Ep. 31- Decoding the Holocaust Codes with Christian Jennings

When the Einsatzgruppen began reporting that they were murdering Jews, the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park intercepted and decoded the messages.  Throughout the Holocaust, these men and women deciphered the reports of the SS and documented the crimes of the Nazi state.

On this episode, I talk with journalist and researcher Christian Jennings about the Holocaust Code and what we can learn about the Holocaust from decoded Nazi transmissions.

Christian Jennings is a British author and foreign correspondent, and the author of ten non-fiction books of modern history and current affairs. THis latest book is The Holocaust Codes: Decrypting the Final Solution. He has lectured for Bletchley Park on German codebreaking, and from 1994-2012 he spent fifteen years reporting for newspapers and TV on international current affairs and complex war crimes investigations, including genocide and its aftermath, across twenty-three countries in the Western Balkans and Africa.

Jennings, Christian. The Holocaust Codes: The Untold Story of Decrypting the Final Solution (2024)

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Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:01.664)
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waitman Bourne. And today I have a really, really interesting guest and a really, really important topic. Oftentimes we wonder what do the allies know about the Holocaust? When did they know it? And one of the things that's come out in recent years with access to archives, et cetera, et cetera, is the decrypts.

of what the Nazis are actually saying to each other about the Holocaust and what the Allies, in particular the British, are hearing about that. And I have a fantastic guest, Christian Jennings, who is an excellent reporter, correspondent, researcher, and author of a recent book on this topic. And he's going to talk to us about it here. thanks so much, Christian, for coming on.

Christian Jennings (00:55.612)
Very pleased to be here, Waightman, very interesting. And I love the podcast, it's fantastic idea. And your background pedigree, your writing and studies on the Holocaust obviously, you know, makes you a perfect host and person to be conducting the podcast. And it's very good and very important to be having a podcast dedicated to this subject, as there is simply so much information out there and so much more new information coming out.

Waitman Beorn (01:26.966)
Well, thanks again. And can you tell us a little bit about how you came onto this? Because you've written about a lot of different things. You've covered genocides. You've covered lots of things in your reporting career. How did you sort of come upon this topic?

Christian Jennings (01:43.632)
I was a foreign correspondent for 15 years based mainly in African and Balkan countries. And I started off my career as a foreign correspondent in Rwanda in the weeks after the Rwandan genocide in 1994. And then saw the aftermath of it and how its effects washed over into neighboring countries into Zaire, Burundi, which each had their own

massive ethnic conflicts and civil wars following on from this. I saw the international justice process of trying to bring to account the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide following on from four years in central and East African countries, majority of which were at war. I proceeded to Kosovo during the NATO bombing campaign in spring 1999.

I ended up spending four years in Kosovo reporting for The Economist, two newspapers in Scotland, The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday, and other outlets, and watched how the international community dealt with the question of nation-state building and accountability for mass war crimes carried out by the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, again, and worked.

reported on the activities of the ICTY, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague. After Kosovje, I went to Bosnia, where I reported on the hunt for two men who at that time were the most wanted men in the world, along with the Sama bin Laden, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the respective former Bosnian Serb president and head of Bosnian Serb army.

And during that time there, I also worked for an international organization that uses human rights and DNA identification techniques to identify the human remains of missing persons and to reunite these human remains of missing persons who disappear after wars, genocides, ethnic conflicts, and also natural disasters.

Christian Jennings (04:01.567)
and returned their remains to their families for a proper burial. The organization called the International Commission on Missing Persons and when I was working for them, their operations were predominantly in the Western Balkans and specifically on the only incidents of genocide to have occurred in Europe since 1945, which took place in 1995, in July 1995 in the Eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica.

where 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered by the predominantly Bosnian self-courts of Ratko Mladic. And the ICMP, the International Commission on Missing Persons, uses DNA identification not just to return the human remains to their families and loved ones, but to prove definitively that these war crimes took place.

and this DNA evidence, this state-of-the-art DNA evidence processed in one of the world's largest DNA laboratories was used in war crimes cases against the perpetrators. I then subsequently moved to Italy where I've spent 10 years writing books predominantly about the Second World War in Europe, several of about Italy which

crossed over naturally into German war crimes in Italy, the Holocaust in Italy. And I also wrote a book about German code breaking in the Second World War called The Third Reich is Listening, which for the first time took the story across the channel from the point of view of German code breaking agencies, seeing what they were doing. Everybody's heard repeatedly and very deservedly because it's such an amazing story.

the history of the accomplishments of British codebreakers at Bletchley Park. I looked at what the Germans were doing. They were using 10 different agencies. They were doing it, not surprisingly, very efficiently, very well, technologically, in a very, very advanced way. And I then took on this knowledge of World War II codebreaking into the Holocaust and thought, if the Allies

Christian Jennings (06:19.42)
British and Americans, but also the Russians, the Italians and others circling around them, had put so much effort into decrypting the German naval enigma to find out about the whereabouts of U-boats in the Atlantic. If the Germans themselves, as they had done very effectively, put so much effort into decrypting the codes of the Royal Navy and the British Merchant Navy, if the Americans had put so much effort into

the Japanese purple code, the Japanese diplomatic codes. What were the Allies doing to decrypt the enormous volume of daily signals about the ongoing operations of the Final Solution? The Germans were extremely efficient in recording and reporting everything. The senior officials in the RSHA, the Right Main Security Office,

Reinhard Heydrich followed on by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, above them Heinrich Himmler. The head of the Gestapo, the different generals who ran the Third Reich, wanted to know everything that was going on with the operations of the Final Solution, especially after the Wannsee Conference in 1942 in January, which laid the operational framework

for the way in which the extermination of Europe's Jews was going to be carried out. And one thing one found out almost immediately was that Bletchley Park's code breakers had been breaking into and reading what were known as the German police codes. The German police codes came under a coding system that Bletchley Park called Domino. And the German police codes were...

the daily, sometimes hourly reports sent back from German police reserve police battalions, which were mobilized battalions of German police officers taken to the Eastern Front to help with all sorts of duties, anti-partisan operations, railroad and traffic control, but increasingly they became involved in the implementation of the first phase of the final solution.

