There had, as yet, been no indication in the messages intercepted at Chicksands that the police units in the north and the south were killing Jews, although there was no doubt that ruthless brutality was being inflicted on the local population throughout the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. On 24 August, clearly angered by the intercepts, Churchill made a BBC broadcast in which he denounced the ‘most frightful cruelties’ that were being carried out in those parts of the Soviet Union occupied by German forces:
Whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands – literally scores of thousands – of executions in cold blood are perpetrated by the German police troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe, there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale or approaching such a scale. We are in the presence of a crime without a name.
Churchill did not mention anywhere in his speech that large numbers of those killed were Jews because to do so would have made very clear that the information came from intercepted German police messages.
On 23 August 1941, the day before Churchill made his speech, Bletchley Park decyphered a message from SS Gruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, commander of the SS and police troops in the south, which confirmed that like von dem Bach Zelewski, he was also busy killing Jews. In a report sent not only to Himmler and Daluege but also to Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Security Police, Jeckeln said 314 Battalion of the Police Regiment South had shot dead 367 Jews in the area around the Ukrainian towns of Belokorovichi and Luginy, south-west of Kiev. This was an important message. It confirmed the analysis of the Bletchley Park intelligence reporter that there was more to the killings of Jews than just von dem Bach-Zelewski misinterpreting his orders, or portraying his actions in a way likely to curry favour with his superiors. It was very clear that Jews were being killed simply because they were Jews. Its content may have been relayed verbally to Churchill by Stewart Menzies, the Chief of MI6. They discussed intelligence matters each morning and the Prime Minister was very clearly interested in the activities of the police troops operating behind the eastern front. It would be strange indeed if Churchill had not discussed them with Menzies prior to making his BBC broadcast.
The first message decyphered by the British on 24 August, the actual day that Churchill made the broadcast, found Jeckeln telling Himmler, Daluege and Heydrich that the 10th Infantry Regiment of the 1st SS Brigade had taken twenty-nine prisoners and shot dead sixty-five ‘Bolshevik Jews’. His Einsatzgruppe had ‘shot dead twelve bandits and guerrillas and seventy Jews’; 314 Battalion of the Police Regiment South had shot dead 294 Jews; 45 Battalion had shot dead sixty-one Jews and the Police Squadron (possibly members of the small police air force accompanying the police troops) had shot dead 113 Jews.
The item was the first to be decoded that day by Bletchley Park’s Military Section so it is possible that it was sent on by teleprinter to MI6 in time for Menzies to have discussed it with Churchill before the Prime Minister made his ‘crime without a name’ broadcast. But the evidence appears to suggest that, at the very least, Churchill had not seen the full details of either of the two Jeckeln messages, because a few days later, on 27 August 1941, Bletchley Park issued the first of a special series of Most Secret reports concerning the activities of the police troops and specifically prepared for Churchill.
These reports, written out on good quality paper, had a very limited circulation. There were just two copies, one of which was kept on file at Bletchley Park, with the other going direct to Menzies, who passed it on to Churchill in his daily bundle of intelligence, singling it out in the covering letter. The way these reports were handled leaves no doubt that they were produced specifically for Churchill and at his request. They are concise and to the point and signed personally by Nigel de Grey, now head of research in Hut 3.
De Grey’s first report in this series covers Jeckeln’s message of 23 August announcing that his men operating in the Luginy area have shot dead 367 Jews. It was seen by Churchill on 28 August and the Prime Minister circled the figure 367 in red. The second on 30 August began with the words: ‘Further light on the use being made of the Police Forces in the back areas on the Russian front is shed by some of the daily reports received.’ It went on to recount the details of Jeckeln’s message of 24 August and the killing of a total of 603 Jews.
In this second report, de Grey added new information on further killings from another report to Berlin by Jeckeln, this time on 25 August, in which he reported that his men operating south of Kiev had killed 1,625 Jews. The 1st SS Brigade had taken eighty-five prisoners and shot dead 283 Jews while the Police Regiment South had shot dead 1,342 Jews. Churchill circled the latter figure, the largest figure so far for a single massacre. Also on 25 August, von dem Bach-Zelewski broke what for him appears at first sight to have been a period of silence on the killings, to say that the SS Cavalry Brigade, which was operating in the Pripet marshes, had killed ninety-two Russian soldiers and 150 Jews.
By now there were worrying signs that Churchill’s speech on a ‘crime without a name’ had led to tightened radio security measures. The cypher in use was changing twice a day, making it more difficult to break, and there were clear delays in the intelligence being decyphered. This was almost certainly why a message sent by Jeckeln on 26 August 1941 and in which he reports that his units had shot a further 1,246 Jews, was not included in the 30 August report to Churchill. It was issued separately on 1 September and seen by Churchill a day later. Again the Prime Minister circled the figure for the number of Jews shot.
