Free Book Preview: The Holocaust Codes
If you’ve read anything else by Christian Jennings, who ranks as one of the loveliest people to appear on History Hack, you’ll know that he’s adept at finding a niche thread that’s part of a well-known story, and then yanking on it. Hard.
His latest is no different: The Holocaust Codes: The Untold Story of Decrypting the Final Solution, starts like this:
‘On the morning of 4 April 1944, a twin-engined De Havilland Mosquito from 60 Squadron, South African Air Force, took off on a reconnaissance mission from San Severo, near Foggia in south-eastern Italy. To save weight, the aircraft carried no machine-guns, cannon or bombs, but only two long-focal-length cameras, one mounted under each wing. The South African crew - pilot Lieutenant Charles Barry DFC and navigator Lieutenant Ian McIntyre - were tasked with photographing the huge I. G. Farbenindustrie AG synthetic oil and rubber plant at Monowitz in southern Poland in preparation for a possible bombing raid. The return flight took five hours, and at a height of 26,000 feet, they were over the target for four minutes.
That day, one of the two cameras was malfunctioning, so, to be sure they obtained adequate images, the crew made two passes, from west to east and back again. On the second pass McIntyre left the cameras running slightly longer than usual to guarantee good coverage. Then the South Africans spotted enemy aircraft, and the unarmed Mosquito turned for home.
When the film of the second pass was developed back in Italy, the final frames were found to show a large site containing small buildings laid out in rows. Little attention was paid at the time to these: the target, after all, was the IG Farben plant five miles away.
It was only in 1979, some thirty-five years later, that photo-analysts from America's Central Intelligence Agency recognised them for what they were: the first Allied aerial shots of Auschwitz.
Eighty years after the two South Africans flew that sortie in their unarmed Mosquito, it seems inconceivable that back then the world had not heard of Auschwitz, that the grisly images of rows of barrack blocks, the crematoria, the wire, the railway lines, now so imprinted on human consciousness, could then have been nothing but an anonymous image from the skies. One whose identity would only be recognised and admitted to in 1979. Yet that is how the Holocaust occurred, that is how its physical institutions were concealed, how its perpetrators murdered millions of people, precisely because it was anonymous, it was hidden and as much as possible of the documentation and evidence was covered up.
However, although the camp complex at Auschwitz-Birkenau may have been unrecognisable from a high-flying reconnaissance aircraft, by April 1944 its existence, and the existence of other extermination and concentration camps and programmes of mass execution, was the subject of a flood of reports and rumours from inside occupied Europe. Some of the precise details, however, had for some time been known to a select handful of Allied intelligence and government officials in London and Washington. One of the primary ways they had discovered what the Germans were doing was through cryptanalysis, the decryption of encoded SS and German Police and intelligence signals that gradually revealed how the Third Reich was murdering six million people. That cryptanalysis, that decryption, those signals and that discovery of a state-sponsored programme of mass murder is what this book is all about.’
Christian’s own experiences as a journalist have shown him some of the very worst of humanity. In fifteen years as a foreign correspondent, he witnessed genocides and ethnic conflicts across twenty-three countries, including Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and Democratic Congo. ’Out on the red dirt tracks of central Africa's Great Lakes Region,’ he explains:
‘in the sleety fog of frozen Balkans mornings, and across trails of mass graves and execution sites, I watched and learnt and reported on how genocide and mass atrocities happen. I wrote books on war crimes and international justice in these countries, as well as on the work of the International Commission on Missing Persons, which has revolutionised the science of DNA-assisted identification, helping to identify some of the thousands of people who go missing following conflicts in such areas as the western Balkans, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine.’
The author is based in Italy, and some of his previous history writing reflects this. He has written Second World War books about both Italy and the Holocaust. The last time I interviewed him, it was about The Third Reich is Listening, where he gave a detailed account of German codebreaking, ‘attempting to counteract the popular assumption of uncontested Allied superiority in this field.’ This latest book is not subject matter for a faint-hearted historian to tackle, but on paper, it looks as if Christian’s entire career has been building to this book. He certainly feels that way. ’It was as though all the different yet inter-connected topics of the past thirty years,’ he writes:
‘have led towards this current subject. The path has unwittingly progressed from the corpse-strewn interiors of Rwandan churches in 1994, to the machetes, burning villages and Kalashnikov tracer of civil war and ethnic cleansing in the eucalyptus forests and villages of Burundi - ironically, like Rwanda, one of the world's most beautiful countries. It has gone from the torched interior of a Kosovo coffee bar in 1999, the flame-blackened room strewn with the brass glimmer of cartridge cases, where Albanians were murdered by Serb paramilitaries, to the exhumed mass graves, the mortuaries and DNA laboratories of Bosnia, and to international courts in The Hague. At every step, the questions How?' and Why?' and What happened?' seemed to beg for answers. Investigating genocide, knowing something of how wartime codebreaking had worked, and where the perpetrators had left their traces across twenty countries, has enabled me to look into the overarching drama behind one of the most extraordinary stories of all.’
Which brings us to the two men pitted against each other in this book. The first is Nigel De Grey, ‘one of Britain's foremost codebreakers in the First World War.’ Eton educated, he nonetheless failed the entrance exam for the Foreign Office, and instead went into publishing. On a meandering path into naval intelligence, his watershed moment in the last war involved the Zimmerman telegram.
De Grey pictured during the First World War.
