The guide begins with brief summaries of the history of anti-Semitism in the West and early Nazi policies in Germany. An overview of the Allies' system of gathering communications intelligence follows, along with a list of American and British sources of cryptologic records. A concise review of communications intelligence notes items of particular relevance to the Holocaust's historical narrative, and the book concludes with observations on cryptology and the Holocaust. Numerous photographs illuminate the text.
The guide begins with brief summaries of the history of anti-Semitism in the West and early Nazi policies in Germany. An overview of the Allies' system of gathering communications intelligence follows, along with a list of American and British sources of cryptologic records. A concise review of communications intelligence notes items of particular relevance to the Holocaust's historical narrative, and the book concludes with observations on cryptology and the Holocaust. Numerous photographs illuminate the text.
Eavesdropping on Hell: Historical Guide to Western Communications Intelligence and the Holocaust, 1939-1945
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Overview
The guide begins with brief summaries of the history of anti-Semitism in the West and early Nazi policies in Germany. An overview of the Allies' system of gathering communications intelligence follows, along with a list of American and British sources of cryptologic records. A concise review of communications intelligence notes items of particular relevance to the Holocaust's historical narrative, and the book concludes with observations on cryptology and the Holocaust. Numerous photographs illuminate the text.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486310442 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 04/10/2013 |
| Series: | Dover Military History, Weapons, Armor |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Robert J. Hanyok is a researcher and historian with the Center for Cryptologic History of the National Security Agency.
Read an Excerpt
Eavesdropping on Hell
Historical Guide to Western Communications Intelligence and the Holocaust, 1939â"1945
By Robert J. Hanyok
Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Robert J. HanyokAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-31044-2
CHAPTER 1
Background
The Context of European and Nazi Anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism has been part of European history perhaps as early as Alexander's Empire in the 4th century B.C.E. What has varied over the centuries since then has been the intensity of the animosity towards Jews, as well as the basis for it, whether it was grounded in political, religious, cultural, or ethnic differences. The early Roman emperors generally had a difficult relationship with Jews in the Empire. There was a major problem over the ritual of emperor worship, which Jews refused to perform. Imperial adjudication was required to settle disputes between Jewish and Gentile communities in such cities as Alexandria and Rome. After Constantine's reign (337 C.E.), the Christian emperors and church leaders placed administrative and legal restrictions on the Jewish population of the Roman Empire, although, for religious reasons, Jews were tolerated.
In early Medieval Europe there was popular hostility against Jews, but it was unsystematic and was charged with a clearly religious tone—more anti-Judaic than anti-Semitic. This attitude changed, though, in the 11th and 12th centuries when the zeal and intolerance of the Crusades spawned more virulent and violent anti-Semitic atrocities. During the First Crusade in 1096, Jewish communities, mostly in the Rhineland, were plundered and their inhabitants sometimes massacred by crusader armies on their way to the Holy Land. The following two centuries saw the growth of official policies that established ghettoes, discriminatory laws, and financial victimization. In 1215 the Catholic Church's Fourth Lateran Council prescribed absolute ghettoization for urban Jewish communities and decreed that Jews wear a yellow label as a sign of their pariah status.
The religious wars of the reformation only brought more massacres and mistreatment for the Jews, especially in Germany. It was not until the Enlightenment and the French Revolution that conditions ameliorated somewhat when civil rights and citizenship were granted Jews. But in the latter part of the nineteenth century, anti-Semitism resurged throughout Europe. The centuries-old religiously based anti-Semitism continued to attract adherents. This old version was joined by a new strain that grew out of the nationalistic fervor that dominated European politics well into the twentieth century. It was based on pseudo-scientific social and biological theories of racial differences that emphasized cultural, ethnic, and stereotyped physical differences. In some nationalist lexicons, Jews were now classified as members of the Semite "race."
The racial core of Nazi ideology was obvious from the earliest days of the movement in Munich. Early proponents of Nazism also hinted at the future destruction of Jewry. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, some anti-Semitic measures were adapted, but the initial policy was relatively unstructured. This changed in September 1935, when Hitler announced the passage of the Nuremberg Laws that, among others, prohibited relations and marriages between Jews and other Germans, forbade Jews to fly the German flag, and deprived them of citizenship. In later years during the war, American intercepts of German consular radio and cable traffic recorded how the effect of these laws was extended to overseas German Jews. These intercepts reported incidents in which individuals as far away as Argentina and China were deprived of German citizenship because of their Jewish parentage or denied state pensions unless a Jewish spouse was divorced.
