Series IV

Volume 9

Eavesdropping on Hell:

Historical Guide 

to Western Communications

Intelligence and the

Holocaust, 1939-1945
UNITED STATES CRYPTOLOGIC HISTORY

Eavesdropping on Hell:

Historical Guide to Western

Communications Intelligence

and the Holocaust, 1939-1945

Robert J. Hanyok

CENTER FOR CRYPTOLOGIC HISTORY

NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

2005

Second Edition
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Page

Table of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .iii

Preface and Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1

A Note on Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Chapter 1: Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

The Context of European and Nazi Anti-Semitism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

Previous Histories and Articles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14

Chapter 2: Overview of the Western Communications Intelligence

System during World War II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Step 1: Setting the Requirements, Priorities, and Division of Effort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24

Step 2: Intercepting the Messages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30

Step 3: Processing the Intercept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36

Step 4: Disseminating the COMINT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .43

From Intercept to Decryption – the Processing of a German Police Message . . . . . . . . .51

Chapter 3: Sources of Cryptologic Records Relating to the Holocaust . . . . .61

The National Archives and Records Administration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .61

The Public Record Office . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67

Miscellaneous Collections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71

Chapter 4: Selected Topics from the Holocaust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75

A. The General Course of the Holocaust and Allied COMINT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .76

B. Jewish Refugees, the Holocaust, and the Growing Strife in Palestine . . . . . . . . . . . .86

C. The Vichy Regime and the Jews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .89

D. The Destruction of Hungary’s Jews, 1944 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .94

E. Japan and the Jews in the Far East . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .99

F. Nazi Gold: National and Personal Assests Looted by Nazis

and Placed in Swiss Banks, 1943 - 1945 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .104

Chapter 5: Some Observations about Western Communications Intelligence

and the Holocaust . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .121

What was Known from COMINT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .122

When the COMINT Agencies Knew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .123

Some Further Observations Regarding the Available Archival Records . . . . . . . . . . .126

There are limited COMINT agency records about the Holocaust . . . . . . . . . . . . . .126

There are significant differences between the archival records holdings

of the cryptologic agencies of the United States and Great Britain . . . . . . . . . .128

Table of Contents
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Page

The Western communications intelligence agencies collected many more

intercepts than they finally processed during the War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .130

There are pertinent uses for the available records from the COMINT

agencies related to the Holocaust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .131

Appendix 1: 

Selected Allied Monitoring Stations (MS) and Designators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .135

Appendix 2: 

Annotated Sample of Diplomatic Translations and German Police Decrypt . . . . . . .137

Appendix 3

Attached Documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .139

Vrba-Wetzler Cable, 26 June 1944 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .140

German Foreign office message to Buenos Aiers regarding a 

pension applicant’s Jewish wife, 13 January 1943 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .146

Spanish diplomatic message referring to Raoul Wallenberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .147

VN 1260: German translation of intercepted U.S. Department of State

message from embassy in Bern, Switzerland, 19 October 1944 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .148

[DOS Nr. 6927] Regarding the status of interned Hungarian Jews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .149

German report of results of deportation of Hungarian Jews, 

30 December 1944. From O.S.S. source “George Wood.” . . . . . . . . . . . . . .150

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .155

Glossary of Terms, Abbreviations, and Acronyms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
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This book is dedicated to those cursed with the memory

of this horror and to those who assumed the burden of

its remembrance.
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There is no river but memory

Raise up, raise up a pillar of

our tears.

“Leaving Sodom” by Ann Lauinger

Surely, the grimmest part of the Second

World War was the Holocaust (or Shoah). This

entailed the systematic and wholesale destruction

of European Jewry and other groups such as

Slavs, Poles, and Romany (Gypsies), among others, which the Nazis had deemed “inferior” and

then slated for destruction because of race, blood,

or disability. In fact, one of the major war aims of

Nazi Germany was the extermination of global

Jewry. During the war years, Europe’s landscape

was scarred by the presence of concentration,

labor, and death camps. Einsatzgruppen (operations groups), and numerous German Police

units roamed the western Soviet Union in the

wake of the Wehrmacht, slaughtering Jews,

Slavs, and Bolsheviks. Collaborationist regimes of

nations allied to or conquered by the Axis powers

cooperated with the Nazi security forces in extinguishing national or resident refugee Jewish populations. The darkness that overwhelmed Nazioccupied Europe and threatened other nations in

the world was only slightly lessened by individual

acts of courageous opposition and the example of

the nation of Denmark, which smuggled virtually

its entire Jewish population to safety in Sweden.

By the end of the war, it has been estimated that

Europe’s Jewish population had been reduced to

somewhere between a third to a quarter of its

1939 level.1

In the years following the war, a number of

histories, memoirs, and specialized studies about

the Holocaust were published. These works were

based on a variety of private and official sources

that were then available to the public. For the

longest period, one element that was largely missing in the historical accounts was the records of

the various Western intelligence agencies, such as

the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS)

and Britain’s M.I.6. Also absent was the intelligence gathered by the wartime Allied communications intelligence (COMINT) agencies, most

notably the British Government Code and Cypher

School (GC&CS), the U.S. Navy’s OP-20-G, and

the U.S. Army’s Signals Intelligence Service (SIS).

The revelations in the mid-1970s of the Allied

code-breaking successes – the deep and persistent exploitation of Axis codes, ciphers, and

communications, popularly referred to as “Ultra”

– only whetted the appetite of Holocaust

researchers. Once it was known that Allied codebreakers had pierced the Reich’s deepest secrets,

the question posed was how much more information would be available for researchers?

Beginning in the mid-1970s, scholars of the

Holocaust who had wanted to utilize the archived

material of the wartime code-breaking agencies

focused their research on the then available

records at the United States’ National Archives

and Records Administration (NARA) and the

United Kingdom’s Public Record Office (renamed

the National Archives in 2003). During the first

few years after the Ultra revelations, these scholars discovered little significant information

about the Holocaust in the wartime records of the

British GC&CS and the American SIS. These

records, by the way, were stored in the record

groups of their modern successor agencies. The

records of the SIS were to be found in Record

Group (RG) 457, the records of the National

Security Agency (NSA). The GC&CS records were

placed in Group HW, the records of the

Government Communications Headquarters

Preface
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(GCHQ). The actual number of records in either

group was not large by any measure; nor were

they particularly revealing. For example, in

NARA by 1990, there were about 150 translations

of intercepted wartime Japanese, German, and

Vichy diplomatic messages that referred to the

Holocaust, while at the PRO there may have been

fewer.2 Considering the nature and scope of the

Holocaust – every country in Europe and many of

their colonial holdings were affected in some

fashion by what the Nazis were doing – the number of publicly available records seemed meager.

At the same time, the records that were available seemed to have large gaps in the subject matter that they covered. Topics of enormous importance to understanding the Holocaust, such as the

depredations of the police and SS units in Russia,

the operations of the death camps, and the

roundup of the Hungarian Jews, barely were

mentioned in the extant material. Especially

when compared to the large body of records from

these and other events during the Holocaust, that

there were so few items from communications

intelligence sources in the British and American

archives during the 1970s seemed to invite disbelief, ridicule, or suspicion.

Researchers also could construe the absence

of significant archival holdings of the wartime

records of the Allied code-breaking agencies to

mean that further, still unreleased, caches of

records existed. These “absent” records were

believed to be in either one of two forms: finished

intelligence in the form of reports still classified

and therefore withheld from the public, or there

existed troves of “raw,” or undecrypted, Axis messages at these agencies. Exacerbating the situation was the publication, during the decade of the

1980s, of the official multivolume History of

British Intelligence in the Second World War.

3

This enormous history referenced British records

of intercepted Nazi messages about the

Holocaust, mainly those of the German Police

who were one of the primary agents for the massacres of hundreds of thousands of Jews and others in the western Soviet Union. The history also

referred to intercepted messages from the SS concerning the slave labor populations at a number

of concentration camps.4 Ironically, the actual

records used to write the history still were not

accessible by the public.

In a way these scholars were correct in their

observations. Even by the late 1980s, the British

and Americans still had much World War II cryptologic material to release. It was not until a number of further significant releases of wartime

records of the Signal Intelligence Service and the

Government Code and Cypher School through

the decade of the 1990s that the amount of

COMINT material available to researchers of the

Holocaust dramatically increased.5 By early

2004, at NARA, over 600 translations and

decrypts of various intercepted messages about

the Holocaust could be found in the record

groups of the National Security Agency. These

included some decrypts of German Police messages that reported the massacres of Jews and

other groups. Others are messages from mostly

diplomatic sources that bear witness to such

events as the roundup of Jews in Hungary and

other countries in occupied Europe. At the PRO,

the complete set of German Police and SS

decrypts were available to be reviewed by the

public.6

Even with the releases of the 1990s, the U.S.

government still held back significant collections

of U.S. government records about the Holocaust.

But the remaining wartime records, and those

from the postwar period that relate to the

Holocaust and to Nazi and other Axis power war

crimes will soon be declassified and released

thanks to the efforts of the United States

Interagency Working Group on Nazi War Crimes

(IWG). Established in January 1999 in accordance with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act

(P.L. 105-246), the IWG was charged with locating, inventorying, and recommending for declassification all classified Nazi war criminal records

held by the United States government. The act
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was amended in 2000 to include declassification

of U.S. government records pertaining to

Japanese war crimes and war criminals.7 Many of

the records that were released under the aegis of

the Disclosure Act were from U.S. intelligence

agencies. Hopefully, the release of these records

will help dispel those claims and charges made

over the years by some scholars and Holocaust

survivors that “there had to be more records” or

that the intelligence agencies were “holding back

records.”8

To this historian, the problems that

researchers and scholars of the Holocaust had

had over the years with the number of available

COMINT records appeared to lay elsewhere than

just with the paucity of this material. Similar

reactions to the later several releases of wartime

records to the NARA and the PRO suggested to

me that the issue was a fundamental one: That

researchers and scholars still misunderstood the

basic operation of the Allied wartime COMINT

system. Many people did not understand how

the wartime code-breaking agencies procured,

processed, and disseminated communications

intelligence. They did not realize that there were

technical and institutional constraints and limitations under which GC&CS and SIS operated.

Also, it was not generally well understood that

there were priorities established for collection

and decryption of Axis and neutral communications and that higher authorities in Allied intelligence and military operations had set these.

Many people also did not know that the operational needs of these agencies largely determined what wartime records were retained after

the war, how the existing records were controlled,

where the relevant records resided in various

national archival collections, and who was

responsible for their release. In short, the story of

COMINT records relating to the Holocaust is

much more than a simple matter of the number of

pages available to the public at various national

archives.

In considering all of the above, I determined

that a historical guide would be useful for

researchers, scholars, and the general public.

Such a guide could help Holocaust researchers

gain a better understanding of how Allied communications intelligence reported intelligence on

the Holocaust. It would explain the variety of

material that would be encountered in the

records of the wartime cryptologic agencies. This

guide, then, will concentrate on three topics that

would be of interest and utility to scholars and the

general public. First, it explains how the Western

communications intelligence system operated

during the war. It will consider how well the system operated and what were its limitations. This

latter point is important when considering how

Western COMINT handled intelligence about the

Holocaust. Second, the guide describes how the

wartime records of the SIS and GC&CS currently

are organized in the national archives of Great

Britain and the United States, where these

records can be found, and the various formats

they come in. Third, the guide summarizes what

information is available from SIGINT records

about the Holocaust. This summary consists of

both a general chronology of the Holocaust and

selected incidents for which significant communications intelligence records are available.

Despite the scope and detail of some of the

material contained in this guide, it is not intended as a narrative history of the Holocaust based

on the records of Western communications intelligence agencies. The major reason is that the

archived COMINT records cannot sustain such a

history. There are too many important parts of

the history of the Holocaust for which no communications intelligence was collected. As will be

demonstrated later in this work, communications

intelligence could not reveal high-level Nazi policy deliberations regarding the Jews and other

groups. On occasion, communications intelligence could “tip off’ an impending action by Nazi

security forces, as in Italy in the fall of 1943. But

this advantage was rare. More often, COMINT

was best as a chronicle of some campaigns that
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already were under way such as the massacres

carried out by the German Police units in the

western USSR in 1941 and the roundup of the

Hungarian Jews in mid-1944.

Although something of a historical narrative

of the Holocaust is presented in the last chapter of

this guide, it is meant to be a selected summary of

the available information from COMINT records.

It is beyond the scope and means for historians of

cryptology to rewrite the story of the dreadful

events of the Holocaust. Their mission is to discover the relevant records and write the history of

cryptology and place that story within the context

of larger events of the Second World War. It

remains for historians of the Holocaust to utilize

completely within their narratives the historical

information provided by the records of the Allied

code-breaking agencies.

This guide will limit its focus to the two major

Western COMINT agencies that produced intelligence about the Holocaust during the war: the

British GC&CS and the U.S. Army’s SIS. Early in

the war, the U.S. Navy’s cryptologic element, OP20-G, contributed some intercept of diplomatic

communications, but by mid-1942, it ceded this

work completely to the SIS and concentrated

almost exclusively on Axis naval communications. A number of smaller Allies contributed to

the overall Western radio intelligence work.

These included Canada, Australia, New Zealand,

and others. However, the American and British

security concern to protect Ultra sometimes circumscribed the contribution of these smaller

allies. Among these, refugee Polish cryptologists

contributed major intercept and code-breaking

efforts against German Police communications.

Their work will be discussed later in the guide.

It is important to mention that the British had

a limited COMINT relationship with the Soviet

Union. Among other things, this included an

exchange of technical information on German

Police ciphers. (But it stopped short of revealing

the Enigma breakthrough.) The Russians certainly were in a position to intercept more police messages than the British (or the Poles). And they

were able to read the same German Police messages as the British. But Western researchers do

not know to what extent and for how long the

Russians were able to exploit German Police

radio traffic. Also, it is not known if the Soviets

retained these decrypts in their archives after the

war. These uncertainties mean that this guide will

forego any consideration of the Soviet contribution to communications intelligence about the

Holocaust. This subject must await future

researchers gaining access to the appropriate

archives in Moscow.9

The background chapter to this guide offers

brief summaries of the history of anti-Semitism

in the West and the early Nazi policies in

Germany, as well as a short review of the limited

body of historical and memoir literature prior to

1997 that pertains to both cryptology and the

Holocaust. Chapter 2 will describe the general

system by which communications intelligence

was produced by the Allies during World War II.

This description will encompass the system from

the establishment of collection priorities, through

the intercept of targeted Axis and neutral communications, next to the processing or analysis of

the intercept for intelligence, and finally to the

dissemination of the produced intelligence. Just

as importantly, this section includes observations

on how the nature of the communications intelligence process affected the collection of information concerning the Holocaust. Chapter 3 will list

the various locations for relevant records of the

American and British cryptologic agencies held

by the National Archives and Records

Administration and the Public Record Office.

This chapter will also include a description and

some examples of other smaller relevant records

holdings. Chapter 4 will briefly review the available COMINT material that is part of the historical narrative of the Holocaust. This chapter

includes a brief overview of the course of the

Holocaust and somewhat more detailed descriptions of specific topics that include the refugee
Page 5

problem and Palestine, Vichy and the Jews, the

roundup of the Hungarian Jews, the situation of

the Jews in the Far East under the Japanese, and

German-Swiss trade and financial transactions

during the war. Finally, Chapter 5 considers some

important general observations about cryptology

and the Holocaust. In a way, these observations

are a summation of the material presented in the

guide.

A Note on Terminology

Since the first revelations of the Ultra secret in

the mid-1970s, the public has been exposed to a

number of arcane terms associated with the business of making or breaking codes. Unfortunately,

there has been a tendency among many scholarly

and popular writers and reporters to confuse or

mix terms. This misuse of terms often led to some

inaccuracies in their texts such as referring to the

German Enigma machine as a “code machine.”

Although most of these terms are not relevant to

this work, a few necessarily have to be used to

accurately describe various activities and items of

the Allied communications intelligence system.

So I will define the most important ones and

explain how they are used in this monograph.

COMINT is the acronym for communications

intelligence and can be defined as measures

taken to intercept, analyze, and report intelligence derived from all forms of communications.

This definition describes most accurately the

entire Western system to exploit Axis communications. The COMINT system included the codebreaking centers at Bletchley Park in Great

Britain and the American centers at Arlington

Hall, Virginia, and Nebraska Avenue in

Washington, D.C. It also includes the monitoring

stations manned by Allied radio operators that

listened in and copies Axis and neutral radio

transmissions. It further covers the work of the

various Allied staffs and units that took the analyzed messages, picked out the intelligence that

mattered and forwarded it to whatever Allied

command, ministry, department, or leader that

would need it.

