[Excerpt] Recently a number of books and articles have appeared which should persuade historians to reconsider some of America's activities during World War II. One work, British Intelligence in the Second World War (1981), now in its second volume, reveals how much more British Intelligence knew about German affairs than many officials at the time acknowledged and than historians had imagined. Other studies, based on state and private archives in England, France, Germany, Israel, and the United States, have presented new details and insights to officialdoms in Western democracies, ranging from those in military command to bureaucrats in Vichy, France to public servants in Palestine. Two books written for the general public as much as for the profession, Martin Gilbert's Auschwitz and the Allies and Lucy S. Dawidowicz's The Holocaust and the Historians, provoke important questions about the behavior of Americans when they encountered Germany's "Final Solution," during the war and in the historical records afterwards.