In the first years of the Nazi regime, the principal method for removing Jews from Germany was emigration. To "encourage" Jews to leave, the Nazis instituted a number of discriminatory measures that included the "aryanization" of the German economy, and, after the Anschluss with Austria, the placement of the mandatory "J" stamp in German passports held by Jews. By the beginning of the war, more than half of German and Austrian Jews had emigrated abroad. Some aspects of the early Jewish emigration from Germany appeared in the occasional Japanese diplomatic message from Berlin intercepted by the United States.
In 1939, for European Jewry, two important events occurred that pushed their fate in the direction of the "Final Solution." The first was in January 1939, when the control of anti-Semitic policy in Germany was delegated to the SS (Schutz Staffel). Operational control was placed specifically in the SS's Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA) under SS General Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich controlled all Reich security services, including the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst or SD) and the Gestapo (Geheime Staats Polizei or Secret State Police). Later, Adolf Eichmann was placed in charge of Department IVA4b of the RSHA, which was responsible for administering the "Jewish problem."
The second occurred in September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. England and France, honoring a defense pact with Poland, declared war on Nazi Germany. With these actions, the Second World War began, and the fate of European Jewry was changed for the worse. The war ended Germany's original plan to rid itself of its Jewish population through emigration and expulsion. As more countries fell under its sway, the number of Jews under Nazi control grew dramatically. The early policy of enforced expulsion was useless; there was nowhere to send them, even to the colonies of the nations they had conquered as with the bizarre scheme to create a Jewish reservation on the French-held island of Madagascar off the Southeast African coast.
When exactly the mass murder of the Jews was ordered as policy is not absolutely certain. In late July 1941 Reich Marshall Hermann Goering signed the order that Heydrich had drafted calling for a "final solution" (Endloesung) to the Jewish presence in German-occupied Europe. Two things about this order are significant. First, it was signed after massacres of Jews and other groups in Russia had begun in the wake of the German invasion. Second, this order also needs to be understood as part of Hitler's position regarding Jews and their association with Bolshevism. In January 1939 Hitler had threatened the Jews with annihilation, but he made this threat within the context of a potential war, and then as part of the struggle against the "Bolshevikization [sic] of the earth." In whatever terms or context it was stated, though, the destruction of Europe's Jews was a prime Nazi goal during the war. During the final phases of the planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union, the SS and the German General Staff approved plans for killing Jews as part of the policy to liquidate all "undesirables," which included Soviet political, military, and security officials. Following on the heels of the victorious Wehrmacht, Einsatzgruppen, along with numerous German Police battalions and SS units, massacred almost three-quarters of a million Soviet Jews in the first ten months of the invasion.
In late 1941 and into early 1942, the decisions and the first steps to exterminate all other European Jews were taken. In January 1942 Heydrich met with senior officials from the SS, the Police, the Foreign Office, the Nazi Party, and Reich Chancellery and Ministry of Justice in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to map out the campaign of mass murder. As a guide to future plans, Heydrich referred to the earlier order from Goering for the Final Solution he claimed he had drafted. Like the earlier order signed by Goering, the decision at the conference to exterminate Europe's Jews was taken after several actions already had begun. These included the operations of the first death camp at Chelmo in western Poland that had started already in December 1941. A month earlier, in Kovno, Lithuania, police units began murdering German Jews who had been deported there. And the construction of Auschwitz-Birkenau, begun in December 1941, was accelerated. The time of "night and fog" (Nacht und Nebel) over Nazi-occupied Europe had arrived.
The Holocaust differed in two significant ways from other examples of twentieth-century genocide. First of all, the Nazis did not simply indulge themselves in an orgy of massacres and other atrocities. Instead, to facilitate their policy of extermination, the Nazis borrowed from the panoply of twentieth century science and technology. They adopted techniques, equipment, and processes from engineering and basic sciences such as chemistry. They also adapted modern business methods, technology, and techniques from the fields of accounting, administration, transport, and bureaucratic organization. The Nazi and SS hierarchy took an avid interest in the progress of the extermination and demanded constant reports from subordinates, units in the field, and the death camps. While not always consistent and efficient, the Nazi machine was organized along methods that allowed for measurements of progress and any necessary "improvements" to the existing system.