Christian Jennings (08:40.754)
mass execution by human firing squads of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, partisans, Poles and others on the Eastern Front, predominantly Jews. And, Leslie Park's code breakers had broken into the domino coding system. And the first thing that began to emerge was after Operation Barbarossa began as in June 1941.

the mass executions begin. And so this formed the basis of the beginning of my book, The Holocaust Codes. What were Bletchley Park decrypting? How and what did they find out?

Waitman Beorn (09:26.186)
Yeah, so I mean, there's just so much here and I highly recommend, you know, everyone please check out Christian's book because it goes into extreme detail. But let's start with maybe how does the British code breakers get involved in identifying these police codes first and foremost? Or these Einsatzgruppen reporting from

Christian Jennings (09:27.996)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (09:55.462)
killing squads to the Reich's treaty main office? And then what is the routine of reporting from these units in the east to the center? What are they saying? What are they telling their superiors? And then what are the British discovering from listening to them?

Christian Jennings (10:15.196)
The staff of Heinrich Müller wanted three things from the Einsatzkommandos and the German police battalions and SS and auxiliary units on the Eastern Front. He wanted to know how many people have been shot, when and where. And these were the details of the mass executions of predominantly, as I said, Jews on the Eastern Front. Behind the lines of three, the three German army groups, North, Center and South.

and the British identified what was going on because the Germans put these details into the messages, who was doing what, when and where to who with what numerical results. On July the 18th, 1941 to the town called Slunim in Belorussia, northern Ukraine, the

The British picked up a message saying that 1,153 Jews had been shot. This began to be typical of the messages they were picking up. They were not decrypting, they had listening stations at this stage in the United Kingdom and the French still at this stage of the war in the non-occupied area of France.

providing listening back up to the British as well. And the British could pick up some of these thousands of signals, but obviously not all of them. And for a variety of reasons, they picked up more from Army Group Centre than they did from Army Group North or Army Group South, who in turn were making their own daily reports about their mass killings they were carrying out. But the British knew what they were up against because...

Waitman Beorn (12:00.296)
Is this,

Yeah, sorry. Is this a result? Is this a because of sort of literally signals and geography and, know, whether they're bouncing off of, you know, clouds into the right part of the of Europe? I mean, is that why they're not getting the same number of decrypts, for example, from Ukraine or from the north? Is it really is it a matter of literally where you're positioned to listings? I mean, I don't know anything about the technology of of intercepting.

radio communications.

Christian Jennings (12:35.962)
It's to do with the sheer volume of signals being sent and the number of interstep stations with a number of intercept staff who could only listen to a certain number of coded signals per hour. It's to do with the way radio waves refract off the earth, the clouds and the earth's atmosphere. The way in which radio signals actually sent. For instance, the British discovered that

for one of these reasons, they could decrypt many more signals on odd or even days of the month than the French in the South of France could decrypt more on even or odd days of the month. It's to do with a combination of geostatic technology about the Earth's movements. It's to do with also the fact that Bletchley was their listening station on the east coast of England.

and in southern England were operating at extreme range into the Ukraine. And it was to do with a combination of geography and volume.

Waitman Beorn (13:45.772)
Cool, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. We can keep talking about obviously the NSA's group reports. I was just curious about, you we think about, think in the modern context, you know, with modern espionage and intelligence agencies, you know, just able to sort of gather all the information in. It's interesting, it's important to sort of realize that this is handwork essentially at a certain level, right? Because an individual human being has to listen.

an individual human being has to decode and, you know, translate and interpret.

Christian Jennings (14:21.564)
Yes, this is German police signals clerk sitting down reading a message that says 17th of July 1941, town name in Ukraine or Belarusia, today X hundred, X thousand Jews and prisoners of war were shot.

And he's tapping it out. He's encoding this signal using the the codes of the day and the key of the day he encodes it and then it's either The use of encryption devices varied a lot of the time the Einsatz Commanders and the German police battalions were using what was called one-time pads where

you simply, the operator got the information about that day's coding from a code book. And on other occasions, some of the messages are being sent by Einsatzkommanders using the Enigma machine. But the operator would then either send on his Enigma machine or send on Morse code. He would tap out the details and message in front of him. He'd be sitting there in his pine forest in Ukraine and his...

senior officer and NCO would have said, this is what our men have just been doing an hour ago. We've just shot 734 people, send it to Berlin. The Gestapo want to know Reinhard Heydrich and his acolytes are in a hurry and we're not going to keep them waiting. And he encodes the message and using more sense it off into the ether. Exactly simultaneously, the message is picked up for instance by...

a station, why station on these, you know, in the United Kingdom. And the predominantly female staff from the ATS on the other end are listening out on certain frequencies and they pick up these messages coming in and transcribe them using up to 125 characters of Morse per minute, write them down.

Christian Jennings (16:50.158)
And, you know, it's for them, it's just a series of letters in word groups, and they don't know what it means. And at the end of each day, these messages are taken down to Bletchley Park, where they're decrypted.