A similar term, signals intelligence, or SIGINT, is often used synonymously with communications intelligence in many histories of wartime

intelligence. Signals intelligence is a term that

encompasses a much broader category of electromagnetic emissions than just those used for communications. This category includes such emissions as radar and navigation beacons. During

World War II, Western technical intelligence took

an active interest in collecting such signals used

by the Axis so that countermeasures could be

developed against them. The famous British

“window,” or chaff (strips of aluminum that

reflected radar signals and created interference

on German radar screens) was an effective

weapon against German warning radars during

the Allied bomber offensives. The British

employed technical deceptive measures to defeat

the Germans navigational beacons used by the

Luftwaffe to guide its bombers during night raids

against British cities.10

Cryptology is defined as the study of the making and breaking of codes and ciphers.

Cryptography is the development of codes and

ciphers. A code is defined as a method in which

arbitrary groups of letter, number, or other symbols replace words, phrases, letters, or numbers

for the purposes of concealment or brevity. To

encode is to transform plaintext into a code. To

decode is to break a code back to its underlying

plaintext. A cipher is a method of concealing

plaintext by transposing letters or numbers or by

substituting other letters or numbers according to

a key. A key is a set of instructions, usually in the

form of letters or numbers, which controls the

sequence of the encryption of text and the decryption of cipher back to the original plaintext.

Transforming plaintext into cipher is called

encryption. Breaking the cipher back to plaintext

is called decryption. Cryptanalysis is the analytic method whereby code or cipher is broken back

to the underlying plaintext. Traffic analysis is the
Page 6

method by which intelligence is derived from the

analysis of the communications activity and elements of messages short of the actual cryptanalysis of a message.

Two examples of famous ciphers from World

War II are the Axis cipher machines, the German

Enigma and the Japanese Purple (known to

the Japanese as the 97-shiki O-bun In-ji-ki,

or Alphabetical Typewriter ’97). Both

machines substituted letters for plaintext

elements according to daily settings (key)

for each machine. Interestingly, most

ciphers used by all sides during the war

overwhelmingly were manual in nature.

That is, they involved the use of paper

charts and key. Such a manual cipher was

the double transposition cipher used by

German Police units to encrypt their reports

about the massacres of Jews, partisans,

prisoners, and Soviet commissars to Police

headquarters in Berlin.

Codes used during the war usually came

in the form of a book. On each page of the

codebook, a plaintext word or phrase was

aligned opposite its code group equivalent.

Examples of a code include that used by the

Soviets for its espionage messages known

Enigma Machine

(Courtesy of National Security Agency)

Purple Analog

(Courtesy of National Security Agency)
Page 7

through the Allied cover name as Venona and the

Japanese operational naval code, JN-25. Both

codes utilized books of code values for plaintext,

but added an additional element: key, in the form

of groups of numbers that were used to encrypt

the code groups, further concealing the “true”

code groups. This practice made decoding even

more difficult: before a cryptanalyst could recover the plaintext value behind a code group, he or

she first had to recover the true code group. An

example of an ordinary code used during the war

was the so-called “Black Code” used by the United

States Army military attachés. This system was

exploited by both Italy and Germany to great

effect in 1941 and was probably Field Marshall

Erwin Rommel’s best source of intelligence during the battle for North Africa.11

To facilitate the understanding of readers who

may be uncertain of the above jargon or uncomfortable with it, I will use terms like “cryptology,”

“communications intelligence,” “COMINT,” “signals intelligence,” and “SIGINT” interchangeably

either as adjectives or as nouns by which to

describe or identify the overall system the Allies

used to exploit Axis cryptography and communications. Using these five terms as general descriptors will not sacrifice accuracy and probably will

make the text more readable. Other terms from

cryptology, used once, will be defined as they are

encountered in the text.

Acknowledgments

This guide took over five years to complete,

far longer than originally planned when I began

in late 1998. Why did it take so long to finish?

Initially, like many other historians of cryptology,

I believed that there was not much material available and felt therefore that a guide could be published within a relatively short time. In 1999 I

previewed the guide in a paper delivered at the

Cryptologic History Symposium held at Fort

George G. Meade, Maryland. At the time I felt

that relevant record sources mostly had been

examined by scholars. A review of the symposium

paper in an intelligence journal had emphasized

my remark about the “scanty” amount of communications intelligence records.”12 But I was wrong.

The Interagency Working Group (IWG) on Nazi

War Crimes (that soon included Imperial

Japanese Imperial Records), which I joined in

early 2001 as a technical advisor to its staff,

already was deep into an extensive review all the

records of Nazi crimes held by the many agencies

and departments of the United States government, including its intelligence agencies. The

records that were unearthed by the various intelligence agencies, and the clues they provided to

supplementary finds in the British Public Record

Office and the U.S. National Archives, indicated

that there were many more pages of cryptologic

records than earlier believed. Every further meeting of the IWG and the associated Historical

Advisory Panel I attended had uncovered more

records. I realized I had to delay the completion

of this guide until the search by the IWG neared

completion. The wait, I believe, was well worth it.

Within the National Security Agency, there

were many people who contributed their efforts,

directly and indirectly, to the publication of this

Guide. First of all, the Publications Team of the

Center for Cryptologic History (CCH) did its

usual magic and turned my initial “heap of

words” into the presentable form it now is. Many

thanks go to the tireless efforts of Lula

Greenwood and Barry Carleen. Within the CCH,

Dave Mowry, Sharon Maneki, and David Hatch

reviewed my manuscript and offered many useful

points. Elsewhere, I am grateful for the insights

from Robert L. Benson and Rona Lerner. There

were others who contributed to this guide from

the NSA, yet they cannot be mentioned by name.

I wish to thank them publicly for their help.

Because of the scope of the information in this

guide, it was necessary to consult with many individuals outside of the NSA. Although personal

research provided much historical background to

the Holocaust, the many months that I spent

reviewing the literature of the Holocaust could
Page 8

not provide me with that astute insight that is

gained only from a deep and sustained professional study of a subject. So I queried a number of

academic historians, independent scholars, and

researchers familiar with the Holocaust for help.

In all of my correspondence with them, I encountered nothing but gracious and full cooperation.

My questions were patiently and quickly

answered, requests for material were filled

promptly, and several people took time from their

busy schedules to review the manuscript. I hope

that our effort was a mutually rewarding learning

experience. Their cooperation suggests that

history is more than a mere academic discipline;

at times it can be a true community of effort,

even, if at times, it can be a bit contentious. With

this experience in mind, I wish to thank the following people for their incisive and useful comments on my manuscript: Gerhard Weinberg,

Richard Breitman, Rebecca Boehling, Colin

“Brad” Burke, David Alvarez, Christopher Lovett,

Sebastian Laurent, Miriam Kleiman, and Ron

Zweig. A very special thanks go to Stephen Tyas,

Ralph Erskine, and Rebecca Ratcliff for both their

comments on the manuscript and for sharing

their historical research from the Public Record

Office. And a final thanks to the archivists of the

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in selecting

images from their photographic archives.

If there are any errors in this guide, then, in

the eloquent words of the Qur’an: “If I err, I err

just on my own.”

Robert J. Hanyok

Fort George G. Meade, MD

2005
Page 9

Notes

1. Precise figures for the destruction of European

Jewry are difficult to arrive at. Among other reasons,

poor national census bases, a reluctance by some

European nations to account for Jewish losses, and an

uncontrolled refugee flow during and after the war

have contributed to the continuing imprecision and

discrepancies in the estimates. Most statistics are, in

reality, good estimates. One source is Leon Poliakov

and Josef Wulf, eds, Das Dritte Reich and die Juden:

Dokumente und Aufsaetz (Berlin: Arani-Verlag

GmbH, 1955). The Jewish population of September

1939 Europe is estimated at 8.3 million. The number

of Jews murdered is put at 5.97 million or about

seventy-two percent. Another source, Wolfgang Benz

in Dimension des Volksmords: Die Zahl der

Judischen Opfer des Nationalsocialismus (Munich:

Deutscher Taschebuch Verlag, 1991) places the final

toll at 6.26 million Jews.

2. In the U.S. National Archives, some of the

records in RG 457, “The Records of the National

Security Agency/Central Security Service,” can be

found both the original version and a “redacted” version. This confusing situation resulted from the

stricter requirements for declassification of the material released in the mid-1980s. By the mid-1990s,

many of the earlier restrictions had been eased and

original version of some of the material from the initial

releases was transferred to the Archives without any

deletions. Good examples of these dual versions can be

found by comparing redacted Japanese translations

found in Entry 9011 (notated also as “SRDJ”), or

redacted French Vichy diplomatic translations, Entry

9021 (notated also as “SRDV) with the original,

unredacted translation that can be found in the

Historical Cryptographic Collection, Boxes 286 to 516.

3. F. H. Hinsley, et alia, British Intelligence in

the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and

Operations. (Volumes I-III) (London, Her Majesty’s

Stationery Office, 1980 to 1990) Volume IV.

F.H. Hinsley and C.A.G. Simkins, Security and

CounterIntelligence (1990). Volume V. Michael

Howard, Strategic Deception (1990).

4. Hinsley, Volume II (Appendix 5), 669-73.

5. For example, in 1996 the National Security

Agency released some 1.3 million pages of World War

II records to the National Archives. This material was

placed in the Historical Cryptographic Collection

(HCC). The records originated with the U.S. Army’s

cryptologic agency known primarily as the Signals

Intelligence Service. In this release were German

Police messages and many more diplomatic messages

from other countries, such as Switzerland and the

Vatican, which referenced the Holocaust.

6. The numbers may yet change. At the PRO, there

are a substantial number of GC&CS diplomatic translations still to be released to HW 12. Also, at NARA in

RG 457, HCC, there are numerous boxes of so-called

“Summary Translations” that consist of single pages

with several short diplomatic translations. A single

sheet can contain as many as five short translations,

some of which are relevant to the Holocaust.

(See Chapter 4 for an example of one of these

“Summaries.”)

7. Although a final count of records released under

the Act remains to be made, as of January 2004,

almost 700,000 pages from the Central Intelligence

Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the

National Security Agency, and the U.S. Army had been

released. It is expected that the IWG will release three

volumes of reports in 2004-5. There will be an overall

report on the working group and its collaboration with

other federal agencies. There also will be two volumes

of reports by IWG-associated historians about the

nature and significance of the declassified and released

records. One volume will cover Europe while the other

will consider Asia and the Pacific.

8. This historian personally encountered such

charges, as well. At a NARA-sponsored symposium on

Records and Research relating to Holocaust-era Assets

in December 1998, a colleague from CIA and I were

confronted by several Holocaust survivors who angrily

claimed that our agencies were withholding records

about certain Nazi war criminals. As it turned out, they

had recently received negative responses to Freedom

of Information Act requests concerning specific war

criminals. They believed that NSA and CIA were withholding records on these individuals.

9. For further information see Hinsley, Vol. II, 57-

65 and Bradley F. Smith, Sharing Secrets with Stalin:

How the Allies Traded Intelligence, 1941-1945

(Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas) 1996, 109-
Page 10

111. Aspects of the proposed early British COMINT

liaison with the Soviet Union can be found in PRO,

HW 14/18, August 1941.

10. Probably the most complete and entirely readable book on the subject remains R.V. Jones’s The

Wizard War. British Scientific Intelligence, 1939-1945

(New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc.,

1978).

11. See David Kahn, Hitler’s Spies: German

Military Intelligence in World War II (New York:

Macmillan Publishing Co., 1978), 193-5, and The

Codebreakers (New York: The Macmillan Company,

1967), 472-4; Bradley F. Smith, The Ultra-Magic

Deals And the Most Secret Special Relationship, 1940-

1946 (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1993), 111-112. For

a description of U.S. diplomatic codes and ciphers during the period, see Ralph E. Weber, United States

Diplomatic Codes and Ciphers, 1775-1938 (Chicago:

Precedent Publishing Co., 1979), 250-254.

12. Ralph Erskine. “Three Conferences.”

International Intelligence History Association (Vol. 7,

No. 2, Winter 1999). The paper also is mentioned in

James Bamford’s Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the

Ultra-Secret National Security Agency from the Cold

War through the Dawn of a New Century (New York:

Doubleday, 2001), 10-11.
Page 11

The Context of European and Nazi AntiSemitism

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.1

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.2

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, antiSemitism 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 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

Chapter 1

Background
Page 12

citizenship because their Jewish parentage or

denied state pensions unless a Jewish spouse was

divorced.3

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.4 

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 (Sicherstheitsdienst 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 Herman 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.”5 In whatever

terms or context it was stated, though, the

destruction of Europe’s Jews was a prime Nazi

goal during the war.6 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.7

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,
Page 13

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.
Page 14

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.8

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).9 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. 10 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 code-breaking

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 Kozazcuk’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.11 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
Page 15

been shot by SS and police units.12 Most of

Bertrand’s story was repeated in Wladyslaw

Kozaczuk’s Enigma, published in Polish in

1979.13 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.14 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.

In the same year as Laqueur’s book,

Calvocoressi published his wartime memoir, Top

Secret Ultra.

15 Calvocoressi had a more detailed

knowledge of the British code-breaking effort

than Winterbotham. In this book, he painted a

more detailed and technically accurate picture of

the operations of the GC&CS’ center at Bletchley

Park. Calavocoressi also added a gruesome detail

that tied in Engima cryptanalysis with the

Holocaust. He claimed that German cryptographers used the numbers of the slave labor population from the daily SS concentration camp

reports, encrypted in a “medium grade cipher,” to

set the keys (wheel settings) for their Enigma

machines.16 But like the previous works,

Calvocoressi used no source documents. They

remained classified.

The publication that provided the first

detailed description of what allied communications intelligence knew of the Holocaust was Sir

Harry Hinsley’s five-volume series, British

Intelligence in the Second World War, published

between 1979 and 1990. Volume II, published in

1981, contained an appendix on the police

decodes which described the operations of the

Einsatzgruppen and police units on the Eastern

Front and the SS messages about the death and

labor camps.17 Hinsley, who had worked on the

German naval intelligence section at Bletchley

Park during the war, and his editorial and writing

staff had been given access to GC&CS records,

decrypts, and translations of intercepted Axis

messages for the purpose of writing the history.

Again, the material, while cited in the work, itself

remained classified and inaccessible to the public

and would remain so some fifteen years after the

first volume of Hinsley’s history had been published.

Hinsley’s work also was based partly on a

multivolume history of wartime activities pro-
Page 16

duced by the GC&CS in the years immediately

after the war. Volume XIII of the Air and Military

History series concentrated on the exploitation of

the communications and encrypted messages of

the German Police and other Reich security

organizations. It contained a short description of

intelligence derived from concentration camps

and an appendix that listed individual massacres

on the Eastern Front contained in selected

decrypted police messages.18 Many of these volumes would be released to the British archives in

the 1990s.

In 1984 a monograph was published in the

Journal of Historical Review that reviewed the

published literature of wartime intelligence,

including the Police decrypts, which carried

information about the massacres and the concentration camps.19 The article called into question

what the intelligence actually revealed about the

Nazi’s ultimate plan for the elimination of

Europe’s Jews. Unfortunately, the journal in

which this article appeared was a well-known

forum for that faction of scholars and researchers

associated with a movement known as

“Holocaust denial.”20 Rather than discuss the

intelligence about the Holocaust and how Allied

officials differed over its meaning, or review the

Nazi program of silence and obfuscation about

the Final Solution, the author claimed that the

gaps in Allied intelligence suggested that many

aspects of the Holocaust, such as the gassings at

Auschwitz, were a fiction. However, the amassed

evidence from captured records and the testimony of Holocaust victims and perpetrators overwhelms the article’s contention. Later releases of

Police decrypts to the PRO would illustrate how

the missing intelligence was attributable to

greater German security measures and the limitations in the communications intelligence system.

Two shorter pieces that dealt with the

German Police and the Holocaust appeared in the

mid-1990s. The first was a monograph, SIGINT

and the Holocaust, by Robert L. Benson, a senior

researcher at the National Security Agency,

known for his major role behind the release of

the NKVD espionage messages referred to as

VENONA. The other was a short piece in the New

York Times Magazine, “The Holocaust Was No

Secret,” by William J. Vanden Heuvel. The article

in the Times probably was published in the wake

of news stories, featured initially in early

November 1996 in the Washington Post, about

the discovery of decrypts of German Police messages in the NSA Record Group 457 at

NARA.21Both Vanden Heuvel’s and Benson’s articles focused on the revelations contained in the

decrypts of the German Police and SS messages

about the massacres in Russia. Both authors also

grappled with the question of why Allied leaders,

especially the British prime minister, Winston

Churchill, who knew of the atrocities, did not do

anything to publicize, impede, or stop them? As

the two authors pointed out, there was really

nothing that the Allies could have done to stop or

appreciably retard the slaughter except to totally

defeat the Nazis as soon as possible.22

As has been seen above, the critical element

absent from all of these early works was the

source material itself – in this case, the collection

of decrypts of the German Police and SS messages. It also has been mentioned that an incomplete set of these decrypts had been discovered in

RG 457 by American University history professor

Richard Breitman in June 1996. This set of police

decrypts was part of a larger 1996 NSA release of

wartime records to the National Archives that

numbered some 1.3 million pages. The set of

German Police messages had been obtained by

NSA from GCHQ in the mid-1980s and had been

incorporated into the large release. The set that

NSA had acquired was only a small portion of a

much larger set of German Police messages that

were still classified and resided in British

archives. (See Chapter 3, page 62, about the

background to the acquisition of these messages

by NSA.) The publicity around the discovery of

the police messages in the U.S. National Archives

helped generate sufficient public pressure for the
Page 17

release to the public of the complete set of police

decrypts by the Public Record Office in May 1997.