The slaughter was unremitting. Jeckeln reported on 30 August that the Police Regiment South had shot dead forty-five Jews in the central Ukrainian town of Slavuta and von dem Bach-Zelewski reported that his men had shot dead eighty-four Jews in the Belorussian town of Gorodishche. A day later, on 31 August, Jeckeln reported that 911 more Jews had been shot dead in Slavuta and a further 2,200 Jews shot dead in Minkowzky. This was reported to Churchill on 6 September as ‘over 3,000 Jews shot by various units’. On 2 September, Jeckeln reported that his men had shot dead a further sixty Jews and fifteen Partisans in the Kaments-Podolsky region of the southern Ukraine. Four days later, on 6 September, they had shot dead 494 Jews and two Partisans. On 11 September, Jeckeln reported that Police Regiment South had liquidated 1,548 Jews ‘according to the usage of war’. This euphemism was commonly used. The victims were variously ‘disposed of’; ‘liquidated’; ‘executed’; ‘shot dead’; or sometimes simply ‘evacuated’. The upshot was, of course, always the same.
The next day, 12 September, the German Police changed their cypher, starting with the cyphers in use by the police troops in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. They switched from the double transposition system to a system known as Double Playfair, a fairly sophisticated substitution system, albeit one that Bletchley Park was able to break again with relative ease.
Also on 12 September, Churchill saw his final report on the killing of Jews during this initial period. There were very clear decryption difficulties with this report. It was only shown to Churchill on 12 September, although it dated back to 27 August, when Jeckeln reported that the 1st SS Brigade had killed sixteen Jews and Partisans; Police Regiment South had shot dead 914 Jews; and the ‘Special Handling Staff with 320 Police Battalion had shot dead 4,200 Jews. At the bottom of the report, de Grey noted: ‘The fact that the Police are killing all Jews that fall into their hands should by now be sufficiently appreciated. It is not therefore proposed to continue reporting these butcheries specially, unless so requested.’
But the messages dried up anyway. A few weeks after Churchill’s speech, Daluege warned his commanders that the British might be listening and told them to send details of all future ‘executions’ to Berlin by courier.
The killings that followed the invasion of the Soviet Union are now recognised as the beginning of the Holocaust. It has been claimed that Churchill covered up the evidence from Bletchley Park of the Holoca
ust killings. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He not only broadcast to the world, denouncing the German mass murders as a ‘crime without a name’, he had Foreign Office lawyers collect evidence of the killings for use in future war trials.
One of those involved in decyphering the plethora of messages coming out of eastern Europe was Charles Cunningham who had been called up into the Army as a private.
I had read classics, Latin and Greek, at Glasgow. By way of ancillary to that I had taken a short course in German mainly because many of the best texts and commentaries on the Latin and Greek classics are in German. As a result of that very minimal knowledge the Army posted me to Bletchley Park. On my first day there, I saluted this captain and he turned to me and said: ‘Excuse me’ – which is not the language normally used by captains to privates – ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘What is that noise?’ To which I replied: ‘That is the air raid siren, sir.’ That gives you some kind of an impression of what kind of place Bletchley was; mad people on all sides.
Cunningham was immediately promoted to lance-corporal and put to work on police communications. ‘I was a cryptanalyst working on what was called German police but in fact it included all the security services,’ Cunningham said. ‘They used a lovely hand cypher system, which was called Double Playfair, named after a British admiral in the mid-nineteenth century who devised it.’
Admiral Playfair’s system required the message that was to be encyphered to be split into bigrams so the sentence ‘Report to headquarters at once’ would be rendered:
RE PO RT TO HE AD QU AR TE RS AT ON CE
The cypher was built in a five by five square around a keyword. If we were to take ‘Phoenix’ as the key word, it would be written into the square with the remaining letters of the alphabet filling the rest of the square, omitting J which when encyphering was always taken to be I. A Playfair cypher using Phoenix as the keyword would therefore appear thus:
P H O E N
I X A B C
D F G K L
M Q R S T
U V W Y Z
Each bigram of the divided message is then replaced by a pair of letters from within the square according to pre-set rules. If the letters appear at a diagonal to each other they are replaced by the letters at the other point of a rectangle so formed. In the case of our message, the first bigram RE becomes OS. Bigrams with letters in the same horizontal or vertical line are replaced by the next letter on, making the second bigram of the above message PO become HE. Letters at the end of the line jump to the next one. So the third bigram RT would be rendered SU. The entire encyphered message would then be written in five letter groups, in this case using four randomly chosen fillers at the end:
OSHES UNRON GIVMG WNSST RCEIN BCVYU
The Germans, having broken this cypher early on in the First World War, decided to adapt it for their own use. They introduced a second square from which the second letter of each bigram was selected and dispensed with the keyword, placing the letters in random order. This complication obviously made it much more difficult to crack. But since the Germans spelt everything, including numbers, out in full, the codebreakers often got plenty of depth. The German fondness for proforma traffic in which everything always stayed in its set place also helped to ensure that the Double Playfair system, used as a medium-grade cypher not just by the German police but also by the Army and air force, was regularly broken.