Secondly, the Nazis moved to eliminate Jews from countries they had overrun during the war. The extranational nature of the Holocaust was the aspect that most differentiated it from other examples of genocide in the twentieth century, such as that perpetrated on ethnic Armenians by the Ottoman Turks in 1915–16 and the Khmer Rouge depredations in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. As the Germans conquered Europe, they immediately established the administrative and enforcement machinery to seize and kill Jews living in the occupied countries. In this task various collaborationist regimes and local fascist organizations sympathetic to the Nazis helped the Germans in a number of ways. Some of these regimes murdered their own Jews or shipped them to the concentration camps in Eastern Europe. Other countries expelled non-national Jews and ethnic groups acquired through territorial acquisition, as happened in Bulgaria, or rounded up foreign Jews and shipped them to their deaths in the east as did France. The continental scope and bureaucratic nature of the extermination program compelled the Nazi apparatus to coordinate its efforts over an extensive region, from the Atlantic to the steppes of the western Soviet Union.
Both of these aspects of the Final Solution forced the Nazis to rely on modern communications to facilitate their efforts—both to satisfy the SS command in Berlin for progress reports and to coordinate their far-flung efforts over the European continent. Where underground cable systems existed, the Nazi authorities made use of them for their communications. The Allies could not monitor the ground cable system in continental Europe. However, the cable system's reach was limited. Where the local system had been destroyed during combat operations or had not yet been constructed, and this was common in most of the regions of the western USSR, the command in Berlin had to rely on radio communications to control the particular missions of the dispersed police units and Einsatzgruppen, as well as receive reports on their "progress." Meanwhile, diplomatic missions and nongovernmental organizations around Europe reported on the roundups and massacres they witnessed or about which they had received information. These communications also made it possible for Allied signals intelligence agencies to intercept, exploit, and disseminate information to their leadership about the Holocaust.
Previous Histories and Articles
For nearly thirty years after World War II, the United States and Great Britain generally succeeded in keeping completely secret from the public the story of the exploitation of the German Enigma and many other Axis codes and ciphers. This success was largely possible because of the willingness of the tens of thousands of wartime employees of the Western cryptologic services to keep silent about the secret. However, there were a few tears in the shroud over this period.
In 1967 a Polish historian, Wladyslaw Kozaczuk, published an account of the Polish breakthrough against Enigma, Bitwa o tajemnice (The Secret Battle). Kozaczuk was the first to state that the Poles had solved the German Enigma. This book, though, received little attention outside of Poland. In 1973 Gustave Bertrand, the former chief of the French Army's radio intelligence branch, published his memoirs, Enigma: Ou la Plus Grande Enigme de la Guerre, 1939–1945 (Enigma: Or the Greatest Mystery of the War), which revealed some more about the early Allied exploitation of Enigma. Bertrand had played a minor, if not unimportant role in the Polish breakthrough against Enigma. He had developed a contact in the German Ministry of War who turned over to him technical information and keying material for the Enigma. Bertrand, whose own country's codebreaking capability had deteriorated in the years after the First World War, passed the material to the Polish Cipher Bureau. Like Kozaczuk's work, Bertrand's book made little impression. German historians, who had reviewed Kozaczuk's book, tended to dismiss the claims that the Poles or any of the Allies had broken Enigma. The secret still stood into the 1970s.
Therefore, outside of intelligence circles, only a handful of people, mostly scholars, knew about the Allied cryptanalytic success against Enigma when, in 1974, F. W. Winterbotham's book The Ultra Secret was published. Winterbotham was a Royal Air Force officer who formed the Special Liaison Units that distributed Ultra to military commands. But he was not involved in actual codebreaking and other cryptologic activities. Winterbotham's book created a shock wave in the intelligence and historical communities. The British government contemplated legal action against him, but finally declined to prosecute him. The Ultra Secret went on to become a best seller. Many historians scrambled, perhaps prematurely, to incorporate Winterbotham's revelations into the narrative of World War II. Winterbotham's book, though, was full of errors, distortions, and omissions. Among other things, he attributed the solution to the Enigma to a spy who smuggled a complete machine out of Germany. This ignored the Polish contribution. He also claimed that the British won the Battle of Britain solely because of Ultra's contribution. This claim ignored the far more critical roles played by Britain's early warning radar network and Fighter Command's centralized command and control system.