It should be pointed out, though, that since

the early to mid 1980s, translations of Axis and

Vichy diplomatic messages that contained limited

information about the Holocaust had been available at the National Archives in the United States.

These documents were located in the NSA Record

Group 457. Beginning in 1979, NSA had turned

over “redacted” (that is, copies of documents with

the still-classified portions blacked out) copies of

translations of Axis and Vichy diplomatic messages to the National Archives. Unfortunately,

there was no topical index for the collections,

which totaled almost 150,000 pages. Those individual translations that were relevant to the

Holocaust lay buried away in their archival boxes

and remained largely untouched by researchers

for years.23

The first full use of any of these records in a

historical study of the Holocaust did not occur

until 1998 with the publication of Official Secrets

by the same Professor Richard Breitman of

American University in Washington, DC. The

book contained a description of how the police

messages were collected and processed by

GC&CS. The largest part of Professor Breitman’s

work looked at the response of the Allied governments to the course of the Holocaust, especially in

light of information available from intelligence

sources including the decrypts of the German

Police and SS units. Using these, he was able,

among other insights, to accord a far more significant role to the police units in the Holocaust, as

well as reaffirm the importance of the Nazi policies of secrecy and deception that disguised the

nature and scope of the Holocaust.24 His book

also detailed the information contained in the SS

concentration camp reports mentioned earlier by

Calvocoressi.

It took nearly twenty-five years from the publication of Winterbotham’s book about the Ultra

secret for many of the official records of the

American and British wartime cryptologic agencies to be released to the public. Among the

records were the collections of decrypts of translations of Axis and neutral messages, primarily

German, which dealt with the Holocaust. The

delayed release of the communications intelligence records did not impede scholarly research

and understanding of the overall Holocaust phenomenon. Mountains of records had been available that documented Nazi planning and execution of the Final Solution. At worst, the lack of

cryptologic material probably affected Holocaust

scholarship of specific incidents. For example, the

lack of police decrypts and translations may have

contributed to scholars underestimating for

decades the major role of the German Police in

the massacres and other atrocities committed in

the western USSR.25

Notes

1 Michael Grant, The Jews in the Roman World.

(New York: Barnes & Noble, 1973), 284-7.

2 Norman Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle

Ages (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 365-7.

Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From

Paganism to Christianity (New York: Henry Holt &

Company, 1997), 292, 317-8.

3 See Berlin (Auswaertig) to Buenos Aires, 13

January 1943, SIS # 78845, NARA RG 457, Historical

Cryptographic Collection, Box 359; Berlin

(Auswaertig) to Tientsin, 4 August 1944, SIS # 135165,

NARA, RG 457 HHC, Box 429; and Berlin

(Auswaertig) to Tientsin, 15 December 1944, H158178, RG 457, HHC, Box 456.

4 Multinational Diplomatic (MND) Translation,

Washington to Tokyo, 17 January 1939, SIS #3494,

NARA RG 457 Records of the National Security

Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS),

Historical Cryptologic Collection (HCC), Box 286.

5 Raoul Hillberg. The Destruction of European

Jews. 3 Volumes (New York: Holmes and Meier,

1985. the Revised and Definitive Edition), 393.

6 Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global

History of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1995), 95-6, 191-2.
Page 18

7 Richard Breitman. Official Secrets: What the

Nazis Planned. What the British and Americans

Knew (New York: Hill and Wang), 36-7.

8 News of the American exploitation of the

Japanese diplomatic cipher known as Purple had been

revealed in part in the immediate postwar period during a bipartisan U.S. Senate committee investigation of

the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As part of the

hearings, the important diplomatic translations,

including the famous fourteen-part message, were

released in their entirety. Subsequently, a number of

histories of the attack utilized the information to propound a number of interpretations about the attack.

Interestingly, during these hearings, a reference was

made to the British helping the Americans to “decode

German messages.” This brief allusion to reading

German cryptographic systems was published in a

Time magazine article on 17 December 1945.

9 Wladyslaw Kozaczuk, Bitwa o tajemnice: Sluzby

wywiadowcze Polski I Rzeszy Niemieckiej 1922-1939

(The Secret Battle: The Intelligence Services of Poland

and the German Reich, 1922-1939) (Warsaw: Ksiazka

I Wiedza, 1967).

10 Gustave Bertrand. Enigma: Ou la Plus Grande

Enigme de la Guerre, 1939-1945 (Paris: Plon, 1973).

11 F. W. Winterbotham. The Ultra Secret (London:

Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974).

12 Bertrand, 117-8.

13 Wladyslaw Kozaczuk. Wkregu Enigmy

(Warsaw: Ksiazka I Wiedza, 1979) Kozaczuk’s Bitwa o

tajmnice predated Bertrand’s and Winterbotham’s

narratives. It has been suggested that The Secret Battle

was the predecessor to Enigma. If so, then it might

have contained the earliest reference to the interception of the police messages about the massacres in

Russia. The source in Enigma about the police messages (p. 139) is quite similar to that in Bertrand’s book

(117-8). However, this author was unable to settle

whether The Secret War contains such a reference to

the police messages.

14 Walter Lacqueur. The Terrible Secret:

Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s Final Solution

(New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1998),

84 –6.

15 Peter Calvocoressi, Top Secret Ultra (New York:

Pantheon Books, 1980).

16 Ibid., 15. This author is unable to determine

conclusively whether this claim is true or mistaken in

whole or in part. German concentration camp slave

labor population reports were marked “ZIP” by the

British. This indicated that the messages had been

encrypted in a high-level system like Enigma, not a socalled “medium-grade cipher,” as Calvocoressi reported, which would have been marked “PEARL.” Also, the

highest setting for any of the 3 wheels of an Enigma

was “26.” So the highest number available was

“262626.” A German code clerk conceivably could

have selected a six-figure number (or a set of two or

three-figure numbers) from a concentration camp

report by which to set the wheels. Whether the

Germans used this on a regular basis (or at all) cannot

be determined.

17 F. H. Hinsley, et alia. British Intelligence in

the Second World War. Its Influence on Strategy and

Operations, Volume II (London: Her Majesty’s

Stationery office, 1981), Appendix 5, 669-73.

18 E. D. Phillips. GC&CS Air and Military History.

Volume XIII. The German Police (London) 81-86,

234-6.

19 K. C. Gleason, “The Holocaust and the Failure

of Allied and Jewish Responses.” Journal of Historical

Review (Vol. 5, Nos. 2, 3, 4; Winter 1984), 215.

Gleason correctly reports that, early in the war, many

Allied intelligence organizations lacked conclusive

information about the scope and nature of German

plans for the Jews and other groups. He is also correct

that some Allied intelligence analysts were not aware

of the extent of Nazi atrocities. As an example of this

ignorance, Gleason states that photo interpreters of

the United States Army Air Force could not determine

the nature of the activities at the Birkenau complex.

They were not aware of the camp’s primary role as a

death camp. Later photo interpretation specialists

from the Central Intelligence Agency could not discover any large group of victims at Birkenau, though one

photo from 25 August 1944 showed about 1,500 people being processed near the gas chambers.

There are several problems, though, with

Gleason’s explanation. For one, he fails to mention

that the technical capabilities of Allied photo interpreters were limited compared to current technology.

They would have been hard pressed to find even large
Page 19

groups of victims with the optical analysis equipment

available in 1944. Also, he does not mention that there

were only a limited number of aerial photography missions, perhaps five, flown between the initial one in

early April 1944 and the last when Birkenau was dismantled in November 1944. Such aerial missions

could take only “instant” snap shots. They did not

linger for several passes or extended overflights. The

first flight in early April occurred before the flood of

Hungarian Jews arrived as part of SS operations to

eliminate that country’s Jews commanded by Adolf

Eichmann. Interestingly, this April mission did photograph a new rail spur that, unknown to the photo

interpreters, was part of the upgrade of Birkenau’s

facilities to handle the anticipated influx of Hungarian

Jews. The next mission was flown on 26 June near the

end of the first phase of the German deportations.

Many of the deported Hungarian Jews had already

passed through the gas chambers and the crematoria.

For a full description, see Dino A. Brigioni and Robert

G. Piorer, “The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective

Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination

Complex. (Studies in Intelligence, 45th Special

Anniversary Edition, Fall 2000), 87-106.

20 The JHR is the publication of the Institute for

Historical review, which is a loosely organized scholarly association ostensibly dedicated to revisionism of

conventional historical interpretations. However, in its

content, the JHR carries a heavy emphasis of articles

pressing a revisionist or denial viewpoint about the

Holocaust. For more on the history and purpose of the

Journal and the IHR, see Michael Shermer and Alex

Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust

Never Happened and Why They Say It? (Berkeley CA:

University of California Press, 2000), 43-46, 73-80,

etc.

21 “Decoded Cables Revise History of Holocaust.”

Washington Post, 10 November 1996, Vol. 119, No.

341, A1

22 Robert L. Benson. “SIGINT and the Holocaust.”

Cryptologic Quarterly (Vol. 14, No. 1, Spring 1995)

71-76; William J. Vanden Heuvel. “The Holocaust Was

No Secret.” New York Times Magazine (December 22,

1996) 30-31.

23 In the early 1980s, the National Security

Agency released a number of sets of translations of

Axis and Vichy messages and special research papers

to the National Archives. These records actually were

copies of the original translations and research papers.

Information in the translations still considered classified had been redacted, or blacked out, from the originals. These redacted versions of the records are distinguished by the prefixed digraph “SR” in the series

notation, e.g., “SRDJ” for Japanese diplomatic translations, or “SRA” for translations of Japanese military

attaché messages. The diplomatic translations of

interest were Japanese, or SRDJ; German, or SRDG;

Vichy, or SRDV. Another set of diplomatic translations, categorized as “multinational,” or all countries,

to include Axis and Vichy, was released in 1996 as part

of the so-called Historical Cryptographic Collection

(HCC), which the 1.3 million pages were labeled. The

diplomatic translations in the HCC were not redacted.

24 Breitman, 67-8.

25 Ibid., 5-7.

Page 21

During the Second World War, the United

States and Great Britain operated the principal

Western Allied code-breaking agencies. The

Commonwealth countries of Canada, Australia,

and New Zealand, and Britain’s colony of India

provided substantial support with personnel and

material, especially in the Middle East, Pacific

and Asia theaters of combat. There were lesser

contributions from small European national

detachments that had escaped from Poland,

France, and the Netherlands East Indies. By war’s

end, this multinational effort had brought to a

high-level of proficiency a worldwide system that

intercepted, decrypted, translated, and disseminated intelligence derived from Axis and neutral

communications.1

A popular perception about Western communications intelligence and its subsidiary codebreaking function, often generally referred to as

“Ultra,” was that this information was available

from all Axis and neutral sources at all times to

the Allied commanders and leaders. This view is

simply not true. The war between the Axis cryptographers to devise and emplace systems to protect their communications and the Allied cryptologists to collect and exploit those same communications (and the mirrored struggle between Allied

cryptographers and Axis cryptologists) was

marked by victories and defeats on both sides.

Although there were major successes by the Allies

early in the war, notably the exploitation of some

versions of the German Enigma and the Japanese

diplomatic machine system, known as Purple, the

struggle for cryptologic supremacy was not settled until the midpoint of the war when the full

resources of the Allied cryptologic effort finally

achieved a general and consistent inroad into

most, but still not all, major Axis cryptographic

systems. Even then, there remained gaps and

shortcomings in the overall Allied capability that

produced unpleasant tactical military surprises

for the Allies later in the war, such as at the

German Second Ardennes Offensive in December

1944. Several Axis and neutral cryptographic

systems were never exploited due to a paucity of

Allied intercept, the strength of the particular

Axis code or cipher, or the late date of a cryptographic system’s introduction into operation. In

short, the Ultra success by the Allies was never

total or constant when measured in terms of the

total number of enemy or neutral codes and

ciphers that could be broken or the duration of

their exploitation. Where the Allies succeeded

was in the exploitation of those Axis communications and cryptographic systems that were critical

to the conduct of certain battles and campaigns.

This ability also allowed the Allies the ability to

gauge the strategic intentions of Berlin and Tokyo

in a depth that otherwise would have been lacking

if there had been no recourse to the information

from Ultra, Magic, and the host of other systems.2

Trying to describe or graphically represent

the entire Western COMINT system can be difficult. Some initial attempts were made by

the U.S. services. One of the more popular

early graphic efforts was a chart devised by

the War Department’s G-2 (Intelligence), “A

Message from Originator to MIS.” This version

was taken from the postwar Army history The

Achievements of the Signal Security Agency in

World War II and is reproduced here.3 It illustrated the system that started with the transmission of a message by an originating entity. It then

detailed several intermediate analytic steps to the

point where the translation of the original intercept was disseminated to the War Department.

Chapter 2

Overview of the Western Communications Intelligence System

during World War II
Page 22

The system this chart illustrated was limited

to those cryptologic functions from intercept to

translation that were performed by the Army’s

Signal Intelligence Service at Arlington Hall. The

chart failed, though, to describe why a certain

message was to be intercepted in the first place.

There were numerous Axis and neutral radio terminals and networks to intercept. What was the

process that determined which one was monitored? Similarly, the chart also left out what happened to the intelligence after it reached the

Pentagon. To whom did this information go and

how did it get there? Was it handled any differently than intelligence from other sources such as

captured documents? In short, the chart failed to

explain the place and role of cryptology within the

context of the activities of the larger Allied intelligence system.

The production of Allied communications

intelligence during World War II was a multistep

system. It began with the determination of a hierarchical priority of intercept of Axis communications and was completed with the dissemination

of the intelligence derived from it. This system

can be likened to a “closed cycle” in which all

steps were interrelated. Within this process a significant change to one step affected all the others.

For example, a reordering of requirements due to

a change in capability or a crisis in a military theater’s situation would affect what was collected

and processed. The rise or decline of cryptanalytic effectiveness, efficiency, or advances in tech-

“A Message from Originator to MIS”
Page 23

nology or techniques could affect what terminals

would be monitored in the future and what intelligence gained from them would be disseminated

and to whom it would be sent.4

Besides being distinguished by the interdependent nature of its operations, the COMINT

system, especially as practiced by the British, was

noteworthy for the operational interaction of its

analysts That is, individuals at all points in the

system contributed information that others could

use in their separate jobs. This interaction developed partly from the background of a large number of the individuals who worked in the cryptologic agencies during the war. Many people who

worked at Bletchley Park and Arlington Hall were

current students, graduates, or faculty recruited

from universities and other schools that prized

cooperation and an intellectual detachment. And

a majority of these hires were women.5 More so,

the leadership of the cryptologic agencies encouraged the continuation of this free flow of ideas

and information. Even those who merely logged

in intercepted messages were encouraged to contribute insights and observations.6 One highranking American observer, who visited Bletchley

Park in May 1943, noted that the British personnel approach was “ bold and forward-looking... an

imaginable conception of the possibilities of

obtaining results from attention to details and

infinite pains.”7 The result of this approach was a

system, which was described by William F.

Friedman as “unified at the top and operationally

intimate below.”8

The wartime Western Allied communications

intelligence system consisted of the following

steps: setting requirements, priorities, and division of effort; intercepting messages; processing

the intercept; and disseminating the resulting

intelligence. Each step consisted of a number of

subordinate processes that contributed to its

completion, though each process was not

employed against every intercept or cryptographic system. Also, each step was affected by a number of technical and institutional constraints, as

well as political/strategic influences or contingencies that further determined how effectively a step

was carried out. Many of the subordinate processes and the constraints and outside influences for

each step will be described in the proceeding sections.

Bletchley Park
Page 24

Two other aspects of the Allied COMINT system need to be considered before we proceed with

the description. First of all, when we talk of an

Allied system, we are really describing two distinct national systems, that of the United States

and Great Britain. While both countries carried

out similar communications intelligence activities, we shall see that there were a number of differences between them in organization, security

restrictions, equipment, training, and even technical jargon. Like much of the rest of the special

relationship between the United States and Great

Britain, the wartime Anglo-American COMINT

relationship was marked by a search for ways to

make the two national systems work in a more

cooperative fashion.

Another characteristic of the wartime allied

cryptologic agencies was the phenomenal growth

experienced by both as the war progressed. In

1939 cryptologic organizations that barely numbered a few hundred were, by war’s end,

staffed by tens of thousands of civilians and

military personnel. As a representative register of this massive growth, consider that

the U.S. Army’s signals intelligence arm was

producing about forty translations a week in

January 1942. By the time Japan surrendered, it was turning out about 1,025 translations a week.9 Also, during the war, both

the GC&CS and the SIS grew organically.