Waitman Beorn (17:06.922)
And so what kinds of information is coming out of this and how, guess the next stage, right, is the analysis stage where they've gotten the raw coded message, they've decoded it. How are they beginning to, are they beginning to sort of understand what's taking place and then who is sort of struggling with this or

dealing with this information.

Christian Jennings (17:39.622)
They begin very quickly to realize what's happening that across the Army Group North, Center and South operational area, behind the lines, huge numbers of Jews are falling into the hands of the police battalions and the attached Einsatz Commandos. And at one point, within internal memos, the phrase appears.

By now it seems such a regular feature of these messages about large numbers of executions of Jews that they're simply going to be summarized in one regular report instead of mentioning them every single time. The messages are going straight to SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, which oversees the operations of Bletchley Park. They're being passed on to Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister. The knowledge of these executions is...

is immediate and high level. And one of the reasons this worked so well was the British were very, good at coordination of intelligence, incredibly good at keeping a secret. And they decrypted very fast and as fast as they could, sometimes the decrypts took some more time. Sometimes, in fact, the messages being picked up were incomplete, because the

listening stations couldn't make out all the words that were coming in over the ether. And so the next stage is, is having received the intelligence that decrypted the intelligence and building up an intelligence picture of what is happening, which is chosen that very obviously, there's a very large number of executions of Jews going on. This is then presented upwards to the small number of

senior officials and politicians who are ultra clear, those who are allowed to know about the intelligence coming from Bletchley Park and knowing that it comes from Bletchley Park. And all of this is proceeding when in August 1941, Churchill, during a meeting with President Roosevelt on a British battleship off the East Coast of Newfoundland,

Christian Jennings (20:01.566)
makes a broadcast declaration in which he includes details of the German executions on the Eastern Front. He uses the words German police troops and executions and the Germans listen to the broadcast. It's broadcast on the BBC. They pick it up, they listen to it and they immediately think our coded signals are being listened to and decrypted. So memos go round

again by signal which will actually decrypt saying, immense caution must be used in transmitting information, encrypted information, particularly about executions because the enemy may be listening and maybe being able to decrypt them. And the Germans then change the German police units, then change their encryption codes from one coding system

to another and luckily for Bletchley Park, the one they change it to, which is a coding technique called a double play fair, it actually turns out to be much easier to break for Bletchley. And the German police then proceed to use this code without changing it for the whole of the rest of the war, unaware the British were breaking into it.

Waitman Beorn (21:25.942)
And I guess it's important to point out too that, right, that at Bletchley, there's only, this is only sort of one building that's focusing on this code, but there's lots of other groups that are focusing on literally a variety of different codes that the Nazi state, and I guess its allies and the Vatican are all using, right?

Christian Jennings (21:52.218)
Yes, Bledsley at that time are predominantly concentrating on the enigma coded.

signals of the German Luftwaffe, the German Wehrmacht and particularly the German Kriegsmarine. The Battle of the Atlantic is raging, Britain's safety and survival is at stake. The war with the U-boats is at its height. The ability of Bletchley Park to break into the Kriegsmarine's naval enigma is a priority. And yet at the same time they allocate increasing numbers of staff

to finding out information about the German mass executions on the Eastern Front. Yet similarly, they're breaking into the Luftwaffe's codes, the operations of the Wehrmacht across Europe, the Italian Navy, for instance, allowing the British to score significant successes, such as at the Battle of Matapan in the Mediterranean in 1941.

Simultaneously to this, the Germans, it's like a very complicated four dimensional matrix of deciphering and in-ciphering. The Germans are listening to the British naval codes and know what the British are doing in the Atlantic, but the Germans don't know that the British have broken into the German naval enigma because the British haven't mentioned this in any of their messages.

And German Teutonic deduction says because the British aren't mentioning it, they haven't broken into the naval enigma. The Italians, however, have also broken into the British naval codes. Whereas the Germans have also broken into the Italian codes and the Americans are broken into parts of the Japanese and the Italian codes. Well, the Italians have broken into parts of the...

Christian Jennings (23:52.464)
American military and the British military codes as well. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Once you throw in the Vatican, the Japanese, the Turks, the Belgians, and then the huge deciphering and enciphering operation carried out by the Russians, you have not just a world war, but a world war on a worldwide

electronic web where everybody's kind of listening to and trying to listen to and piggybacking on everybody else's messages, where it's rather like the entire world was using WhatsApp and everybody had been able to break into a little bit of each other's WhatsApp from different times, different days. And the volume of decrypted information was was phenomenal.

And the British and Americans were very good at it because they allocated large numbers of staff. They were very technologically efficient. They were inventing the supercomputer as they were doing all this without effectively knowing it. And then they did mechanically. The Germans were much more suspicious of each other and were much more mechanical about their methods of code breaking. And so everybody's doing it at the same time.

Everybody is trying to find out what everybody else knows without letting on what they know themselves. And the British managed to, for the entire war, break into a whole variety of enigma encoded signals without the Germans discovering it.

Waitman Beorn (25:32.798)
And so as the as Britain, especially Park is beginning to of acquire all of these reports, I guess my question is the next the next level of analysis, what's happening before we get to because I think the next the next thematic area is sort of movement towards the final solution. But before we get there, we're just talking about the Einsatzgruppen and the police shootings in Eastern Europe. And these these

decrypts are coming in, they're being sort of deciphered and then summarized. What's then happening with this information? Is it just sort of going to the government who is then sort of noting it? Or is there any discussion about what might be done with this for propaganda purposes or to warn people? I mean, what's happening to the actual information?

once it goes up, I suppose, like the next level in the chain, or is it just kind of filed as evidence for some later purpose, you know, after the war or later on?

