitman was aware of the intelligence history and says he told reporters not all his material was new. Nevertheless, he bears some responsibility for the hype. "The extraordinary thing about these documents is that they contain new information both about the Holocaust itself and what the West knew," he told the Washington Post.

His remarks drew a heated response from British historians, one of whom called them "misleading" in a letter to the London Times. "Presenting already well-known historical facts as new discoveries tends to diminish their substance and even to misrepresent them," wrote historian Gitta Sereny.

On November 19, nine days after Dobbs' story appeared, New York Times Bonn correspondent Alan Cowell weighed in with a front page story about the intercepts. Cowell quoted two historians as saying, "What is totally new is that the British were able to intercept the cables."

"The historians who are experts in the era think there is something new in these things," says Cowell, who was surprised none of the experts he quoted was aware of earlier disclosures. Cowell admits he knew of Sereny's criticism, but says he did not pursue it. Breitman's documents are new, he asserts, "in the sense that they were declassified, and they are still classified in Britain."

But Sereny disagrees. "The story was more attractive to him if he retained the emphasis on the news value of Mr. Breitman's discovery," she says. "The fact that it wasn't really a discovery would have ruined his story."

Historian Gilbert agrees with Sereny, insisting that the Post and Times accounts "add absolutely nothing." But, he adds, there's another side to the debate. The newspaper stories, he says, "provide the readers of those publications important information less than two dec-ades after it became public. Sometimes you have to wait 50 years before something becomes general knowledge."