They had to design, build, refine, and modify their organizations, equipment, structure,

practices, and procedures while they also

worked against Axis cryptography and communications. In 1939 American and British

COMINT were local cottage workshops. By

1945 they had become a joint global industrial concern.

What follows is a description of the communications intelligence system with a

particular eye to the ways in which its

operations influenced how it obtained and

distributed intelligence about the Holocaust.

Step 1: Setting the Requirements, Priorities,

and the Division of Effort

For the Allies, perhaps the most difficult step

in the COMINT process was simply to decide

what Axis communications to intercept, decipher,

and report. To visualize the potential size of the

Axis communications target is to grasp the scope

and nature of the problem facing the Allied cryptologic agencies, especially early in the war: thousands of radio terminals on hundreds of radio

networks around the world supporting Axis military, naval, diplomatic, security, intelligence, and

commercial entities. All of these utilized hundreds of cryptographic systems from simple hand

ciphers to complex book codes and intricate

machines such as Enigma, Purple, and Tunny.10

Added to this initially uncharted wilderness were

the hundreds of military, diplomatic, and commercial communications networks of important

neutral and Axis-friendly countries, notably

Arlington Hall
Page 25

Vichy France, Turkey, Sweden, Spain, Portugal,

Switzerland, the Vatican, and those of Latin

America. These networks, too, had potential as

sources of intelligence and could not be ignored;

many already were targets of Allied cryptologists.

Early in the war, the Allied communications

intelligence effort could not adequately monitor

the existing Axis communications networks,

much less even hope to cover it completely. The

British, beginning in September 1939, and later

the Americans in late 1941, lacked the facilities,

the personnel, and the technology to adequately

monitor all of the Axis terminals that mattered. It

would take time for the influx of money, training,

and the development of administrative and technical support organizations to create the impressive Allied COMINT structure that existed by the

end of the war.

Meanwhile, the disparity in capabilities

between the Allied cryptologic agencies and the

Axis communications networks forced the intelligence staffs in Washington and London to prioritize the Axis communications terminals and cryptographic systems that had to be attacked. This

prioritization was determined by a number of

general factors. First of all, there had to be either

an already demonstrated or a reasonably high

expectation that intelligence of value to the war

effort could be derived from a terminal’s messages. Another factor, which could override all

others at times, was the perceived current strategic or tactical military needs of the moment. For

all practical purposes, these factors were militaryoriented. They dictated target listings throughout

the war and dominated all prioritization schemes

from strategic priorities to those in individual

theaters of operation.

The COMINT agencies, too, had their own

considerations to add to the calculations for target priority. Usually, these considerations reflected the agency’s own measure of its technical ability to intercept or to exploit cryptanalytically a

particular Axis terminal or a general target category such as “Japanese military.” The feeling

within the SIS leadership, for example, was that

tasking of radio links was far more complex than

to be left to the whims of intelligence officers. In

early 1943, the SIS disagreed with the idea that

the War Department’s G-2 could just hand it a list

of radio terminals to go after. One memorandum

stated that there were other factors “in the chain

of events leading from G-2’s desires to actual

results.” Rather, it continued, the priority of a target radio terminal should be determined first by

whether a monitoring station could hear it and

then whether any cryptographic systems used in

its traffic could be read or were being studied.11

As an example of how requirements were

levied and how they changed with the war, it is

useful to look at the experience of the SIS. For the

overall U.S. COMINT effort, the SIS was responsible for intercepting and processing Axis military, weather, and air force communications traffic. It also was responsible for exploiting international diplomatic communications. This was a

carryover from its success with the Japanese

diplomatic cipher machine known as Purple. In

April 1942, G-2 gave the Signal Security Service

(SSS), as the Signal Intelligence Service was soon

to be called, a set of priorities for collection and

processing (which included cryptanalysis and

translation).12 The first priority included all

German, Japanese, and Italian military traffic.

Second priority was given to all Axis military

attaché communications. Axis diplomatic traffic

among their respective capital cities was in the

third priority. The fourth priority was for all socalled German “administrative” radio nets, which

probably referred to German illicit intelligence

and security radio networks. The diplomatic messages of other countries, minor Axis and neutrals,

were spread across priorities five to eight.13

Nearly a year later, in March 1943, the priority list had changed somewhat. The priority list for

collection and analysis was organized now into

groups identified by letters that ranged from “A,”

the highest, to “G,” the lowest. For the SSS, the
Page 26

Japanese Army was now the most important target. This was tagged “#1 Special Research

Project,” which probably referred to the main

Japanese army code that was still unexploited at

the time.14 Weather traffic was also part of Group

A, as were certain diplomatic links between

Tokyo and Moscow, Berlin, and Rome. German

military had fallen to the bottom of Group “B,”

along with Japanese diplomatic messages to

Europe (other than other Axis capitals) and

“Security” (intelligence, espionage and security

elements such as police) messages.15 The latter

reference to “Security” traffic is interesting

because the SSA still lacked the means to intercept consistently the communications of the

German security agencies such as the Abwehr

(military intelligence), the SD, and the German

Police. The Americans had few monitoring sites

that could intercept such communications in the

European theater. There were some U.S. Army

radio intercept companies in England and North

Africa, but they were tasked with collecting

tactical German military radio traffic. A note

attached to the tasking for these intercept units

indicated that the coverage of the German security elements was primarily for the purpose of

tracking the volume of traffic and reporting this

to Army counterintelligence.16

The SIS already was somewhat familiar with

German Police communications and cipher systems. In January 1941, then SIS Major Abraham

Sinkov, one of William F. Friedman’s original

cryptanalytic staff, had headed a small technical

exchange mission to GC&CS. It was this mission

that provided the British with a working Purple

and Red Japanese diplomatic cipher machines.

During the ensuing technical discussions, one of

Britain’s foremost codebreakers, John Tiltman,

provided Sinkov with detailed information on

how the so-called German Police cipher worked.

He was informed that the descriptor “German

Police” applied to the systems used by the

Schutzpolizei, the SD, the SS, and the line Order

Police battalions and regiments. Sinkov was told

that the information in the police messages was

useful for mapping associated German military

units.17 However, at the time the U.S. had no way

of intercepting these communications; the cryptanalytic information was useless except for training.

As for the remainder of the revamped 1943

SIS overall requirements, these consisted mostly

of targeted diplomatic communications from

most minor Axis, neutral, and some minor allied

nations. As in the previous year’s priorities they

remained spread across the lower priority Groups

from “C” to “G.” For example, the tasking requirement for intercept of diplomatic messages

between Washington and major neutrals was

now at the Group “D” level. The requirements to

intercept diplomatic messages from the Vatican,

Latin America, and European countries to elsewhere other than Washington were covered in

Groups “E” and “F.”18

In the various combat theaters of operation,

cryptologic working arrangements between the

British and Americans followed de facto national

theater command responsibilities. In Europe the

British were preeminent for the first two years of

the war. A gradual cooperative effort with the

United States Navy’s OP-20-G cryptologists

developed during the lengthy U-boat campaign in

the Atlantic. In the European Theater of

Operations (ETO), the GC&CS, and the supporting British service units, remained the principal

Allied cryptologic agency when it came to the

Axis military and air force. In the Pacific theater,

the American army and naval cryptologic organizations supervised allied intercept and codebreaking operations. In the China-Burma-India

Theater, there were British stations in Ceylon and

India that had American contingents. Also,

Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand personnel served at various Pacific and Asian sites with

the Americans and British.

These worldwide operations required that the

United States and Great Britain eventually had to

establish corresponding divisions of effort and
Page 27

responsibility for setting requirements, intercept,

processing, and dissemination. Otherwise, there

would be problems with redundant operations,

and misallocated resources. Also, the rules, methods, material, and channels for technical and

intelligence exchanges needed to be ironed out

between the two countries. The two countries had

to make a general agreement to govern operations around the world. For the first eighteen

months of the war, the GC&CS and the SIS and

OP-20-G had a number of separate and limited

reciprocal interchanges. By mid-1943, these various working relationships were institutionalized

in a series of agreements between the British and

the U.S. War Department, which culminated in

the so-called BRUSA (Britain-United States of

America) Agreement of June 1943.19 (The U.S.

Navy would sign a separate, more limited, agreement. It was known as the Extension Agreement

and applied to an earlier 1942 exchange arrangement known as the Holden Agreement.)

The main provisions of the BRUSA

Agreement were the exchange of technical intelligence (sources and methods) and a division of

effort in the daily activities of collection, analysis,

and dissemination of intelligence. The two Allies

formally agreed to the exchange of finished intelligence. There was no exchange of “raw” (undecrypted) intercepts, except for U-boat messages,

and possibly some examples for training purposes.20 The monitoring sites, though, would send

their “raw” intercept to the national center

responsible for processing it. The agreement did

not include so-called “nonservice” (nonmilitary)

intercepts. This uncovered category principally

entailed Axis and neutral diplomatic and intelligence-related (illicit espionage and internal security organization) messages. Both countries continued individually to decrypt and exchange

diplomatic translations, though a later mechanism for exchange between GC&CS and Arlington

Hall was established in August 1943. As a result of

this later agreement, the two Allied cryptologic

agencies targeted the diplomatic traffic of every

major Axis power, minor Axis ally, minor Allied

power, and significant neutral, though the total

amount collected against each country varied. As

for the category of Axis intelligence messages,

another division of effort was arranged. The

British collected and processed German intelligence and security-related messages in occupied

Europe: the United States, principally the United

States Coast Guard, collected and processed Axis

overseas illicit and overt espionage radio traffic,

notably Abwehr messages from Latin America,

North Africa, and the Far East.

In essence, the BRUSA Agreement formalized

the realities of the division of effort in the combat

theaters that had existed since 1942. The

Americans took the responsibility for Japanese

service and nonservice communications, while

the British oversaw that of the German and

Italian military and security forces. This agreement did not preclude either country from collection and analysis of each other’s missions. In fact,

both sides exchanged personnel who were then

integrated fully into each other’s efforts. Three

special SSA units were established in Britain to

work alongside the British in the areas of collection, analysis, and security. American cryptologists could be found at various British intercept

and analytic sites, including Bletchley Park. U.S.

radio intercept units stationed in England and

North Africa intercepted and analyzed Axis communications in the European and North African

theaters, but they passed the take to the British

analytic centers.21

Great Britain retained authority over the production of communications intelligence in

Europe, while the Americans controlled similar

activity in the Pacific. Because of this division

of effort, German military communications

remained a lower priority for the U.S. Army codebreakers at Arlington Hall Station for the rest of

the war.22 Tactical communications intelligence,

that is, intercept and analysis of plaintext messages or those encrypted by low-level codes and

ciphers that were sent by Axis tactical or operational-level combat units, was produced by Allied
Page 28

cryptologic elements attached to Allied military

commands or units in Europe and North Africa.

Theater or local commanders controlled the operations of these units and were the main recipient

of that type of communications intelligence.

As mentioned above, the priorities for collection and processing shifted during the war

according to current strategic needs and capabilities. This shift was especially obvious when it

came to diplomatic targets. A good example of the

shifting priorities of an individual target country’s

communications can be seen in the Allied effort

against Switzerland’s diplomatic radio traffic.

During previous European conflicts, Switzerland

had remained neutral. As a result, that nation had

taken on certain roles such as representing the

foreign interests of belligerents. These included

monitoring the conditions in prisoner-of-war and

internee camps, supporting International Red

Cross relief activities, and allowing Swiss locales

to be used for unofficial contacts between

combatants. Considering these historic roles,

Switzerland’s diplomatic communications naturally were a target of interest for the Allied cryptologic agencies.

The GC&CS had been analyzing Swiss diplomatic messages since 1939, and the Americans

began their separate attack in December 1942.

But both agencies produced few translations during this period. There were some technical reasons for this paucity of communications intelligence. One was that for their European message

traffic the Swiss relied mostly on the European

cable network that was inaccessible to Allied

communications monitoring sites. In addition,

the Swiss used a large number of codes and

ciphers – over ten systems, mostly manual

ciphers and codes, and an early version of the

Enigma cipher device for their diplomatic traffic.

Yet, the most important reason for the small output of translations of Swiss traffic was that, early

in the war, the messages to and from Bern

appeared to carry little intelligence of value.23 The

intercept of Swiss diplomatic messages continued

for the purposes of training and cryptanalytic

continuity, but not for reporting intelligence. By

early 1943, the Americans downgraded the intercept priority of various Swiss diplomatic terminals to fourth and fifth priority on its list.24

This situation changed in the summer of 1944

when the Allies discovered that the Swiss diplomatic cables now carried important information

on the conditions in the Balkan capitals that were

being overrun or threatened by the advancing

Red Army. Of particular interest was the situation

in Budapest, Hungary. The several changes in

governments and the German-supported coup in

October 1944 had kept the Hungarians in the

conflict. Furthermore, the Germans were in the

midst of a roundup, which had begun in the summer, of the sizable Jewish population in Hungary

for transport to the death camps and slave labor

details in German war industries. A review of the

diplomatic translations from this period issued by

the SIS shows a marked increase in the number of

published translations of Swiss diplomatic messages. Allied interest in the Swiss diplomatic

messages continued late into the war as concern

grew over the possible fate of prisoners and

internees under Japanese control. The Swiss,

working in concert with the International Red

Cross, reported their findings on camp and prisoner conditions throughout Asia. Another point

of interest for the Allies concerned the activities of

German banking officials who were negotiating

payments and commercial accounts with the

Swiss for German purchases of war material and

currency exchanges. (See pages 104-110 for more

details on this last point.)

One of the problems that bedeviled Allied

cryptologists who tried to set requirements was

that the intelligence value of the information carried on various communications networks or

individual terminals could not always be predicted. The above example of Switzerland shows how

reality did not always match expectations. On the

other hand, useful intelligence could come from

unexpected sources. For example, one of the best
Page 29

sources for insight into Nazi Germany’s strategic

plans and Hitler’s own appreciation of possible

Allied moves came from the Purple decrypts of

Japan’s ambassador in Berlin, Baron Oshima

Hiroshi. Oshima had developed a rapport with

most of the Nazi hierarchy, especially Hitler and

Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign

minister. They confided to Oshima some of the

Reich’s most important secrets. These personal

connections made his long reports to Tokyo a

gold mine of information on a number of topics,

from German development of new weapons to

Hitler’s own appreciation of the Allied troop

strength and strategic options for landing in

Western Europe in 1944.25 Oshima reported

nothing on the concentration camps or massacres

in the western Soviet Union, though a few of messages to Tokyo suggest he was aware of the situation of the Jews. (See pages 100-101)

In a similar fashion, British codebreakers

were probably surprised by the first bits of information about the massacres and camps that

appeared on certain German Police radio networks, such as those servicing the police units in

the Soviet Union and SS and SD units in occupied

Europe. The Allied intercept and processing of

German Police and SS communications originally was performed as a supplementary source to

intelligence about the German military, principally to gather administrative data and order of battle information. The police and SS communications also contained intelligence on German civilian morale and other domestic security concerns,

information about the results of Allied air raids,

and escapes by Allied POWs.26 The police messages were also targeted since the manual cryptographic system used was similar to systems used

by Wehrmacht units.27

However, London and Washington would

never make gathering intelligence about the fate

of Europe’s Jews and other groups targeted for

destruction by the Nazis a major requirement for

agencies like GC&CS and SIS. Both would collect

and process some information about the

roundups, massacres, and the

camps from Police and diplomatic

communications. Yet, this information was a byproduct, perhaps even

incidental to the coverage security

and diplomatic nets. The primary

purpose of the COMINT requirements placed on Bletchley Park and

Arlington Hall was to gain intelligence dictated by the military exigencies of the war. Whatever advantage was gained from the intercept

of Axis communications related to

the Nazi atrocities was of little use to

the current Allied prosecution of the

war, except in a limited way for

propaganda against the Axis.28

Later, the British would gather it

with the intent to use intelligence as

evidence in proposed postwar war

crimes tribunals. (See pages 50-51 for eventual

fate of this intelligence.)

Japanese ambassador to Germany Baron Oshima meeting with Nazi

foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop
Page 30

Step 2: Intercepting the Messages

After the requirements had been set, the next

step was intercepting the radio terminals that

were designated the highest priority targets. It

was at this juncture in the communications intelligence system that the general requirements had

to be translated from the vague entries such as

“German military” to a list of targeted radio stations that could be monitored by Allied radio

intercept personnel. Before discussing the allotment of target stations to monitoring stations, it

is necessary to describe the communications the

Allies monitored. There were two major types of

communications media that were targeted: cable

(or wire) and radio. Both had their advantages

and shortcomings.