Christian Jennings (26:41.342)
Very good question. It's being filed for use in war crimes, prosecutions and trials later on. It's being passed on to the United Nations War Crimes Commission from 1942 onwards. It's being disseminated at an unbelievably limited level. And it's horribly ironic that the stage at which the allies knew most

about the operations of the Final Solution on an hourly and daily basis were from the mass executions on the Eastern Front. And it came at a time when they were least well equipped to do anything about it. They were struggling not to lose the war in the Atlantic. They were, you know, their first combat was in North Africa. They couldn't have done anything about what was happening behind the front lines in Belarus or the Baltics.

and Ukraine. What then happens is that as the Germans move, as the Reich Security Main Office implements the next phase of the Final Solution, which is the transition from human execution to the use of gas and detention centers, camps, the Allies begin to discover far more about it because they receive

escape prisoner reports predominantly from Poles who escaped from camps predominantly from the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex from 1940-1941 onwards and these have all this intelligence has a means of being disseminated unlike the Holocaust codes where the information the allies Bletchley Park has about mass executions on the Eastern Front they go to 30 people and

And that's it. And the Allies know the Germans are executing an awful lot of Jewish civilians, but that's the line. The escape prisoner reports from Auschwitz predominantly, reporting about what is happening in ghettos and inside Auschwitz, are then published in physical pamphlet, a manuscript of book form, report form by the Polish government in exile in London.

Christian Jennings (28:57.27)
And these reports are believed, trusted, disbelieved or received with a level of skepticism depending on who the reader is. But through a combination of electronic technology and human eye witness reports, knowledge about the final solution begins to enter into the

the mass body politic into the blood information bloodstream of the mass body politic and added to this a hundreds and hundreds of intelligence reports coming in from resistance groups diplomats. A lot of journalists are working in inside occupied Europe. The massacre at Babi Yar outside Kiev in November 1941 were 33,721 I think.

The Jews of Kiev were executed in two days by German police, the SS and auxiliaries. International foreign correspondents were there. They were reporting about this a week after it happened. groups themselves, Jewish groups within Europe, are massively active in reporting the atrocities against the Jews. And a body of knowledge about what is happening in the Holocaust

A lot of it inaccurate, a lot of it not as precise as it could have been, obviously. The information jigsaw is absolutely massive and the Allies become aware of what is happening. And the Holocaust then moves into its second phase, which is the extermination phase in five killing camps in the general government area of occupied Poland run from

Lublin in Poland by one of the officers who features in my book SS Major Herman Hoffley who's one of the operations administration officers for Operation Reinhardt which runs the camps five of whose names are just synonymous with the absolute sort of unmitigated hell of the Holocaust Chelmnell Belzec Majstanec Treblinka and Sobibor and

Christian Jennings (31:20.994)
No information is coming out from here at all. Herman Hoffley, one of the deputies of SS General Odielo Globocznik, who's in charge, Hoffley makes all of his subordinates sign secrecy clauses. I won't take pictures, I won't talk about it, I won't write about it, I won't explain it or tell it to anybody on leave or anything. It's a layer of secrecy within the secret of the Holocaust that is operating in Poland.

and the exterminations and mass killings at the five camps which take place predominantly in 1942 and then in the first half of 1943 are almost entirely unbroadcast on electronic media. The information about them is sent by couriers that discussed on landline telephones in some cases. Herman Hoffley, the SS Major himself, is pushed by Himmler for updated information.

about the numbers of Jews who've been killed in 1942. So under extreme duress, in January 1943, he sits down and composes what is called, it's one of the most seminal documents about the Holocaust ever. It's called the Hoffley Telegram, held in the British National Archives at Kew, discovered in 2000. And Hoffley just sits down and writes, the number of Jews who've been killed in 1942.

in the camps under his control and his command. 1,274,166 I think it is. And the Hoffley Telegram goes to Berlin. This is one of the very, very few documents reporting what's going on in, you know, in Poland with the Holocaust. And then the third phase, once this is finished in 1943, the third phase of the Holocaust,

The extermination operation was largely centered around the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, which had begun in 1942. The first trial gassings of Polish and Russian prisoners of war were in late 1941. But in 1942 and 1943, the Auschwitz complex is at its height. And again, the information about Auschwitz is in many ways almost

Christian Jennings (33:44.7)
much less than what was happening at Treblinka and Belzec. The Germans write administrative messages about the Auschwitz camp complex and Dachau and Mauthausen, prisoner returns, lists of numbers of people, nothing about the huge numbers of Jews arriving and being killed or Poles arriving and being killed at all. These are admin messages and there's a huge information black hole from

Auschwitz particularly about what is happening there. Again, the messages were being sent by courier, by telephone, by cable, by telegram, anything except by enciphered coded message. The Germans are running an enormous railway deportation program from Germany across the whole of the Reich.

By this time, the sheer volume of reports from the Polish underground, the people who've actually escaped from Auschwitz, is building and building and building. And the Allies, despite the low level of German signals about the Holocaust, are beginning to pick up an enormous number of small parts of the jigsaw, constant references to Jews being deported from Italy, for instance, to Mauthausen and Auschwitz.

the French, the Belgian, Dutch Jews being deported eastwards. The Allies start to build up an intelligence picture by 1943. And at end of 1942, they make a declaration, a United Nations and Allied declaration against the Holocaust. And by 1943, they know largely what is happening and vaguely where it is happening, but not any specific details about it.