There was no mention in Winterbotham's book about what information there might have been about the Holocaust from Ultra sources. Interestingly, prior to the publication of The Ultra Secret, there was some information already available about codebreaking and the Holocaust. The first inkling of what SIGINT records might hold about the Holocaust had appeared in Gustave Bertrand's Enigma. In the course of describing the operations of a small, multinational, Allied covert communications monitoring site in southern France, Bertrand revealed that this site had intercepted and decrypted German Police messages that contained information about massacres in the western Soviet Union. Bertrand stated that the site, over the course of a little more than two years, had intercepted over three thousand German Police messages. He related the substance of a police message from 21 August 1941 that reported that 5,130 Jews had been shot by SS and police units. Most of Bertrand's story was repeated in Wladyslaw Kozaczuk's Enigma, published in Polish in 1979. The information about the German Police decrypts in the books from France and Poland largely went unnoticed. This was probably because the works were slow to be translated into English, and the rather meager information they contained about the massacres was subsumed within the interest generated by the much broader revelations about the effect of the exploitation of Enigma on the course of the war. Another problem was that Bertrand's reference to the police decrypts was based largely on his recollections and personal notes. There were no copies of the intercepts or decrypts available.
The first account in English that discussed Ultra information in connection with the Holocaust was Walter Laqueur's The Terrible Secret, first published in 1980. This book tracked the knowledge of the Holocaust among various groups such as German civilians, international Jewish organizations, officials of the major Allied and neutral countries, the leaders of the Jewish communities in Europe and America, and nongovernment organizations such as the International Red Cross. His account carried some additional details over the previous histories that had referred to the decrypts of the German Police messages. He also mentioned that the British were reading the Enigma messages of the German railway service, and, as a result, this suggested that the British had the capability to track the movement of trains throughout occupied Europe, which would have included the trains transporting Jews to the death camps in the east. It appears that Laqueur had some access or knowledge of British code-breaking efforts against the German Police, SS, and railway Enigma ciphers. He refers to some specific details from the police decrypts, but it is not clear if he had seen specific documents from GC&CS because they had not been released to the public. Laqueur also interviewed Peter Calvocoressi, an important figure in the operations of one of the analytic centers at Bletchley Park. He also may have been a source of Laqueur's information.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Eavesdropping on Hell by Robert J. Hanyok. Copyright © 2012 Robert J. Hanyok. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
A Note on Terminology
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Background
The Context of European and Nazi Anti-Semitism
Previous Histories and Articles
Chapter 2: Overview of the Western Communications Intelligence System during World War II
Step 1: Setting the Requirements, Priorities, and Division of Effort
Step 2: Intercepting the Messages
Step 3: Processing the Intercept
Step 4: Disseminating the COMINT
From Intercept to Decryption – the Processing of a German Police Message
Chapter 3: Sources of Cryptologic Records Relating to the Holocaust
The National Archives and Records Administration
The Public Record Office
Miscellaneous Collections
Chapter 4: Selected Topics from the Holocaust
A. The General Course of the Holocaust and Allied COMINT
B. Jewish Refugees, the Holocaust, and the Growing Strife in Palestine
C. The Vichy Regime and the Jews
D. The Destruction of Hungary’s Jews, 1944
E. Japan and the Jews in the Far East
F. Nazi Gold: National and Personal Assets Looted by Nazis and Placed in Swiss Banks, 1943–1945
Chapter 5: Some Observations about Western Communications Intelligence and the Holocaust
What was Known from COMINT
When the COMINT Agencies Knew
Some Further Observations Regarding the Available Archival Records
There are limited COMINT agency records about the Holocaust
There are significant differences between the archival records holdings of the cryptologic agencies of the United States and Great Britain
The Western communications intelligence agencies collected many more intercepts than they finally processed during the War
There are pertinent uses for the available records from the COMINT agencies related to the Holocaust
Appendix 1: Selected Allied Monitoring Stations (MS) and Designators
Appendix 2: Annotated Sample of Diplomatic Translations and German Police Decrypt
Appendix 3 Attached Documents
Vrba-Wetzler Cable, 26 June 1944
German Foreign office message to Buenos Aiers regarding a pension applicant’s Jewish wife, 13 January 1943
Spanish diplomatic message referring to Raoul Wallenberg
VN 1260: German translation of intercepted U.S. Department of State message from embassy in Bern, Switzerland, 19 October 1944
[DOS Nr. 6927] Regarding the status of interned Hungarian Jews
German report of results of deportation of Hungarian Jews, 30 December 1944.
From O.S.S. source “George Wood.”
Bibliography
Glossary of Terms, Abbreviations, and Acronyms
Index