The first of these, cable intercept, proved to be

a useful but limited source of communications

intelligence. At the war’s outset, both the United

States and Great Britain invoked wartime information contingencies and imposed restrictions

on telegram and cable traffic to, through, and

from both countries. All such wire traffic – personal, commercial, and diplomatic – was subjected to censorship review. Each resident

foreign diplomatic mission was required

to submit a copy of each message it sent,

even in its encrypted form, to the appropriate government censorship office.

The main reason for this was to control

the flow of information out of the country that was critical to the war effort.29 In

England, the General Post Office oversaw this program, sometimes referred to

as “traffic blanketing.”30 The British also

implemented censorship practices at all

overseas Commonwealth cable terminals located in such places as Malta, New

Delhi, Gibraltar, and Barbados.31 In the

United States, the government, through

the Office of Censorship run by Byron

Price and staffed by civilians and contingents from the Army and Navy, received

copies of all such wire traffic (before

transmission overseas or upon receipt from an

overseas terminal) from the various cable and

wireless telegram companies such as Mackay

Radio, Western Union, Radio Corporation of

America, and Global Wireless.32 These companies had terminals in New York, Washington, DC,

New Orleans, Louisiana, Galveston, Texas, and

San Francisco, California. Copies of cable traffic

that passed through overseas U.S. and British terminals on to other countries were also collected

under the wartime restrictions. This coverage

affected mostly diplomatic, personal, and commercial cable traffic between Europe, the United

States, Latin America, and Africa.

This cable intercept had the primary advantage of simplifying the intercept problem. All

messages flowing through an American or

Commonwealth terminal were accessible to

Allied cryptologists. Another advantage was the

errorless copy of the intercepted cable message;

each message usually was free of transmission

garbles and missed cipher groups that could hinder exploitation, except for errors by the originator’s code clerk. The collection of cable messages

was inexpensive for the cryptologic agencies since

Copy of Netherlands cable from U.S. Censorship Office
Page 31

the national censorship offices performed the

task.

On the other hand, there were limitations to

this collection method. For example, only cables

sent between Washington (and other U.S. terminals with overseas connections such as San

Francisco, New Orleans, and New York) and

an overseas terminal were available to the

Americans. Messages sent on cables not routed

through American- or Commonwealth-controlled

terminal stations were beyond intercept. There

were few means then to obtain these cables

except through covert means, such as placing taps

or suborning cable clerks. These methods risked

eventual exposure and were difficult to hide and

continue without discovery by foreign security

agencies.

Another difficulty was that some of the targeted countries knew or suspected that the Allies

probably were reading their cable traffic. To

defeat the intercept and possible exploitation of

their cables, some diplomats were warned by

their capitals to take certain precautions when

sending cables, even encrypted ones. For example, Axis diplomats in Europe and the United

States were told to be careful when they included

excerpts of public speeches and newspaper stories in their messages. They were warned not to

quote them verbatim because the excerpts were

also available to Allied codebreakers and could be

used as “cribs” to break the enciphered messages.33 To defeat the Allied cable censors, some

countries sent sensitive correspondence by diplomatic pouch or courier. Of course, the courier

pouches could be searched covertly (“tossed” was

the expression) by Allied agents. But this technique was difficult to arrange and, if discovered,

was a possible source of diplomatic embarrassment. It appears that Allied agents probably did

this anyway. In early 1942, the U.S. Office of

Strategic Services, and its predecessor, the Office

of the Coordinator of Information, received

copies of diplomatic messages from the British

Security Coordination. A number of these messages appear to have been obtained in this manner.34 (See pages 65-6).

In occupied Europe, Nazi military and occupation authorities made use of cable telephone or

telegram systems where available, thus denying

the Allies access to these communications. Also,

during the years of the war, the Germans, especially the military, expanded, repaired, and

improved the European cable backbone network

in occupied Europe in order to support their

operations. In four years, the German army nearly doubled the size of the European cable trunk

network to 6,900 miles.35 This cable expansion

denied more intercept to the Allies.

The other and much larger and lucrative

source of Allied intercept was radio communications. Since its introduction at the turn of the century, radio communications had expanded dramatically. As technology advanced and industry

was able to mass-produce components and radio

sets, the speed and distances that information

could be transmitted grew. Many advanced countries had developed complete national-level communications networks that served private and

public functions. When the war began, governments quickly took over many facilities and converted them to military or other official uses. The

use of these in place systems presented more

problems for Allied intercept stations since they

had to match Axis capabilities.

Many Axis and neutral diplomatic missions,

not needing or trusting the Allied-controlled

cable systems, transmitted their diplomatic messages by long-range, high frequency (HF) radio.36

Axis naval and air force units and organizations

relied on long-range HF radio for their communications, unless ground-based cable systems were

available. Some communications operated on

lower frequency bands similar to those used by

commercial broadcast stations. Many Axis units

used low-power high frequency radios to communicate with their local commands that reduced
Page 32

the chance for interception by Allied monitoring

stations.

The Axis used different modes of communications on the many frequency bands. The most

common mode was manual morse, the famous

“dit-dah” or on-off keying of a continuous wave

signal. This mode appeared on all frequencies,

and all service and government elements used it.

The Axis also used teleprinter systems for highvolume traffic among command centers, though

this appeared later in the war. Voice communications was also heavily used. Most often this

appeared at higher frequency ranges. The most

common users were aircraft pilots communicating among themselves and with ground controllers. Some aircraft and ground stations used

long-range HF voice systems, though this was

rare because of the lack of security.37

German Police units operating in the western

USSR used both long-range high frequency and

the shorter-distance low frequency and medium

frequency manual morse communications to

send reports about their activities from major

command centers in Minsk and Kiev to headquarters back in Berlin. Police battalions received

radio or courier reports from companies and

detachments in the field. The battalions, in turn,

sent their radio reports over HF radio to regimental headquarters in the region in which they

operated.38

For the Allies, intercepting Axis and neutral

radio communications of interest presented a

myriad of problems. The most obvious problem,

as mentioned earlier, was simply the number and

location of Axis radio terminals – perhaps several thousand. In order just to hear these radio stations meant that the Allies had to develop extensive corps of thousands of radio intercept operators to man the monitoring stations to collect the

Axis and neutral communications for intelligence.

The major Allied radio intercept organizations were, for the British, the Radio Security

Service (belonging to M.I.6), the General Post

Office, and those units of the various services of

the British armed forces, known as the “YService.” For the Americans, the radio intercept

personnel were assigned to the Signal

Intelligence Service (Army) and organized under

the Second Service Battalion, OP-20-G (Navy),

the United States Coast Guard, the Office

of Strategic Services, and the Federal

Communication Commission. Canada operated

the Examination Unit of the Canadian National

Research Council. A number of men and women

from other Commonwealth countries also performed as intercept operators. These included

personnel from Australia, New Zealand, and

India. Commonwealth military personnel who

performed intercept services were organized into

units known as Special Wireless Groups.

Additionally, contingents from smaller Allied

forces also intercepted Axis communications.

All of these personnel were stationed at monitoring facilities located around the world. These

facilities ranged from large field stations, such as

at Beaumanor, Leicestershire, England, or Vint

Hill Farms in Virginia, to small direction finding

huts in Alaska or Scotland. It is difficult to get a

precise total number of Allied monitoring sites.

Many stations did exist for the duration of the

war. Some served only to support a campaign.

Many stations were limited to a direction finding

function only. Some sites, such as the U.S. Navy

station at Muirkirk, Maryland, originally were

commercial radio stations that were taken over

by the military. American sites, including those

of the Army, Navy, Coast Guard, OSS, and

FCC numbered over seventy-five. British and

Commonwealth stations numbered around sixty

and were located in the British Isles and overseas

in Australia, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Egypt, Palestine,

Malta, Iraq, Kenya, and India.

Generally, Allied overseas monitoring stations supported the commands in the theater of
Page 33

operation in which they were located. For example, in early 1942 U.S. Army radio intercept companies that were assigned to locations in the

British Commonwealth, such as in Northern

Ireland, or in the Atlantic region, at sites

in Iceland and Newfoundland, intercepted

German military, naval, or espionage communications.39 In the Pacific and Asian theaters, some

field stations were manned by a mix of personnel

from the United States and Commonwealth

countries, such as the large sites at Central

Bureau Brisbane and the Wireless Experimental

Center in India. Other facilities were manned

almost exclusively by personnel from one nation,

such as the Americans at the U.S. Navy radio

intercept site in Hawaii and the British in Ceylon.

On the other hand, in the Southwest Pacific area

of operations, Australian detachments accompanied SIS units to forward intercept sites in New

Guinea and the Philippines to support General

MacArthur’s advance.40

Most field sites were controlled and manned

by one service element: army, navy, air force, or

security service, such as M.I.6 or the OSS. This

arrangement was not absolute; other service contingents or nationalities could be present. Also,

intercept missions could cross service boundaries

and responsibilities. For example, early in the

war, U.S. Navy sites did collect diplomatic comIntercept operations of

USA Signal Radio Intelligence Company,

Fifth U.S. Army in North Africa

(Courtesy: National Security Agency)

An intercept section at MS-1, Vint Hill Farms, Virginia
Page 34

munications. But service priorities usually prevailed when it came to mission assignment. For

example, a tentative 1943 intercept assignment

list for the major SIS monitoring station #1, located at Vint Hill Farms, Virginia, was dominated by

international diplomatic and commercial terminals. The number one assignment block included

all government traffic between Tokyo and Rome,

Bern, Vichy, Ankara, and Stockholm. The second

and third tier priority was both German and

Italian weather traffic (known as “WX”). The

fourth priority was all government traffic to and

from Berlin to Manchukuo, Madrid, occupied

China, and Lisbon. Interestingly, the only military traffic assigned to Vint Hill Farms was that of

Germany and it was reserved for the lowest priority.41

Eventually, the assignment of targets by city

(or “circuit”) and specific types of messages was

dropped because it was considered inefficient.

Too often, there was needless duplicative copy of

the same radio traffic. In mid-1943, the SIS

adopted the procedure of tasking by frequency

and terminal callsign. This targeting method was

similar to that used by the British when tasking

their field sites.42 The British also pioneered the

central control of all collection sites. From

Bletchley Park, GC&CS could direct the activities

of all the British intercept sites, though its measure of control over service monitoring stations

may have been less certain.43

By early 1944, the American and British sites

were experimenting with a joint and centralized

authority that controlled collection of important

target networks. Field sites informed a control

authority by teleprinter of current targets being

collected. The control station then assigned any

remaining priority target terminals that were not

being monitored. Field sites also sent in weekly

reports on their coverage that allowed refinement

by oversight committees in both countries, the

Y-Committee (later Y-Board) in Great Britain,

and at Arlington Hall.44

Still, even with the number of intercept and

direction finding facilities that eventually would

be built during the course of the war – over 130 –

the Allies would never have enough monitoring

positions and radio receivers to match the number of Axis transmitters and the volume of radio

traffic they sent. Precise numbers on messages

transmitted by the Axis and those intercepted by

the Allies are not readily available. One estimate

is that a Japanese area army command could

send as many as 1,400 messages a day.45 Some

educated estimates by veterans and scholars of

Allied wartime cryptology tend to support the

contention that Allied intercept never resembled

the popular analogy to a vacuum cleaner in which

all Axis traffic was “scooped up in the ether.” If

anything, Allied intercept more closely resembled

a form of “sampling.” There is one estimate that

the U.S. managed to intercept only 60 percent of

all Japanese naval communications in the time

leading up to and at the time of the Japanese

strike at Pearl Harbor.46 In rare cases, where the

high-level interest existed that could focus

resources, more complete coverage could be

arranged. During the United States-Japan negotiations leading up to Pearl Harbor, all but a few of

the messages between Tokyo and its embassy in

Washington were intercepted. But such thorough

coverage was not the norm.

Sample intercept: German naval attaché message from

Berlin to Tokyo copied by the U.S. Navy site “W”

located at Winter Harbor, Maine
Page 35

Besides the large difference between the level

of Axis communications and the Allied monitoring capability to collect it, there were a number of

other technical limitations that hindered complete and effective Allied intercept operations.

Atmospherics, such as local weather and the presence of sunspots, affected reception of communications, especially those on the high frequency

range, which was the most commonly used transmitting frequency band. The location of monitoring stations was critical to hearing enemy transmissions. The sheer distance between the transmitter and the monitoring station could determine whether the latter could hear its target. The

time of day and the season could also influence

the range and clarity of communications. At

night, the composition of the layers in the atmosphere changes, producing two effects: increasing

the range at which radio communications can be

heard, while creating nonreception areas, known

as “skip zones.” The local topographic conditions

in which a radio transmitter was located played a

role in how well a radio signal could be heard at

an intercept site. Mountains, heavily forested terrain, or jungle dampened radio transmissions,

while deserts increased the range of a transmission. The frequency and power output of the

transmitting terminal also mattered. The sensitivity of the monitoring equipment at an intercept

site was a crucial element.

All of the above environmental factors were

considered when the Allies selected locations for

their monitoring stations around the world. An

important part of this process was the work of

teams that performed field studies of potential

sites. The results of their surveys determined the

location of the monitoring stations.47 One of the

most productive Allied intercept stations against

Japanese military communications originating

from Japan was the U.S. Army’s site at Two Rock

Ranch outside of Pentaluma, California. An U.S.

Army site that specialized in intercepting international diplomatic communications was located

near Asmara, Ethiopia.

At the monitoring station, the capabilities of

individual intercept operators could make a distinct difference in what was copied or missed –

the difference between so-called “clean” copy

usable by cryptanalysts or linguists, or that riddled with missing or mistakenly heard characters

or groups that hindered recovery of message text.

The ability of Allied intercept operators varied

according to training and experience. The training of these specialized personnel included general skills in communications procedures and

modes of transmission, as well as training tailored towards specific communications targets,

such as instruction in the difficult Japanese telegraphic kana code. As intercept operators gained

experience, their “copy” would become usable.

Two sites primarily intercepted German

Police communications. The first was the British

Army Y-station at Beaumanor in Leicestershire,

located about eighty miles northwest of London,

England. Beaumanor was one of the largest

British intercept sites and operated with 140

radio receivers by the end of the war. The primary

mission of Beaumanor was German military communications and included that of the German

Police. Because of the vast distances between the

operational police units and their various headquarters hierarchy that extended back to Berlin, a

variety of radio frequencies were used. These

extended from the low frequency band associated

with commercial broadcasts up to the standard

high frequency bands used by the military.

The site was able to copy police messages

from Russia on all of these frequencies. In fact,

once the initial recovery of the police radio network was completed, that is, identifying all of

their stations, operating frequencies and schedules, the collection effort was not too difficult to

maintain, despite changes by the Germans. In

early September 1942, the police changed their

callsigns, but not their frequencies or schedules.

The Y-operators at Beaumanor were able to
Page 36

quickly equate the new and old callsigns within a

few days.48

The other allied monitoring station that

copied police and SS communications merits a

short consideration because of its unique contribution to the intercept of Axis communications

relating to the Holocaust, as well as the curious

story of the site itself. P.C. Cadix (P.C. stood for

Poste de commandement or command post) was

a covert Allied intercept site located in the southeastern part of unoccupied Vichy France at the

Chateau de Fouzes near the town of Uzes. The site

was manned by a polyglot team of Poles, exiled

Spanish Loyalists, Free French, and the occasional stray Englishman. The monitoring station originally had been formed in late 1939 by Colonel

Gustave Bertrand, head of the French Army’s

radio intelligence organization, the section d’

examener (S.E). In its initial configuration the

site was first known as P.C. Bruno located near

Paris, France.

Following the fall of France in June 1940, the

team that had manned P.C. Bruno, after spending

a short exile in Algeria, returned secretly to southern France. From October 1940 to November

1942, P.C. Cadix, as the site now was named,

intercepted German high frequency communications in occupied France and elsewhere. Because

of the peculiarities of HF radio propagation mentioned above – such as the interval of the angle of

reflection off the ionosphere of the sky wave of a

radio signal, known as the skip distance, and

extended propagation of HF and lower frequency

bands during the night – P.C. Cadix was able to

monitor German radio traffic from the Russian

front at night, and signals from Germany to the

units during daylight. Because of this situation,

Beaumanor and P.C. Cadix split the work on

German Police traffic, with the British copying on

even days and the French site working the police

nets on odd days.49 Among the radio messages

intercepted by Bertrand and his team were over

3,000 sent by German Police and the SS formations, many of which contained reports of the

atrocities committed by these units.50 P.C. Cadix

transmitted the decrypts by radio to Bletchley

Park. Ironically, these transmissions were

encrypted with an Enigma.51 Cadix continued to

operate until late 1942 when it was forced to shut

down, and its staff had to flee pursuing German

security forces during the occupation of Vichy

France that followed the Allied invasion of French

North Africa.

It is a most important point to understand

that the intercept of an Axis message was the initial step in the communications intelligence

process. The quality of the intercept pretty much

defined whether that message eventually could be

useful for Allied intelligence. Radio reception

conditions and the abilities (or lack thereof) on

the part of monitors dictated the duration and

difficulty of the subsequent analytic exploitation

of intercepted messages, or even if the analytic

effort could be started at all.