Waitman Beorn (35:36.392)
Is the the Hufflet Telegram understood at the time to be what it is in the sense of because for those of the listeners that aren't familiar, you know, the most sort of damning part of it is a part that literally lists numbers of people, but it's only they're only indicated by letters. like B for Belzec, S for Sobibor, T for Treblinka.

did they know at the time what they were what they were looking at

Christian Jennings (36:09.48)
Very good question. When you look at the original Decrypt document, one of the figures in the one of the yearly totals or one of the camps has been got wrong. And it doesn't, in my investigation into what happened to the Hofley Telegram during the war, there isn't any evidence that this information in this telegram specifically was disseminated up.

That it was decrypted, we know. Did the Allies know what they were looking at? It's very unsure. It would appear in some ways, Baron, that they didn't know exactly what this was. Even though Herman Hoffley, it's the only document in the Second World War almost on which he puts his name. They didn't know.

what this summary report was, or if they did, then it seems uncertain as to who received it, and in fact whether it was actually that there's no... In the months after the interception decryption of the Hoffley Telegram, there's no repeated mentions in Allied intelligence summaries about it saying, we've got this sort of incredible document that says that 1,274,000 people were...

murdered in 1942 in four camps. It's not referred to in the information intelligence chain and it would suggest that it wasn't as fully appreciated as it should have been.

Waitman Beorn (37:52.352)
Yeah, I mean, think it's worth pointing out, you know, that we'll get to this too, because as an historian, you know, I'm always massively excited about, you know, stuff that's sitting in the archives that we may not have recognized its significance. And so it's still there for us to sort of look at. But it's also important to point out that, you know, these are people at the time who are limited by, you know,

Christian Jennings (38:09.51)
Exactly.

Waitman Beorn (38:19.86)
what they know at the time, but also they're in some ways drinking from a fire hose of information. And they're not they're not sitting there with a fine cove comb going through the documents necessarily the same way that I might, you know, as an historian, because they're literally just getting thousands and thousands of these. they're just sort of it's it's it's a it's a forest for the tree situation.

Christian Jennings (38:43.132)
Yeah, exactly. They're, they already in many ways by now know what's going on. They know the Holocaust is going on. And this is, this is one of the, again, it's very easy with hindsight, you know, to use hindsight in the present. It's one of those messages where the decryption and inception was first rate. One mistake is made with one

figure, but the actioning of it afterwards is seems very, very opaque as to as to what what to what use was it put. And given that this was it formed the basis of a report that Imler had asked for via Eichmann about the number of number of Jews being killed in the Operation Reinhardt camps.

does show that how little the Allies knew about the Operation Rhine Harp Camp Complex and its framework, that they weren't able to fully appreciate the Hopfley Telegram and put this amazing building block into any existing structure, simply because there so little information about it.

Waitman Beorn (40:05.578)
And so building on that a little bit, with regards to the Americans, for example, are the British sharing their nascent and building understanding of the Holocaust and what's going on? Are they sharing this with the United States or is it something that they're sort of keeping in house?

Christian Jennings (40:30.674)
The British and the Americans are sharing Bletchley Park's information and the intelligence generated by the US cryptoanalytical system and have been doing so since 1941 when the Americans first paid a visit to Bletchley Park. The Americans said we'd like to see Enigma product and the British said we'd like to

see what you're getting from Japanese diplomatic and naval codes and the Americans were extremely helpful and open about sharing with Bletchley and to a certain extent vice versa although the there was a certain amount of canniness over the sharing of the initially the sharing of the naval enigma information. This information yes it does go to the States and it is known about on both sides of the Atlantic but

Also, by the beginning of 1943, the very specific reports that as the war goes on, the amount of information generated about the Holocaust increased, the amount of information about the Holocaust that's referred to in electronic-incyphered signals by the Germans decreases and

What happens then is that the amount of knowledge about the final solution, the number of reports from prisoners escaping from Auschwitz, for instance, the media get onto it. By the first half of 1943, it's an open secret. The Germans are slaughtering hundreds and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Jews in Poland and on the Eastern Front. The methods by which they're doing it are somewhat kind of

vague and obscure that reports refer to everything from electrocution to gassing to execution by firing squad. But everybody knows by then that the final solution is taking place and the British then achieved further successes breaking into the SS signals from Italy during the implementation of the final solution in Italy. And

Christian Jennings (42:47.966)
through their network of decryption via the Vatican, Turkey and other countries, they find out about what's going on from the Vatican, they find out about what's going on in Greece, in Slovakia. And then by the beginning of 1944, by spring 1944, when the Holocaust in Hungary begins, they start breaking into codes about, you know,

There were two epicentres of the Final Solution, the Operation Reinhardt camps around Lublin and the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. Finally, at beginning of 1944, they start breaking into the codes of Auschwitz. And in fact, my follow-up book to the Holocaust codes is called The Codes of Auschwitz, Decrypting the Last Great Secret of the Final Solution. What did the Allies know all about what was happening at Auschwitz for three years?

less what did they do about it, but how much did they actually know? Their information appears to have existed in one great big huge enormous black hole. Yet if you look at it worldwide through the decryption operations of 18 different countries in 18 different languages, and 10 different decoding centers, and you simply put together everything which is what I'm doing for the next book.

every single bit of the jigsaw of what was known about Auschwitz, you come out with a rather different picture. And I'm doing it through the eyes of a British code breaker at Bletchley, an SS officer who's the deportation and railway transport specialist in Eichmann's office. And also for the first time, from the Soviet point of view, from a Russian, an NKVD officer who's in charge of a team of code breakers.