For those that don’t know, this is named after the German Foreign Secretary, who in January 1917 was stupid enough to send a message to Mexico plotting a joint assault on the United States, in which the carrot at the end of the stick for the latter would be the reward of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Famously, Royal Navy intelligence got hold of this, and left it precisely where the Americans would see it. A few weeks later, the United States joined the Allies. Nigel de Grey was one of the men who decoded the Zimmerman Telegram, and apparently three days later he stood up and said to his colleagues:
‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to win the war.’
He was not wrong. Germany could survive with America remaining neutral, but not with her as an enemy. Germany didn’t have enough left in the tank to beat the Allies now. Not with all of the money, industry and men that the Americans would be able to shovel into the conflict.
De Grey was called up again in 1939, and alongside his duties as deputy director of the Code and Cypher School, he was also the Intelligence Coordinator.
His nemesis for the purpose of The Holocaust Codes is Austrian SS Major Hermann Höfle, who oversaw five concentration camps, including Treblinka. Prior to becoming a war criminal, like so many of Hitler’s flunkies he was nobody of note; working as a mechanic for his father’s taxi company. A devotee of the Nazi party since it was still illegal in Austria, he was a cheerful participant during Kristallnacht, commanding his own platoon of SS men, which brought him to the attention of Adolph Eichmann. Having also participated in the invasion of Poland in September 1939, he was sent south to Nowy Sacz, which was earmarked for ‘Germanisation.’ ‘He and his men terrorised, tortured and killed local Poles and any Jews they could find.’ From there, it was on to Lublin, where he was earmarked to command his first camp.
These two men act as a conduit for Jennings to address bigger questions:
‘How did the British and Americans use their stunning expertise in codebreaking to uncover parts of the Holocaust, almost as it was happening, and how did the SS use signals intelligence to try to hide what they were doing? And what then became of this information?’
The answer to these questions comes to us now in the shape of The Holocaust Codes.
‘If the devil was in the technical detail, in the tangled mathematical forests of cryptanalysis where the war's secrets lay hidden, then the devil was also in human nature.
The German signals clerks who inadvertently repeated key letters or words in messages, enabling codebreakers to gain a 'crib' into an otherwise unbreakable cipher.
The SS general who changed a crucial code setting which the British had compromised, in order to conceal the electronic evidence of massacres committed by his men - and who then unwittingly chose as its replacement a code that was simpler to decipher, and then refused to change it for the remainder of the war.
The inflexible mindset of key German officials who believed the Enigma system was unbreakable.
One of many systems Bletchley decoded was an arcane encipherment used by national Communist Party organisations around the world to send coded signals to and from the Communist International Committee in Moscow. On 25 June 1944 a signal was decrypted in this code from a Polish official telling a Hungarian colleague about the gassing of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz. As the message was picked up from very long range, the British intercept teams were not able to make out all the incoming letters. But what was legible was clear enough:
‘In the concentration camp at Oswiecim [the nearest town to Auschwitz] the Germans are gradually killing from five to ten thousand Hungarian Jews... approximately... thousand. .. have been gassed... month ... Hungarian Jews about this. [word missing before 'Hungarian' estimated to be 'tell' or warn' or ‘alert’.'
Much has been written about Bletchley Park's extraordinary success in decrypting the coded wartime signals of Germany, Italy, Japan, and several other countries. The contribution of the codebreakers to the Battle of the Atlantic, the decryption of the German naval Enigma, their U-boat ciphers, the Luftwaffe's Vulture code, the Wehrmacht High Command's Tunny and Sturgeon keys on the Lorenz cipher machine, the Japanese Purple diplomatic cipher, and the naval JP25 - all these have been often and deservedly celebrated.
Much less well-known is the decryption of the Domino collection, and other ciphers used by German Police units, by the SS and Gestapo, by the Vatican and by the military and diplomats of a dozen countries around the world, which provided information not about military matters but on the genocidal policies of the Nazis as they played out behind the scenes. By breaking into these codes the Allies could see what was happening out in the remote villages and ghettos of Byelorussia, Poland and rural Ukraine, in the mud and blood and wire, and what diplomats and military officials around the world were reporting back to their own capitals about the ongoing persecution of the Jews. And all the while, thanks to their decryption of the Enigma coding system, the Allies were reading the Germans' own intelligence digests.
The Third Reich's ten different intelligence agencies had broken into some or all of the codes of forty-one different countries, and the Germans never knew that much of it was then decrypted by the Allies and used against them. This kaleidoscopic mix of coded sources can collectively be called the Holocaust Codes. The signals and their encipherments, their interception and decryption, the operations they described, and what became of the secret intelligence the Allies gained, all form the subject of this book.
Information about Allied codebreaking and the intelligence gained from it about the Final Solution has been emerging gradually since the first official histories were published in the 1980s, and the pace has quickened since the introduction of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in the United States in 1997 and 1998. As new documents are declassified in archives from London and Washington, more information becomes available.
Nevertheless, it sometimes seems like the tip of an iceberg, and it is a crucial subject that merits ongoing investigation. The material is everywhere, in many languages, from Kew in London to Maryland in the United States, from Jerusalem, Berlin and Munich to Tokyo and Rome, from Helsinki and Berne to Ankara and Budapest, to name just a few of the main repositories. It is not hidden, but it is not obvious: it sometimes seems concealed in plain sight. Some of this information has been published by academics and by experts on cryptanalysis and the Holocaust. To find it you need to know where it is, to ask and to search. Some has not been printed before, and much of the detail of this book is derived from original archival research. This is an attempt to piece together as much as possible of what is known about the Holocaust Codes, and to give a picture of the way in which the Allies found out about Germany's genocidal policies.’
The Holocaust Codes is published by John Blake and is available in the UK and Canada now.