Step 3: Processing the Intercept

Once the enemy’s messages were intercepted,

and if they were not decrypted at the site, then

they had to be forwarded to theater or national

centers for processing. Generally, tactical military

communications, that is, those between Axis

units of division-size and below, were decrypted

and translated at a large intercept site or at intermediate processing centers located in such places

as Hawaii, Egypt, Ceylon, and Australia. Allied

tactical field intercept units also could monitor,

decrypt and translate low-level encrypted or

plaintext enemy messages and pass them along to

their immediate commands. So-called higher

level cryptographic systems – and this meant all

traffic encrypted by Enigma, Purple, and other

machines as well as Axis and neutral diplomatic

messages – were processed at the major analytic

centers of Bletchley Park outside of London,

Berkeley Street in London, England, OP-20-G

Headquarters on Nebraska Avenue, N.W.,

Washington, D.C., and at Arlington Hall Station

in northern Virginia.
Page 37

Early in the war, intercept sites within the

U.S. or U.K. sent the intercepted messages to the

national centers over cable by encrypted teletypewriter. Overseas facilities sent their material by

air transport. This meant that intercept could

take weeks to arrive at a processing center. Later

in the war, when enciphering communications

equipment had been installed at major overseas

intercept sites, the intercepted cipher text could

be transmitted by enciphered radio or underwater cable to the national centers for decryption

and translation. To securely transmit this intercept back to the processing centers, the Western

Allies used their own high-level cipher machines,

notably the British TypeX or the American SIGABA, both of which were considered unbreakable

by Axis cryptologists.52

By war’s end, this enciphered communications system linked most of the Allied intercept

and processing centers together in a worldwide

network that allowed intercept from a remotely

situated monitoring site to reach the appropriate

analytic center. In the United States, so-called

traffic or signal centers were set up in

Washington, San Francisco, California, and

Seattle, Washington. These centers relayed the

intercepted traffic from overseas stations via

cable to the Signal Security Agency at Arlington

Hall, Virginia. British or Commonwealth intercept destined for the SSA came from London

Allied Communications Network

(Source: RG 457, HCC, Box 843, “Lines of Communication – Traffic Exchange”)
Page 38

through the British Security Coordination located

in New York City. The BSC also relayed Canadian

intercept from Ottawa, Canada. U.S. field stations

as far away as Kunming, China, and Asmara,

Ethiopia, could get their intercept transmitted to

SSA Headquarters within a day via this series of

radio and cable relays. The chart on page 37 from

June 1945 illustrates the network.

Once the intercepted messages arrived at the

centers, they were sorted by target country and

service element. The copy was then distributed to

the appropriate target country office for analysis.

So-called traffic analysts performed the initial

evaluation of message “externals.” (The British

referred to traffic analysts as “discriminators.”)

This traffic analytic process can be likened to the

study of the outside of a mail envelope. Even

without reading the enclosed correspondence of a

piece of mail, the recipient’s and sender’s identity

and addresses, the postmark, weight and size of

the envelope, the postage class, special handling

instructions, and the history of prior correspondence between the two can

reveal much about the content of individual letters.

At Arlington Hall Station,

analysts from the B-I section

performed the initial review

of the intercept. The externals they studied included

parts of the intercept such

as station callsigns, message

precedence (or its urgency),

message serial number, the

number of recipients and

relays (if used), and tips to

the cryptographic system.

These items were studied for

clues to the content of the

message and perhaps the

identity of the ultimate recipient. For example, many

diplomatic messages were

sent to radio terminals with

only the notation of the ministry for which it was

intended, such as “Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” If

possible, the analyst would try to determine to

which department the message was addressed.

The analyst would review the files on previous

intercepts to see if there were any clues that indicated the message’s recipient.

From there, the message, or a copy of it, was

routed to the appropriate code breaking office. At

Bletchley Park, cryptanalysis was done at Hut 6

for military, air, police, and the SS, or at Hut 8 for

naval traffic. The GC&CS site at Berkely Street in

London received diplomatic and commercial

intercepts. At Arlington Hall, the SSA cryptanalysts worked in section B-III, which handled all

military and diplomatic intercept. The cryptanalytic task, the actual recovery of the message contents from its encoded or encrypted format, was a

formidable one due to the enormous number of

possible cryptographic systems employed by target countries. Allied codebreakers had to contend

with almost 500 codes and ciphers.53 For examTypical Arlington Hall analytic section
Page 39

ple, British cryptanalysts worked against over 100

German cryptographic systems.54 Many countries employed numerous cryptographic systems.

For example, France (including the Vichy,

Gaullist, and Giraudist factions) used over 100

systems for its armed forces, diplomatic, and

colonial communications. Switzerland had available over ten manual systems and a simplified

version of Enigma just for its diplomatic messages.55 Not all countries used all of their systems

all of the time. Some systems were reserved for

messages of certain levels of importance. Some

military or naval encryption systems were

designed for use by a single command or region.

For some countries, most of their communications were encrypted using relatively few systems.

For example, although the Vatican was known to

have nine diplomatic systems available for its

apostolic delegates, it used only three systems,

and one of those was so seldom used by the

Vatican that American and British codebreakers

could make no progress against it.56

It has been popularly portrayed that Allied

cryptologists often could read enemy messages

before the intended recipient. In a few instances

this was true, such as occurred with some Purple

decrypts prior to Pearl Harbor. Generally,

though, this capability was rare. The ability to

exploit encrypted traffic in a reasonable time after

intercept was possible only after the cumulative

application of physical resources and months of

human analytic effort devoted to a single system

such as Purple or the constellation of Enigma

variants.57 Allied cryptologists did not reach that

level of expert or timely exploitation for all Axis

cryptographic systems.

Another aspect to the cryptanalytic process

was the constant risk that Axis cryptographers

would change or replace current codes or ciphers

that the Allies were exploiting. This danger existed for all major Axis cryptographic systems.

There was a notable example of this in January

1942 when the German Navy replaced the threewheel Enigma used by the U-boats with a newer

four-wheel version. As a result of this move, the

Allies were unable to exploit U-boat messages

encrypted in the new Enigma until November

1942. In another example, in September 1941 the

German Police began to change over its current

manual encryption system, a double transposition cipher to another, a double playfair.58 This

change was completed by early November. The

playfair was quickly broken; in fact it was a simpler system. This switch illustrates the inherent

risk that faced Allied codebreakers every day during the war.59 (See pages 49-50 for more on the

background to this change.)

It is also true that not all foreign cryptographic systems warranted the same level of cryptanalytic effort that had been made against the Purple

machine or the various versions of the Enigma.

There were a number of reasons for this. As

pointed out above, there were quite a number

of systems to attack, far more than the number

of available cryptanalysts. For many systems,

including manual codes and ciphers and some

machine systems, not enough intercept was

acquired to allow for their successful or timely

cryptanalysis. Depending on the systems’ complexity and potential for intelligence, some codes

or ciphers would be exploited relatively quickly;

others, because of their difficulty, took a great

deal of time and resources to break. For example,

the high-level German diplomatic systems,

known as Floradora and GEE, took, respectively,

four and five years for Allied codebreakers to

solve.60A few machine cipher systems, such as the

German Gestapo Enigma, known as TGD, defied

Allied cryptanalysis completely during the war.61

The British had a large section in Hut 6 at

Bletchley Park devoted to the decryption of the

police ciphers. There were good technical, cryptologic reasons for this extensive effort. The texts

of decrypted police messages sometimes provided cribs – plain text assumed to be present in

enciphered messages – to those messages

encrypted with the Enigma by other services such

as the Wehrmacht. Also, many Wehrmacht and
Page 40

Luftwaffe operational units retained reserve manual ciphers similar to the police system in case of

Enigma failure, or used them for messages of a less

importance.62 As for intelligence value, the police

messages were important because they provided

information on much more than the massacres of

Jews and other groups in Russia. They contained

information about economic, political, and social

conditions in Germany and occupied Europe, the

suppression of resistance groups in the conquered

countries, the political situation in Italy after the

fall of Mussolini, news of Allied POW escapes, the

effects of Allied bombing on the morale of German

civilians, and the SS plunder of art and other cultural items from other countries.63

For systems that had been broken, there was

virtually no retroactive effort by the Allied cryptologists to solve so-called “back traffic.” For example,

there was no plan to go back and read the high-level

German diplomatic messages that had accumulated prior to the cryptanalytic breakthroughs in 1944

and 1945. In another case, by early 1944, the War

Department’s Special Branch conceded that there

was no way that some 200,000 intercepted

Japanese military messages, encrypted and encoded in systems that were now exploitable, which had

been stock-piled, would ever be read by the Army.

Arlington Hall conceded that there was too much

current intercept arriving from the field and just

keeping up with that flow negated any chance for

work on the old messages. Also, the Army’s analysts

had to stay on top of the current systems in case the

Japanese changed them. The author of a memorandum reviewing this situation at Arlington Hall

could only muse about how much “priceless intelligence” was lost. 64

How much of the total intercept ultimately was

exploited cryptanalytically is not known. There is

no quantitative data about how many possible messages may have been missed (or copied too poorly

for use by the code-breaking sections). There is not

much data about intercepted messages encoded or

encrypted in cryptographic systems that were

unbreakable. Likewise, there is little statistical

information available to determine an overall success rate for Allied codebreakers. The few records

with statistics concern how many messages were

intercepted and how many were broken. If the incident about the Japanese Army messages related in

the preceding paragraph can be used an indicator,

then it is possible that a substantial number of messages were intercepted but not exploited. In reality,

the general rate of successful decryption or decoding of intercepted messages may not have been particularly high, and this estimate includes messages

that were partially exploited. For example, in fiscal

year 1944, the Allies intercepted about 576,000

Axis and neutral diplomatic messages. The SSA

cryptanalytic branch at Arlington Hall, B-III, managed to solve about 89,000, or a rate of slightly less

than 15.5 percent.

This low rate, though, does not mean that the

Allied codebreakers failed to produce intelligence.

For one thing, the priorities established by the

Allied staffs ensured that the communications most

important to the war’s prosecution received the

most coverage and analytic attention. Axis military

systems, such as U-boat Enigma traffic, were

exploited in much larger numbers and a greater

rate relative to intercept than targets of lower interest such as neutral diplomatic networks.65 As for

the diplomatic problem, the major targets of interest, Japanese embassies in Axis and neutral capitals

were the highest priority and accounted for approximately 54 percent of all diplomatic translations.66

Success for the Allied cryptologic effort must be

measured in the intelligence gathered that affected

the course and outcome of the war. Still, the general result of the codebreaking was that a relatively

small percentage of the intercepted messages were

available for the next set of analysts – the translators.

Translations of the decrypted high-level Axis

and neutral messages were done at Huts 3 (military

and air) or 4 (naval) at Bletchley Park, at Berkeley

Street in London (diplomatic and commercial), and

at the B-III section of Arlington Hall Station. A

translation took a few steps to complete. Initially, a
Page 41

linguist would complete a worksheet. Usually this

took the form of the decrypted text with a word-toword translation. Next, the linguist would compose

a draft English text based on the worksheet. A final

version of the text would then be written. Usually

this form carried any comments considered necessary for the reader of the translation. For example,

if a particular passage proved to be difficult and

open to other interpretations, that bit of text in the

original language would be included in a footnote. 

The translation problem facing the cryptologic

agencies was enormous. The nature, size, and logistical needs of the language problem proved to be as

daunting as that of decryption. The target countries, Axis, minor allied, and neutral, used threedozen languages. The mixture was an almost devilish variety that ranged from relatively familiar

European languages, such as French, German, and

Spanish, which were taught at many American and

British schools, to the unfamiliar and rarely taught

Amharic, Arabic, and Thai.67

At the beginning of the war, one of the major

issues confronting the Allied cryptologic organizations was that they had to produce a large enough

cadre of linguists to handle the range of languages

found in the decrypted messages. This early lack of

translators created a bottleneck in the processing of

intercept. For example, during the month of March

1943, SIS had received over 114,000 intercepts,

mostly Japanese Army, but also weather and diplomatic messages. Yet, Arlington Hall could produce

only 4,500 translations. The problem was a lack of

translators to handle the load.68

Once training programs were running and producing linguists, other problems intruded. Again,

wartime priorities often defined the direction of the

linguistic training effort. For the Americans,

Japanese was the language emphasized in its training programs. This emphasis was driven partly by

the division of effort with the British, though the

latter had their own Japanese training program.

Other languages of interest were not ignored, but

American linguistic training was dominated by the

needs of the war against Japan. Besides the dominance of Japanese language needs, another problem was other organizations that competed with the

cryptologic agencies for these rare linguists. The

most important was the Allied Translator and

Interpreter Section (ATIS), which performed critical roles such as POW interrogation and translation

of captured enemy documents in all combat theaters.

Once the linguists were assigned to analytic

centers, their work was supposed to be verified at

various steps for correctness and readability.

Nonetheless, the quality of translations the cryptologic agencies produced during the war varied. In

the archival record collections, researchers easily

can find numerous excellent translations, and

many with serious shortcomings in grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. Many of the problems probably arose from technical gaps in linguistic

resources. Linguists not only had to become proficient in a language, as they went along in their work

they had to learn or develop specialized glossaries

for military, nautical, and aerial jargon, equipment

references, and so on.69 The text of diplomatic messages often contained exactingly precise language

that was difficult to render into equivalent English.

Many diplomatic messages reported conversations

and interviews with individuals that had been

translated from the language of the host country.

Also, messages were composed with a background

context that assumed a prior understanding

between original sender and intended recipient. If

the linguist had not seen any previous messages,

allusions to other individuals, issues, and the significance of topics in the text could be opaque to an

Allied translator. For the recipients of the translations, though, these shortcomings may have not

always posed a problem: the main ends to translation were availability and utility, not elegance and

erudition.

The rapidity at which a translation could be

completed varied, as well. The above difficulties

affected the turnover from decrypt to translation.

Further, if an intercept was considered important,
Page 42

and the decryption could be done quickly, it would

be translated relatively quickly. If not, it could be

some time before a translation was completed and

disseminated, perhaps weeks or even months. An

example of this difference can be illustrated by two

diplomatic intercepts of late June 1944 from

Budapest. Both messages had been received at

Arlington Hall one day after being intercepted by

the U.S. Army’s monitoring station in Asmara,

Ethiopia (MS-4). The first intercept was a 26 June

1944 Hungarian diplomatic message to Ankara,

Turkey, that reported world reaction to the initial

roundup of Hungarian Jews. It took Arlington Hall

from 27 June to 16 December 1944 to complete its

decryption and a formal translation to be issued –

almost six months. The second intercept was of a

Vichy diplomatic message from Budapest to

Ankara, Turkey, that reported the situation of a

group of Lebanese Jews trapped in Budapest. It

took Arlington Hall from 13 June to 24 June to

decrypt and translate this message, or only eleven

days.70

The specific reason (or reasons) for the long

delay in issuing the translation of the Hungarian

intercept is not known. The quick processing of the

Vichy intercept probably can be explained by the

long familiarity of Arlington Hall analysts with

Vichy diplomatic cryptographic systems that had

been solved about two years earlier, as well as the

comparatively easier French plain text. The delay in

processing the Hungarian intercept suggests more

difficulty with Hungarian cryptography, as well as

problems with the Magyar language. The long processing time for the Hungarian intercept does not

mean that information of intelligence value it may

have contained would have been held back until a

full translation was done. In a heat of operational

necessity, intelligence could be passed informally.

At the beginning of the war, the United States

cryptologic agencies were producing only a few separate series of translations, notably the diplomatic

series by the SIS and Japanese Navy translations by

OP-20-G. These early series of translations suffered

from a number of limitations. There were too few

being written; they were not timely; and the translations suffered from missing portions of text. As

the war progressed, both army and navy codebreakers got better at breaking Axis and neutral

cryptographic systems, and began to exploit more

systems. As the number and variety of readable

intercepts increased, the number of resulting translations also grew.

The initial translation series proved to be inadequate to handle the growing flood of intelligence.

The analytic centers created additional specialized

translation series that were categorized by topic,

source, or administrative needs. By the end of the

war, the U.S. cryptologic elements were producing

over sixteen separate series of translations. Some

were for a general intelligence audience, such as

the Japanese military translations. Others were for

the cryptologic elements themselves. These series

usually carried the notation “CI” for “Code

Instruction.” Most of the translation series had no

or very little information about the Holocaust

beyond a passing reference. The two that contained

the most information were the “H” (Multinational

Diplomatic) and the “T” (Reserved, or Restricted

Diplomatic) series.71 These two series are discussed

in some detail in Chapter 3, pages 61 to 64. The

British created fewer translation series compared to

those of the SIS.