By 1943 and 1944, the information is out, the Holocaust is taking place. Also by this time, the Allies are ashore in mainland Europe, they're ashore in Italy, they've invaded Sicily, they're moving up Italy. Southern Poland, Silesia, around Krakow, where Auschwitz is, is within range of Allied aircraft. And it's...

Christian Jennings (45:10.62)
the Russian, the Red Army start to move into the eastern parts of Hungary and move through into Poland. And indeed it's on, it's in July 1944, the end comes quicker than everybody expects. The first camp, Mausdenek in Poland, is liberated by the Red Army.

Waitman Beorn (45:32.28)
Yeah, I mean, this is such interesting to think about in terms of not just the fact that they're listening to the Nazis, but they're also listening to other people as well, as you sort of highlight. And I'm gonna come back to Auschwitz. But are they listening to the Vatican? Are they decoding Vatican conversations, or are they getting those from another place? Because I know the Vatican becomes involved in

And I say the Vatican and I mean sort of the massive institution because obviously there are parts of the Vatican that are not as interested in Holocaust as others. But you know, the Vatican is receiving reports that it may or may not be passing on. You mentioned the Regner telegram in the book as well. You know, what is the connection between Bletchley and code deciphering and the Vatican?

Christian Jennings (46:26.75)
Gletchley was deciphering the diplomatic codes of the Vatican from, I think their first efforts were mid-42, their first successes were late 1942 and early 1943. Gletchley Park were decrypting the coding systems used by the Vatican's network of what they called apostolic delegates, papal nuncios, the Vatican's cardinals who were its ambassadors in capitals abroad. Gletchley Park were

listening to, intercepting and decrypting the messages sent from London back to Rome of the Archbishop of Westminster. And you've got copies of them sitting in the British National Archives. They were reading the papal delegates in Ankara, in Slovakia, in Switzerland. They were reading messages from cardinals coming out of the Vatican itself.

The Vatican was a recipient of huge amount of information about the Holocaust because it had a vast network of Catholic priests across the world and the Poles were predominantly Catholic and the Poles were being persecuted from the moment the Germans arrived in Poland in September 1939 and so the Vatican is a huge repository of information about about what's happening in the Holocaust and it disseminates it on a far

greater level than most people suspected. Its activities in trying to save Slovakian Jews in 1943 for instance and get Slovakian Jews transferred with visas to Palestine shows the level at which the Vatican were operating to save the Jews of Europe. And the British

have led the way on decrypting the Vatican's. The Vatican had three coding systems named after the colors of the code books themselves, green, yellow, and red. And green was the hardest one to crack into. The Vatican's codes were based upon centuries old encipherment systems. And the Vatican had been doing it for a long time, very well, very effectively against most of the outside world and knew precisely what it was doing.

Christian Jennings (48:46.898)
And the other thing is the Vatican tend to use apostolic language often in Latin, thereby adding in the further levels of complexity. And so the Vatican and the Japanese were the main, were the secondary kind of, not so much stars of the show, that's a rather kind of sort of arrogant way to put it, but they were the...

The Germans, the Americans, the British and the Russians were at the forefront. I'd say that the three secondary were the Turks, the Vatican and the Japanese. And again, you read, again, it's in the book, you read some of the signals being sent by the Vatican and you read comments being read about these codes written by Belgians.

Turks and Italians, which in turn are also deciphered by the British. And it doesn't necessarily show that the Vatican were fully committed to one course of action as opposed to another, but it does illustrate very, very effectively what they were doing.

Waitman Beorn (50:04.49)
And what are they saying? what is the Vatican? mean, because again,

Vatican obviously is both sort of the organization in Rome, but as you point out, it's lower level officials throughout Europe. And so, you know, what are they feeding back to Rome in terms of knowledge about the Holocaust and what's going on?

Christian Jennings (50:30.181)
in the

The the papal ministers in Hungary, for instance, in 1944 are feeding back information to the Vatican, simply saying that hundreds of thousands of Jews are being deported from Hungary to Auschwitz. It's as stark and black and white as it's possible to be. And the Holocaust in Hungary in 1944 from March to July was the full extent of it. Well, from March to September.

was took place as a state where everybody knew about it. It was being visibly witnessed. The deportation operation in Budapest was witnessed by international Swedish, Swiss, European diplomats. It was stopped because the Americans threatened to restart their bombing campaign of Budapest. At that stage, the Vatican's papal nonsens are just saying, this is happening. We've got to issue visas, condemn.

know, say and do something. Beforehand, it tends to be limited to limited operations to save, for instance, the operation in 1943 to save Slovakian, to save Slovakian Jews, or to deal with the Jews of Italy in between October 43 and spring 1944. They're pretty terse and hard hitting these, you know, Vatican memos. Please can

We ask Papal Nuncio in Ankara or Bern or Rome or whoever to arrange visas for 2,000 Slovakian Jews. You know, they're very mechanical, they're very efficient.

Waitman Beorn (52:18.868)
And then, the center, so coming from Vatican City, what are they saying? Are they saying, yes, we must do this? Or do we get a sense of how they are receiving this information?

Christian Jennings (52:35.878)
Yes, there's a great sense of urgency and activity being taken. There's a curious sense of kind of almost contradiction where on the surface, the Pope is avoiding condemnation. And this is not mirrored in the industry to do something about Europe's Jews by his secondary staff. And the...