Proforma messages inevitably required each part of the message to be preceded by a sequential number, the first part being 1, the second 2, and so on. Since these had to be spelt out, EINS, the German word for one, was immediately recoverable and easy cribs were available for the rest of the message. The fact that, when spelt out, the German numbers one to twelve contain all but eight of the letters in the Double Playfair squares made proforma traffic relatively easy to break. But while the actual process of breaking the police cypher was an enjoyable and intensely rewarding task for the codebreakers, the results of their labour were often horrific.
‘When you’re an individual cryptanalyst just working on the intercepts of the day before, you don’t have any real overall picture,’ said Cunningham.
You only see the bits of paper in front of you and try to break the cypher and having broken it you pass it on to someone else who does the decoding. The business of the cryptanalyst is simply to get the key. When he’s done that, he goes on to another batch. But there was concern over the concentration camps, which was of course a very inadequate term, and one was aware in the case of stuff coming from these camps that very nasty things indeed were going on. They were run by the SS and they made regular returns of the intake and what the output was and you can guess what the intake was and what the output was. You soon got to have a fairly good idea of what you were dealing with. The ironic thing was that these terrible returns, sort of day-to-day status reports, were stereotyped and that is a very good way of getting into that kind of cypher. They provided an excellent crib, which I always thought of as a distinctly unfortunate thing but I suppose it is a kind of way of turning evil into good.
The SS decrypts also revealed the existence of a special SS battalion which, under the guidance of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, was plundering works of art and sending them back to Berlin. The battalion was attached to Army groups in all the countries invaded by Germany and in Russia made a particular target of the palaces of the former Tsar in Leningrad, suggesting that it may have been behind the disappearance of the legendary Amber Room, a gold and amber encrusted hall in the Winter Palace. The decrypts showed the battalion becoming involved in a wrangle between von Ribbentrop and Alfred Rosenberg, Minister for Occupied Territories, over what should happen to various works of art looted from Russian palaces, museums and monasteries, most of which made their way into the villas of leading Nazi party bosses.
CHAPTER 7
ACTION THIS DAY
Churchill’s obsession with the increasing amount of high-grade intelligence the codebreakers were producing hidden away at a secret location in the heart of the British countryside meant it was inevitable that he should want to visit Bletchley Park in person to see them at work. He arrived on the morning of 6 September 1941, his visit kept secret from the bulk of the codebreakers.
The decrypts delivered by Menzies had most recently included the reports on the German killings of the Jews on the Eastern Front and the preparations by German U-Boats to attack Allied shipping in the Atlantic, while Hut 6, having proved its worth in the Balkans, with its warnings over the invasion of Russia and as the place where Enigma was being broken most regularly, was one of the highlights of Churchill’s visit.
‘Travis took him on a tour of the many Bletchley Park activities,’ Welchman recalled.
The tour was to include a visit to my office and I had been told to prepare a speech of a certain length, say ten minutes. When the party turned up, a bit behind schedule, Travis whispered, somewhat loudly, ‘Five minutes, Welchman.’ I started with my prepared opening gambit, which was ‘I would like to make three points,’ and then proceeded to make the first two points more hurriedly than I had planned. Travis then said, ‘That’s enough, Welchman,’ whereupon Winston, who was enjoying himself, gave me a grand schoolboy wink and said, ‘I think there was a third point, Welchman.’
Welchman took the Prime Minister on a tour of Hut 6, introducing him to John Herivel as the man responsible for beginning the continuous break into the vitally important Red key. ‘Churchill didn’t say anything,’ Herivel recalled.
He just gave me a deep penetrating look, not a very friendly look, rather a scowl, and then he went on. Later that day, we were told the Prime Minister wanted to see us. There was a little pile of material which the builders had conveniently left near the end of Hut 6 and Churchill stood up on it and in just a few words, with deep emotion, he said how grateful he was to us for all the good work we were doing in the war effort. So that was our finest hour.
Churchill would later laud the codebr
eakers as ‘the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled’ but was reputedly so startled by the eccentricity of some of the codebreakers that he turned to Menzies, who was visiting with him, and said: ‘I know I told you to leave no stone unturned to get staff, but I didn’t expect you to take me literally.’
Malcolm Kennedy recorded the visit in his diary entry for 6 September 1941.
The PM paid us a surprise visit this morning and after inspecting some of the work of BP gave a short talk thanking us for what we have done and stressing the great value of our work. Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, paid a similar visit of thanks at the time of the ‘Bismarck’ show. Very decent of these old boys to come down in person to thank us when they themselves must be terribly loaded down with their own work and vast responsibilities. Instructions issued to keep Churchill’s visit a secret, but all Bletchley seems to know about it.
Only a few of the codebreakers were able to hear what Churchill said but there was an immense feeling of pride that the Prime Minister had visited them and disappointment among those, like Anne Lavell, who were not there to hear him speak. ‘I was terribly cross,’ she said. ‘I was on four to midnight shift that day and when I came up the place was buzzing like an ant-heap, and I’d missed it all, he’d been and gone.’
The Secrets of Station X Page 14