Although a precise accounting of the final tally

of finished translations produced by the Western

cryptologic agencies is beyond this study, it should

be pointed out that the intercepts that were translated represented only a part of what previously had

been decrypted, which, in turn, was a portion of

what originally had been intercepted. Even by the

end of the war, the overall rate on some targets was

still relatively low. In July 1945, an Inspector

General survey of OP-20-G activities indicated that

only 10 percent of all intercepted Japanese naval

messages were being fully processed and disseminated to the various military commands.72 Recall

that the number of decrypts produced by B-III in

1944 was 89,000 (out of 576,000 intercepts, or 15

percent); the estimated number of translations for
Page 43

the same period is about 50,000. This represents

about 56 percent of the decrypts, but only 8.6 percent of all diplomatic intercepts.73

The 1944 American total of diplomatic translations issued is surprisingly close to that of GC&CS

at the start of the conflict. In 1940 the Diplomatic

and Commercial Section of GC&CS reported that it

had received (intercepted by radio or cable, or

acquired through espionage) 100,000 telegrams,

read 70,000 of them, but circulated only 8,000.

The British numbers also represent another aspect

of this problem mentioned earlier: the relative

dearth of intelligence of importance that was contained in the intercepted messages. The low figure

of translations disseminated through the British

government, some 8 percent of all intercepts

despite a 70 percent success rate of decryption, suggests that many messages that London intercepted

contained little intelligence of importance to the

prosecution of the war. The intercepts were largely

of minor neutrals and allied governments in exile.74

Once the translations were completed, other

intelligence analysts reviewed them for usable

information. At Hut 3, this work was done in the

indexing sections. These individuals, many of them

women, extracted those elements of intelligence

that contributed to the larger information matrixes

that were important to the war’s prosecution –

order of battle, equipment listings, names of individual officers, etc. At Hut 3, a senior indexer would

flag the information that needed to be entered into

large index card catalogues for further use. The

information was entered onto index cards, crossreferenced, and stored in cabinets within Hut 3 for

future reference.75

No information was overlooked. Even that data

that appeared innocuous and subsequently not

important by the Axis, could reap benefits from

good indexing. For example, prior to the war, the

British intercepted messages from the Italian Air

Force in North Africa. The messages contained

seemingly mundane information: specifics about

repairs of the engines to Italian aircraft. Many of

the messages listed engines by serial number. Alert

British analysts compiled these serial numbers. The

payoff was that, by knowing the status of almost

every aircraft engine, the British could develop a

complete picture of the size, composition, and

availability of aircraft to the Italian Air Force in

North Africa when hostilities began in September

1940.76

Step 4: Disseminating the COMINT

Once a translation was completed, there

remained the problem of getting the intelligence it

contained to the military and civilian leaders and

organizations that needed it. In Britain, the Joint

Intelligence Committee, which served under the

Chiefs of Staff, produced intelligence reports for the

rest of the government. The JIC had been functioning since before the war (when it had been called

the Joint Intelligence Subcommittee). The major

services and Foreign Office were represented on it.

The services and the Foreign Office, which was

responsible for M.I.6, and, ultimately, GC&CS, funneled intelligence to the JIC, which, in turn, distributed it to the necessary recipients. The JIC also

issued the military, political, diplomatic, and economic estimates of the war.77

Early in the war, the United States SIS produced and disseminated COMINT to other agencies

and commands, usually in the form of translations.

This system soon broke down. The Army codebreakers were swamped by the increase in messages to exploit. SIS was unprepared organizationally and lacked the resources to distribute the

COMINT. It reported communications intelligence

in a haphazard fashion; no effort was made to check

the signals intelligence against other sources.

Organizationally, the SIS remained within the

Signal Corps. Its product had to go to G-2, the War

Department’s intelligence arm. Another organization, the Special Branch, was formed in mid-1942

under the control of the War Department’s operational intelligence arm, the Military Intelligence

Service. Special Branch thereafter would handle the

analysis of the COMINT product from SIS, combine
Page 44

it with other sources of intelligence, and then disseminate to the rest of the government whatever

useful intelligence it had gained. Special Branch

produced the “Magic” Summary and also other

special topical studies.78 In 1944 Special Branch

was broken up and subsumed under the War

Department’s Military Intelligence Service, which

took over the management of COMINT analysis

and dissemination.79

Within the British government and ministries,

the Ultra material was distributed to the intelligence and service ministries that required it. As a

general rule, copies of all Ultra translations or

decrypts were sent to Secret Intelligence Service

Headquarters in London and the intelligence

departments of the three services. This distribution

scheme varied, though, as the war progressed. A

good example of this change can be seen with the

dissemination of the German Police decrypts. For

example, in August 1941 eight copies of police

decrypts were produced and distributed. One copy

went into the files. Two copies went to M.I.6 HQ,

while another was transferred from the Service to

the Ministry of Economic Warfare. A fourth copy

went to the Air Ministry intelligence section. The

fifth copy went to M.I. 8, British Army Y staff. The

War Office section responsible for occupied

Europe, M.I. 14, received a copy. One final copy was

sent to Bletchley Park as part of a standing intelligence exchange, known as the B.P.I.E.

Starting in late 1942, the police decrypts carried

a distribution list that contained both office designators and named individuals within M.I. 6 or the

intelligence section of the Air Ministry or War

Office. Why the distribution became name-specific

is not clear, though it may have reflected a maturing topical specialization by individual analysts

within M.I. 6 and other ministries. Also, after 1943

it appears that copies of the police decrypts, including those of the SS, were passed to the American

contingent at Hut 3 in Bletchley Park. For example,

in August 1944, a Lieutenant Colonel Taylor, most

likely Lieutenant Colonel Telford Taylor, the G-2

Special Branch representative to Bletchley Park,

received a copy of an SS message detailing the rail

transport of almost 1,300 Jews from Hungary to

Auschwitz.80

For the Allies, this last step in the communications intelligence system potentially was the trickiest because it was the one most likely to compromise Ultra to the Axis. It was recognized early in the

war that such information, being at once the best

source for Axis plans, intentions, and capabilities,

also could be the most ephemeral of all intelligence

sources. To lose the advantage that Ultra conferred

on the Allies – what Churchill on one occasion

called his “golden eggs” – could have been critical

to the progress of the war, if not to its outcome. This

was especially true in the early years of the conflict

when Ultra was just about the only edge that a

beleaguered Great Britain had against the military

and naval forces of Germany and Italy in the various combat theaters. A method was needed to allow

access to the intelligence derived from Axis communications, known variously as “Boniface,” “Most

Secret Source,” or Ultra, to those who had the “need

to know,” especially in overseas commands. Yet,

that method had to ensure that the cryptologic

sources would not be compromised and subsequently lost.

To solve the security problem posed by disseminating Ultra to overseas commands, the British

developed a system to control the distribution of

COMINT and, concurrently, to minimize the

chance of its exposure. In August 1941 an organization, the Special Liaison Units (SLU), was formed

under the control of the Chief, Secret Service, that

administered the dissemination of Ultra to British

commands in the Middle East. Soon, SLUs were

present at every command of the British armed

forces. These units were staffed largely by Royal Air

Force personnel who were familiar with the signals

intelligence sources and could offer technical background information concerning the intelligence.

The unit also enforced the security regulations that

protected the Ultra intelligence.
Page 45

The units, many of which were attached to the

various Allied commands around the world,

received the Ultra intelligence from Hut 3, most

commonly in the form of a translation. The intelligence was transmitted by enciphered radio, cable,

or carried by a courier. When normal communications service was not available to an SLU, the transmission of Ultra information to the field was handled by Special Communications Units (SCU). The

translation, or the message that contained it, carried a special designator (two- or three-letter combination) known as a delivery group that specified

the recipients. A single translation could carry several delivery groups depending on how many commands had the “need to know.”81 The SLU, in turn,

dispatched special representatives who delivered

the information to those individual commanders,

ministry heads, and diplomats cleared to receive it.

Keeping the lists of recipients approved, or

“cleared,” to receive Ultra was another facet of the

SLU system. The lists were fairly limited; recipients

usually were high-ranking ministers or military

officers, generally no lower than corps commanders

or their equivalents in the other services. For example, in the United Kingdom, a late 1944 Ultra distribution list for the Supreme Headquarters Allied

Expeditionary Force of cleared army and air force

personnel ran some twenty pages and included

about 500 names.82 Yet, when one considers the

size of SHAEF, and the subordinate commands

involved, this listing is not particularly large.

The Americans developed their own version of

the SLU, called the Special Security Officer or SSO.

The SSO system was sponsored by the War

Department’s Special Branch and officially was

adopted by the War Department in late 1943 as the

main method of Ultra distribution to major U.S.

commands. The SSO liaisons were first established

in the Pacific, Southwest Pacific, and China-BurmaIndia Theaters. Eventually, by spring 1944 an SSO

was set up in Europe to support General

Eisenhower, although an SLU counterpart also was

present. Like their SLU counterparts, these officers

personally handled all aspects of the Ultra traffic.

They received the intelligence messages sent from

the War Department, carried the intelligence to

their designated recipients, briefed them, and then

returned with the material.83

The other major American system of distribution of communications intelligence was by summary report. This distribution method began with

the early typewritten “Magic” Diplomatic Summary

and was published first in March 1942. The summary remained limited to senior officials within the

Washington, D. C., area: the White House and the

War, Navy, and State Departments. A subordinate

office of the Special Branch of the Military

Intelligence Service compiled this summary. It was

a digest of relevant translations based mostly on

diplomatic sources with a preponderance of Purple,

or Japanese diplomatic translations. Some other

sources of information included mostly prisoner

debriefings and digests of reports from aerial

imagery. Occasional press and OSS-produced intelligence sometimes would be slipped into a summary, but COMINT material clearly dominated the

content of the summaries, sometimes comprising

Sample Ultra translation with delivery groups
Page 46

over 90 percent in a single issue. Occasionally,

communications intelligence was the only source in

a summary.84 It was understandable why this was

called the “Magic” Diplomatic Summary.

With the closer liaison between GC&CS and

SIS, and the resulting access to more intelligence,

the number of American summary reports grew. A

European version, the “European Summary” was

started in late 1943. Special Branch representatives

in Britain culled Enigma translations published by

Huts 3 and 4 for items to include in this summary.

The European Summary was based mostly on

translations of Axis military intercept. Also, the distribution of the European Summary was limited to

about a dozen copies sent to Washington.85 Except

for two examples, a complete set of this summary

series has yet to be located in any archival holdings

in the United States. In July 1944 a “Far East Magic

Summary” was started. It summarized the military,

political, and diplomatic Magic translations and

military intelligence reports related to the campaign against Japan. It was published through the

surrender of Japan in September 1945.86 This latter

summary carried no information on the Holocaust.

Access to the “Magic” Summary was limited,

usually with only a few copies hand-carried to the

War, Navy, and State Departments, and the White

House. The service chiefs, General George Marshall

of the Army and Admiral Ernest King of the Navy,

saw them, as did their deputies for intelligence and

operations. Secretary of State Cordell Hull and the

Assistant Secretary of State, Adolph Berle, received

the summaries. Whether the copies of the summary were returned immediately to Arlington Hall

when reviewed or held in a secure area for a short

period is not clear. Whatever the case, it appears

that the copies of the summaries eventually were

returned to Special Branch.

How much communications intelligence

reached the “top,” that is, the desks of Prime

Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt,

depended both on their individual predilection and

the selection process by their staffs. Churchill has

been portrayed accurately as a voracious consumer

of Ultra information. In September 1940 Churchill

requested that “C,” Stewart Menzies, the head of

M.I.6, provide him daily all Enigma messages.’87

This request clearly was impractical because of the

number of decrypts. By summer of 1941, Churchill

was receiving a daily brief from “C” that summarized important Ultra material. Bletchley Park produced a veritable daily banquet of information from

which Churchill simply feasted. Sprinkled throughout the daily briefings are reports about the massacres of Jews in Russia, Hitler’s directive to shoot

German political refugees taken prisoner with Free

French units, Jewish internees in North Africa used

to unload Axis ships in Tunisia, anti-Jewish hostility in Turkey, Himmler’s instruction to the SS to

remove all works of art from Florence, Italy, rumors

of the German Reichsbank hiding gold and sensitive documents, and SS orders to move Jewish

inmates to Dachau late in the war.88

Churchill used the intelligence from the daily

briefings for planning strategy and berating commanders who were slow to exploit local advantages

that he saw from Ultra decrypts.89At these briefings he also was informed of sensitive political and

intelligence issues, such as the danger of passing

Ultra to the Soviets, increasing German signals

security, and the chance that Ultra might be compromised by a “precipitous” military action against

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Headquarters.90

The daily summaries he received from Bletchley

Park during the war, as contained in the PRO series

HW1, illustrates the depth and breadth of the intelligence brought to his attention.

On the other hand, FDR seems to have been living on, if not quite a monk’s diet, then certainly a

somewhat leaner ration when compared to

Churchill’s appetite for Ultra. It was not that

Roosevelt was uninterested and ignored the intelligence from radio intercepts. He referred to the

Purple translations closely during the failed negotiations with Japan prior to Pearl Harbor. He did, in

fact, continue to receive this intelligence in various

forms throughout the war. The most notable was
Page 47

the “Magic” Summary. Roosevelt’s aides would

brief him in the morning or afternoon (or both) on

the highlights from the various summaries. The

White House also received “translations of interest”

from either the Army’s Signal Intelligence Service

at Arlington Hall or Special Branch throughout the

war. Sometimes he would ask to read some of the

translations used in the summary. All of his aides

have reported that the president was extremely well

informed from the intelligence. Usually when the

president went abroad to conferences, such as

Casablanca and Cairo, the Magic material was forwarded to him.91 And FDR would complain about a

lack of intelligence on a particular issue he found

important. For example, in November 1943 he

called the secretary of war, Henry Stimson, and the

secretary of the navy, Frank Knox, to the White

House to complain about a lack of intelligence on

the domestic and political situations inside

Japan.92 

It appears that other U.S. officials were not

always satisfied with the distribution of “Magic”

information to the president and his use of it.

General George Marshall, who well understood the

importance of the COMINT, established a new

summary system in early 1944 for President

Roosevelt, creating a presidential “Black Book” of

briefings. He did this after discovering that FDR

was not getting or reading the Magic decrypts from

the Army. In February 1944 he addressed a memo

to President Roosevelt specifically on this issue. In

the first paragraph he reported that he had learned

that the president “seldom sees the Army summaries of ‘magic’ material.” Marshall later

explained that a new arrangement of material had

been prepared and that the president should avail

himself of these.93

It is difficult to determine the precise context

for Marshall’s complaint. FDR was receiving intelligence daily, indeed even on occasion demanding it.

Marshall may have believed that Roosevelt was not

utilizing “Magic” when making wartime decisions.

Certainly, Roosevelt’s approach to wartime leadership differed substantially from Churchill’s. Unlike

Churchill, who hectored his generals and admirals

for action and often used Ultra as his hammer, FDR

left the execution of the war to his military chiefs.

Roosevelt preferred a personal working relationship with his commanders. They would develop

and carry out operations subject to his approval. As

long as his military commanders kept FDR’s confidence, they were free to direct the military operations of the war. Perhaps to a person of Marshall’s

business-like attitude, FDR could appear maddeningly casual or detached from the direction of the

war, especially when compared to Churchill’s tendency to get involved to the point of almost meddling.94

A review of the “Magic” Diplomatic Summary

files shows that they contained very little information about Axis atrocities or crimes against Jews or

other groups in occupied Europe. There were perhaps three or four items a year beginning in mid1942.95 Additionally, from the set of translations

SIS forwarded to the White House from early 1942

to the middle of 1945 only one – an Irish diplomatic message from Rome in October 1943 – can be

found that had anything to do with the Holocaust.96

Whether these few reports from American signals

intelligence on the Holocaust eventually were

briefed to President Roosevelt is unknown. This

small number of references in the summaries is

interesting because U.S. COMINT produced over

400 translations dealing with aspects of the

Holocaust. Almost all of these were from diplomatic sources. Also, it seems that Roosevelt never saw

the German Police decrypts that GC&CS had produced earlier in the war.97 This gap, though, may be

explained by the fact that the German Police and SS

mostly had stopped reporting by radio about the

massacres in Russia and the concentration camps

by the end of 1942. Whether he was apprised of the

information in the British decrypts through other

sources, possibly the OSS via its exchange with the

British Security Committee in New York, is

unknown. The president had other sources of information about the Holocaust, including the OSS, his

advisors, like Rabbi Stephen Wise, and personal
Page 48

briefings from first hand observers like Jan

Karski.98

Throughout the war, President Roosevelt’s

reaction to the news of the Holocaust could be characterized as sympathetic, but also as realistic and

restrained. He did authorize the Allied Declaration

condemning the Nazi killing of the Jews in late

1942. He also publicly denounced the Nazi execution of civilians in October 1941. The president

favored the postwar retribution against Axis war

crimes. Yet, he believed that the best course to end

the killing was the successful and quick defeat of

Nazi Germany.99 Furthermore, Roosevelt, like

Churchill, understood the political problems that

would follow from any statement that singled out

Nazi atrocities against the Jews. The Germans

could very well use any specific declaration about

the Holocaust against the Allies as a propaganda

weapon. And, on occasion, they did, denying claims

about gassing of Jews and publicizing stories about

Jewish control of the Allied war effort.100

There was also an overriding security consideration regarding the dissemination of Ultra material

about the Holocaust. Publicizing any information

based on Ultra could seriously compromise the

work at Bletchley Park, especially the exploitation

of the German high-level Enigma and its many variants. If the Germans had been warned that the

Allies had penetrated their most secret ciphers and

codes, they could have installed new systems. Allied

codebreakers then would have been returned to the

difficult early days of the war when Enigma’s workings were a mystery. If such a compromise had

occurred in 1941 or 1942, the attendant loss of

information could have adversely affected the

Allied strategic posture against Germany.