A picture you get is of a network of cardinals, particularly in the United States and in Europe, are determined to do something, whatever they can, to mitigate the process of the Holocaust, except for one of the most crucial Vatican nuncios, who is called Montenegro, he's a cardinal, or Seneca, who's in Berlin.

who's a complete kind of drip bag who, you know, anytime the foreign minister Ribbentrop in Germany says anything to him about condemning the Holocaust, he backs down. He's a man who's been received sort of internal protests for his behavior from other Cardinals in the Catholic Church. He's the worst possible Cardinal to be liaising with and

putting any forceful front towards Hitler and the Nazi apparatus in Berlin. But I would say the Vatican did covertly, and also its involvement with the anti-Hitler resistance, it did much more than was seen. On the surface it did possibly much less than it could have done. But its encodement

operations and the operations to read into its codes, the decipherment thereof, and how this involved other nationalities. mean, the Italians outside of the Vatican, Vatican, Mussolini's Italians had cracked the Vatican's codes originally by stealing their code books. And the Germans then simply said to the Vatican, we want this, to the Italians, we want this information. So the Italians just swapped it with the Germans for, you know,

Christian Jennings (54:57.918)
for other codes. And if you look at in the German Foreign Ministry, there's an archive at the moment of all of the code breaking material and information the Germans have. And this is material, this is code books, this is documents, this is maps, this is lists, this is cipher books that were captured by the British and Americans when they went into Germany and Austria in 1945.

and information that was taken to Britain and the United States and then returned to the Germans in 2000. And in this fascinating spreadsheet, which the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent to me a number of years ago, there's just a list of every single thing that they've got. And they're Afghan code books. Every country in South America, there are Vatican code books.

code books and coding material from Ethiopia that you would never ever have thought about. The Germans were trying to break the codes of everybody and anybody who was ranged against them or next to them in the Second World War.

Waitman Beorn (56:03.616)
and that's a great segue into sort of my next question which is which is a bit of a larger one which is you know the holocaust at some level is is one of the most documented you know historical events and and so we have you know from the perpetrator side you know we have all kinds of documents from the nazis these kind of things what does looking at these decrypts what these decrypts tell us how do they complement our understanding of the holocaust

you know in the context of all the other documents that we have because it's it's another question before we get to that is sort of when did these become available for historians to even look at in the first place but then you know following from that what what do they add to our understanding of the Holocaust as an event.

Christian Jennings (56:57.822)
The signals are almost like the electronic scientific DNA of the Holocaust. They're the numerical proof, the numerical bloodstream of the Holocaust, recording the dates, the times, the numbers, the peoples, the places. They, on kind of the Green Bay's card table of history, the Holocaust codes lay down absolutely

you know, insurmountable ace of, ace of spades of scientific and numerical qualitative and quantitative proof. And they prove that it happened. They showed that it happened. They showed how, where and why it was happening. And they're the downloaded decrypted proof of the greatest

crime in the history of humanity. And even though we might not have more than, in some ways, a small percent of them, a lot of them were burnt at Auschwitz or in other concentration camps, a lot of them were lost, a lot of them were got rid of after the end of the war. But they're coming out of archives, they're being declassified, they're being released, knowing where to look for things.

is part of the hunt and knowing how to find is knowing where how to look and knowing how to look is knowing where to look. And again, it'll, you know, comes in more into my next book, The Codes of Auschwitz, which in many ways takes the the crypt analytical jigsaw much wider to about 20 countries, but focuses on one thing on Auschwitz. And

Christian Jennings (58:55.942)
they're the building blocks, they're the building blocks of truth, they're the building blocks of history, and they're the building blocks of knowledge and the building blocks of what we know about what kind of humankind can do to each other, which no, I didn't observe or be part of, thank God, anything to do with the Holocaust, but I've seen exactly the worst of what humankind can do to each other in the...

fields of Burundian on the hillsides of Rwanda and across the kind of plains of Kosovo and in eastern Bosnia. And it's the living proof about why Never Again should actually mean Never Again.

Waitman Beorn (59:40.362)
Yeah, and I think, you know, one of things that I really appreciate about this book, and I think it should be clear to our listeners from this conversation, is that, you know, you've done the work of archival research, of like going into these archives and really, you know, doing the scholarly work of researching them. And I think it would be fascinating for you to take a moment and just reflect on, you know, tell us, what are some of the

things that you discovered that were just incredibly interesting or unexpected from looking at these decrypts that, I'm assuming that they weren't declassified until recent history. They weren't available for a while, and then you're just looking at these documents and you're saying, wow, I can't believe I'm reading this.

Christian Jennings (01:00:35.878)
It's a link, it's a direct link from your reading something that's come out of the National Archives in Kew in London on a yellowing piece of paper with typewriter writing on it written in the kind of formal very English language of the early 1940s. it is, it is the knowledge that you're looking at something which is based upon

a message to something that could have happened just hours and days before. It's a direct intravenous link into the kind of most dramatic part of humankind's history. And they were declassified fairly recently, a lot of them, and they only started to be referred to in British intelligence histories towards the end of the 20th century. A lot of them came out.

excuse me, under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in the United States from 1995 onwards. But actually physically seeing them, you see the horrific detail of the executions, what was known about it, the human comments of the British code breakers and intelligence officials and government officials in the margin in fountain pen and pencils.

all about, you know, we must do something with this or we shouldn't do something with this or how are going to get away with this? Showing the human, you have the scientific evidence of mass murder and around it, the questioning and dithering and inaction and decisive action in many ways of humankind. It's how genocide works. It's the interaction between an operation where humankind wants to reduce human beings to numbers who can be slaughtered.

And it's mankind's bloody minded refusal to be reduced to numbers and at the very worst phases of their history to show to prove that they are people, that they are human, they do exist and they are doing something about it. And in the middle of these Holocaust codes, these decrypts, the appalling what Hannah Arendt, the sociologist and historian called the banality of evil comes out.

Christian Jennings (01:03:00.23)
The Einsatzkommando German police unit in Ukraine in 1941, it's boiling hot. They're on the steps of the Ukraine. They've been killing for weeks. They just need, they need time off and they send a message back to Berlin saying, we, this unit makes an urgent request for X hundred numbers of pairs of handcuffs.

And for 400, I think there's 451 pairs of bathing trunks.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:32.204)
Yeah, I mean, think that stuff, you know, as an historian, when I find that stuff really fascinating because it, as you say, it's on the one hand, it's it's minutiae, right? On the one hand, it's it's irrelevant in the larger context of of the history. But on the other hand, it's absolutely indicative, you know, of of what people are doing, because it's it's it's the materiality of the event, you know, that we need handcuffs and we need.

bathing suits because we want to, on the one hand, we are controlling and killing people. On the other hand, we want to have fun and hang out. I think one of the things that's interesting and a question that springs to my mind as a scholar is, are there any published collections of these documents or do you have to go to Q to sort of access all of them?

Christian Jennings (01:04:30.334)
They're all over the place. They're in lots of different archives in lots of different countries. They're predominantly in Kiew in London, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have got a lot of them. They're in three separate Bundesarchive repositories and SS in Wehrmacht and German war criminal documentation centers in Germany.

No, they're not. They're not published in one one great big collection. And the physicality of them seeing these, some of the most appalling ones and also most sort of fascinating ones are the moments where the the SS, the German police and the Wehrmacht go into Poland in September 1939. And the first moments, the first mentions of executions of Jew movements of convoys of displacement of people.

start, start kind of coming out through the hundreds and hundreds of signals. And you can see, you can see what a Bosnian forensic scientist I worked with investigating a mass grave in eastern Bosnia said, I can look at the ground and I can see how people are buried. And I can look around me and know what's here because I can see shadows in the fog. And these early signals are the beginning of the genocide.

are like shadows in the fog, they're the feeling in the wind, you know what's about to happen, you know what's going on. Which in many ways leads on to your one of your last questions, which is the one about what is a recommended book about the Holocaust. There are many excellent histories, many people who stand out. But Holocausts and genocides are about people. And I think that there's no more powerful

book than or document in the Diary of Anne Frank, particularly when you know what happened to her. It's not mentioned in the book, but you know her death from typhoid typhus in the concentration camp, almost unconscious, naked apart from a robe wrapped around her because her pajamas are covered in lice. And she's with her, I think she's with her cousin or a relative. She doesn't know what's going on. She's delirious and she dies.

Christian Jennings (01:06:54.174)
And it's that, that is the end of everything that happens in the narrative. This fabulous book written by this intelligent, funny, clever, kind of resourceful, resourceful young girl. It stands as a reading lesson for this shit happens and this shit is still happening and it'll carry on happening until people put a stop to it as forcefully as the way in which it's being carried out, unfortunately.

And that's the lesson of never again.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:27.776)
But I think it's a really great point and it's a great point to sort of to end on, right, which is which is, again, you know, this idea that and again, in a certain sense, we've we've only been talking about perpetrator documents in this in this episode because obviously the reports coming out from the Nazis are written by the perpetrators and they are, you know, obviously reducing their victims to numbers and and material and those kinds of things.

But it's a great reminder that ultimately in the end, these are people. as I often say, there's no such thing as six million being killed. It's one person being killed six million times. It's an individual human being being murdered with everything that comes with that human being's life. It's one life being extinguished.

six million times, you rather than the of bulk number that we can't, we really can't conceive of or reflect on. Christian, thanks so much for coming on. you know, you've already answered our question about, you know, what book you'd recommend. We'll have to have you back when your book on the Auschwitz codes comes out. It's really interesting to think about, you know, this idea of creating a composite

image of Auschwitz by looking at what other people are saying about it in their their codes. I'm really interested. I'll be I'll be fascinated to sort of to see that book when it comes for everyone else. Once again, thank you for listening. If you have a chance, please do give us a rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening and

Christian again, thanks so much for coming on.

Christian Jennings (01:09:26.226)
I would just say thanks to you, Waightman, particularly for your, not just your work on the Holocaust, your writing, your research and your teaching, but your very much this podcast, which is getting information out there, particularly to people who, well, it makes it something that everybody knows about the Second World War and what happened in it. A lot of people don't, particularly in the younger generation. It's terribly important to explain it in accessible human terms to.

tell how the past shapes the present we live in, why things that are happening today are often because of what happened in the past. So well done to you and thanks for inviting me on. And my book is just to remind you is called The Holocaust Codes, The Untold Story of Decrypting the Final Solution. It's published by Bonnier Books in the UK, HarperCollins in Canada. We're hoping for an American publishing detail deal soon.

It's available from Amazon and all good online and high street bookstores. Thanks very much.

Waitman Beorn (01:10:31.402)
Yep, and thank you again for those kind comments. And yes, also, as always, folks, I will have a link to Christian's book in the show notes, so you can just click right on it and get a copy. do highly recommend it. It's really good. And thanks for listening, and we will see you next time.

Christian Jennings (01:10:50.354)
Thanks.