The fear of compromise of Ultra sources rightly dominated and formed the entire British (and

later American) administration of the dissemination of intelligence derived from it. The Allies developed some ruses and cover stories to protect these

sensitive cryptologic sources.101 The initial British

approach to disguising Ultra material was to make

it appear to have originated from a traditional espionage or agent source. The original cover name for

Enigma decrypts was “Boniface,” and the material

from Bletchley Park was issued by M.I.6 to further

disguise its source. This cover name was used to

suggest that the information came from an agent

high in the German command that was controlled

by M.I.6. This approach may have secured the cryptologic source, but it often subverted the impact of

the Ultra material since many recipients were skeptical of what they assumed was human agent information. But the British leadership appeared to

accept the loss of some operational efficiency as

long as security was maintained.102 By late 1941,

though, the volume of Enigma decrypts had

increased dramatically as had the number of recipients. This growth forced the British to finally

extend the initial SLU presence in the Middle East

and give more recipients the “need to know” about

the source of Ultra intelligence.

While this expansion of approved recipients

solved one aspect of the security problem, it still left

the problem of compromise of Ultra information

through its use in military operations. When there

were no other intelligence sources to account for

knowledge of Axis plans and moves, the Allies had

to devise ways to disguise the role of Ultra information. An example of this was the British use of

reconnaissance aircraft flights to “discover” Axis

convoys in the Mediterranean that were known

already through Ultra. When British codebreakers

learned the date and route of an Axis supply convoy, the Allies would schedule many days of air

reconnaissance over the route.103 In the Pacific, the

aerial ambush of Admiral Yamamoto in April 1943

had been based on a decrypt of the valuable

Japanese naval code, JN-25. The cover story, told

to the U.S. Army Air Force pilots who carried out

the mission in case they were captured, was that the

information on Yamamoto’s flight came from Allied

coast watchers.104 In another interesting example,

shortly after the German invasion of the USSR, the

British supplied the Russians with signals intelligence based on high-level cryptanalysis. However,

London was aware that the Germans could exploit
Page 49

many Soviet ciphers and that Berlin could discover

Ultra information in Moscow’s radio traffic.

Therefore, London disguised the Ultra it gave

Moscow and characterized it as “a most reliable

source.”105 In all of the above cases, a subterfuge

was used to cover the real source of the information. Still, no matter the deception or cover for the

real source of information, there was always a

chance of discovery by the Axis. And this fear

weighed heavily on the Allied codebreakers.

The handling of the information derived from

the German Police decrypts from the Russian front

in the summer of 1941 points to the dilemma just

discussed. On 24 August 1941, Winston Churchill

delivered a radio speech about the atrocities committed by the police on the Eastern Front. It was

based on information derived from police decrypts.

The prime minister was aware of the German

depredations against Jews and other target groups

in Russia since the start of the invasion. He may

have been motivated to make the broadcast

because of the shocking information in the reports.

In the radio address, Churchill mentioned that

Russian inhabitants from entire districts were

being exterminated, but he made no reference to

Jews being a specific target of the police units.

Instead, Churchill made a general statement about

German Police executing Russian “patriots.”

Perhaps in the first months of the invasion, the

prime minister had not yet understood the emphasis on the Jewish target by the police and SS.106

Even though the sole source for British knowledge of the massacres in the western Soviet Union

was the police decodes, it appears that Churchill

was not sensitive to the potential for compromise

when he included a reference to the police executions in his broadcast. Nor is it certain if senior officials of M.I.6, GC&CS, or the Joint Intelligence

Committee were themselves sensitive to the possibility of a compromise of the police decodes.

Churchill may have viewed the military situation in

August on the Russian front as critical. Certainly,

there were members of his cabinet who believed

that the Soviet Union was facing defeat.107 He may

have wanted to bolster domestic British support for

Moscow’s struggle by delivering the speech.

A probable result of Churchill’s speech was that,

on 12 September 1941, Kurt Daluege, the commander of the German Police units, sent a message

to all of his command to cease transmission of

reports by radio of the mandated executions on the

Russian Front. A second probable effect of

Churchill’s speech was that, in November 1941, the

police changed the manual encryption system for

their messages from a double transposition cipher

to a double playfair system, the latter of which,

ironically, was a relatively easier system for

Bletchley Park to exploit. The British cryptologists

believed that Daluege’s order and the cryptographic change were inspired, in part, by Churchill’s

broadcast.108 Although the order to cease reporting

by radio had been sent on 12 September, nearly

three weeks after the broadcast, it is likely the

speech influenced the German changes. Daluege’s

12 September order probably was preceded by a

period of deliberation within the police leadership

and staffs in Berlin about the practice of radioing

reports of massacres. Not to be overlooked as a possible influencing factor, as well, is that Daluege’s

order may have reflected a long-standing concern

with the cryptographic shortcomings of the police

cipher and that the speech was the impetus for a

final decision to rectify a long-standing cryptographic security issue.109

The dissemination of information derived from

Ultra sources presented a constant security risk for

the Allies during the war. The compromise of this

capability, that is, of the cryptanalytic exploitation

of any of the high-level Axis cryptographic systems

could have closed a valuable source of information.

Churchill’s speech condemning German atrocities

in Russia, by referring to the role of the German

Police, contained a reference to the source of intelligence that may have tipped the Allied advantage

in this one case.110 And it appears that the Germans

quite likely changed their cipher in response to the

prime minister’s broadcast. That the Germans
Page 50

replaced the then current police manual cipher system with one easier to exploit was a matter of good

fortune for the codebreakers at Bletchley Park; the

opposite, that is, the replacement with a stronger

cipher system, was just as likely an outcome. The

reliance on intelligence from singular cryptanalytic

sources such as Ultra only increased the potential

for a major compromise of the Allied codebreaking.

For the Allies, no matter the demands of the situation, whether it was countering an Axis military

operation or revelations about the police massacres, the best security policy to follow was to

avoid risking the disclosure of their cryptologic

secrets throughout the war.

In October 1942 the British began to accumulate information on war crimes by the German

Police units to be forwarded to the Foreign Office,

which would keep the dossier. This arrangement

had been agreed upon between Sir Alexander

Cadogan, the permanent undersecretary for foreign

affairs and the head of M.I.6, Stewart Menzies,

following a suggestion by Sir Victor CavendishBentick, who chaired the Joint Intelligence

Committee.111 Two Foreign Office officials were to

gather the information. How it was to be organized

is not certain. Notes attached to the police decrypts

suggest that the evidence was to be organized into

three categories: (a) the number of people shot or

maltreated in known and unknown areas, (b) officials responsible with summary of atrocities each

had perpetrated, and (c) a listing of Police, SS, and

Army units and a summary of the atrocities each

had committed.112

At war’s end, the Foreign Office had gathered

together a number of Police and SS decrypts. In late

May, Cavendish-Bentick approached Menzies

about the classification of the material and whether

that would mean it could not be turned over to the

Nuremberg War Crimes Commission. Menzies

passed the request to Edward Travis, the director of

GC&CS after 1942. The response from Travis was

that the Police decrypts that contained information

about the massacres and other atrocities in Russia

was “medium-grade” and could be released to the

prosecution at Nuremberg. (The category was

known as PEARL, referring to material derived

from low-level cryptanalysis such as the manual

ciphers used by the Police. This category was later

recast as PINUP and included everything NOT

derived from high-level cipher systems such as

Enigma.) Travis added that the concentration camp

messages could not be released because they contained some SS Enigma material, known as

“Orange.”113

This material, though, was never used at the

Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in the prosecution

of major or other criminals. Many Police officials

were included in the group of lesser criminals, or

Category 2, and some of them were tied to atrocities

in the decrypts.114 Another striking feature with

regards to the absence of the decrypts in the

Nuremberg evidence was that the head of the staff

for the American prosecutor, Chief Justice Robert

Jackson, was none other than Colonel Telford

Taylor. Prior to the trials, Taylor had supervised the

exchange of Ultra material with the British from

1943 to 1945. As part of the BRUSA Agreement in

June/July 1943, Taylor probably had received

copies of Police decrypts from later in the war.115

But he most likely did not receive copies of any

Police decrypts from prior to the agreement.

Telford Taylor (right front), formerly head of Special

Branch liaison with London, now a brigadier general, pictured with his staff at Nuremberg War Crimes Trials

(Source: NARA)
Page 51

Taylor had worked at accumulating evidence

against Axis war criminals for two of the general

counts against the accused, that is, crimes against

peace and crimes against humanity. Considering

that some of the material, namely, the lower-level

decrypts such as those of the police, could have

been used as evidence, the failure by Taylor to utilize the material seems to demand an explanation.

This is especially pertinent since one possible result

of this unwillingness to use the decrypts was that

many Police junior officers, noncommissioned officers, and rank and file police were not investigated

for war crimes immediately after the war.116

There are probably two explanations for why

the decrypts were not used by any of the

Nuremberg tribunals. The first was that, according

to Taylor, sufficient evidence already existed in the

forms of captured documents, eyewitness testimony, and the depositions of the accused senior Police

and SS officials. Taylor also deferred to the British,

who, he contended, had more expertise about

German organizations such as the Police, the SS,

and others.117

The second reason, and perhaps the more compelling one in light of the ensuing thirty-year cloak

of secrecy that dropped around Ultra, was the overriding concern by both British and American intelligence officials to keep secret the advantage gained

from the wartime exploitation of high-level German

cryptography. In the immediate postwar situation

in Germany (and later for Japan) intelligence officials in both countries were concerned about resurgent national feelings or the chance that underground resistance movements might start up

against the occupation governments. The Allies

could suppress such potential movements by

exploiting any ciphers or codes that might be used

by the insurgents.

Also, the Western Allies took the long view

when it came to protecting Ultra. New threats to

world security could arise in the future. If there

were a general awareness of the Allied success in

codebreaking, then any future enemy would be on

guard against the possibility that its communications might be exploited, and this would hamper

any American or British effort against them.118

From Intercept to Decryption – the

Story of One German Police Message

How the COMINT process functioned can be

illustrated with an example of this German Police

message of 16 June 1942 from commander of the

Police in central USSR to Reichsfuehrer Heinrich

Himmler and the Chief of the Order Police, Kurt

Daluege in Berlin. The message, Nr. 14, was sent

from Mogilev (callsign “SQF”) in Byelorussia to

Berlin (callsign “DQH”) on 16 June 1942. The message was intercepted on 3742 KHz at 9:51 PM

(GMT) at the British Army intercept site at

Beaumanor (BMR) by shift operator “A115.” The

handwritten changes to certain characters in the

cipher groups indicate that the operator had difficulty in copying the message. Another message was

sent some time after “14,” but the operator was

unable to copy it due to man-made interference

that is notated as “QRM.” The interference could

have come from inadvertent transmissions from

Intercept copy (NARA, RG457 HCC, Box 202)
Page 52

other radio stations near the same frequency or

from Soviet radio jammers trying to prevent the

Germans from communicating with one another.

Once copied, the message was sent from

Beaumanor to Hut 6 at Bletchley Park for processing. The important information from the intercept

was entered onto a form such as the “W/T (wireless

telegraphy) Red Form” shown above. The cipher

groups, with corrections or alternates, were entered

into the blocks on the sheet. Other intercept information – callsigns, frequency, time of intercept,

and organization – was entered on the form. Once

completed, this form would be forwarded to a

cipher clerk, who would apply the day’s key and

decipher the intercepted message.

Once the deciphering of message Nr 14 was

complete, the text would be entered onto the day’s

other German Police decrypts (Nr. 21) by Hut 3 for

dissemination. If the message were to be translated that job would have been completed at Hut 3.

A rough translation of the message is as follows:

To: Reichsfuehrer SS and the Chief of the Order

Police.

On the Bobruisk to Mogilev road, [there was]

a skirmish with partisans: 16 men from the 51st

Police battalion were killed. In the town of Borki,

[Unlocated. There are several towns named

Borki in present day Belarus – author.]

where weapons and ammunition were found, and

was leveled in the usual manner. The inhabitants

were liquidated. From: Senior Officer SS and

Police Chief Central Russia.

Western communications intelligence during

the war grew from a set of small national efforts to

a partnership that spanned the globe. It consisted

of the major cryptologic agencies of the United

States and Great Britain with supporting contingents from the Commonwealth as well as from

other Allied nations. Western COMINT comprised

a multistep system that set priorities for the collection, processing, and intelligence signals intelligence. Western COMINT primarily targeted Axis

military, naval, and diplomatic communications.

Secondary targets included the less important Axis

Decrypt of Police message (NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 1386)

Copy of W/T Red Form

(NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 202)
Page 53

communications and those of neutral countries.

Axis and neutral communications that carried the

most information about the Holocaust, German

Police and international diplomatic were targeted

mainly for the intelligence that these networks

might contain that supported the main war effort

against the Axis. Information about the Holocaust

that appeared on these networks was collected as a

byproduct of the main COMINT effort.

Notes

1 See Euna O’Halpin, “Small States and Big Secrets:

Understanding SIGINT Cooperation between Unequal

Powers during the Second World War.” Intelligence and

National Security (Vol. 17, No. 3, Autumn 2002), 1-16.

For more on the relationship with France, see RG457,

HCC, Box 1277, Folder 3732, “Liaison with the French on

Signal Intelligence Matters,” 28 November 1944; and

PRO, HW 14/3, January-February 1940, “Liaison with

French and Poles.” For relationship with Netherlands,

see PRO, HW 14/18, August 1941, “SIGINT Exchange

with Dutch in the Far East.” For more on the relationship

with the Poles, see, among others, PRO, HW 14/8,

regarding a Polish-manned intercept station in

Stanmore, England.

2 For example, see Carl Boyd, Hitler’s Secret

Confidant: General Oshima Hiroshi and Magic

Intelligence 1941 - 1945 (Lawrence, KS: University Press

of Kansas, 1993), pages 57-74, about Axis plans for 1942

and pages 117-139 for German appreciation of the Allied

intention in 1944. Also, see Hinsley, Vol. I, pages 429-

493, about COMINT and other intelligence sources

regarding German plans and preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union known as Operation

Barbarossa.

3 SRH-349, The Achievements of the Signal

Security Agency in World War II (Washington DC: The

Assistant Chief of Staff , G-2, 1946).

4 Memorandum for the Deputy Chief of Staff from

Major General Clayton Bissell, Subject: Intercept

Facilities. 8 September 1944. SRH-145, 200-201. Also

Memorandum for Mr. McCloy from Colonel Carter

Clarke, no subject 16 March 1944, SRH-145, 158-A.

5 For more on the phenomenon of women in these

agencies, see Jennifer Wilcox, Sharing the Burden:

Women in Cryptology during World War II (Fort

George G. Meade, MD: Center for Cryptologic History,

1998), SRH-152, “Historical Review of OP-20-G,” 1945,

3; Alvarez, 115-119.

6 “German Traffic Analysis in Sixta,” NARA, RG

457, HCC, Box 1429, Folder 4729.

7 “Report of Colonel McCormack’s TDY to London,

May-June 1943.” NARA, RG457, HCC, Box 1119, Folder

3600, June 1943.

8 William F. Friedman, “E Operations of the GC&CS

at Bletchley Park,” NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 1126,

Folder 3620.

9 SRH-349, Appendix, “Bulletin production –

Average Daily Volume of Translated Messages,” 1

December 1941 – 31 August 1945.

10 The Enigma and Purple cipher machines are well

known from the literature of World War II. Less famous,

but important as sources of intelligence, were some

other Axis cipher machines. Tunny was the cover name

applied to the Lorenz Company’s on-line enciphered

teleprinter known to the Germans as Schluesselzusatz

40 or SZ-40. GC&CS first broke it in mid-1941.

11 Memorandum from Major Brown to Mr.

Friedman, 28 January 1943. RG 457, HCC, Box 1432,

Folder “SSS Intercept Priorities Memorandum.”

12 The Signal Intelligence Service underwent many

title changes during the war. From 1929 to 1942, it was

the Signal Intelligence Service. In June 1942 it was

briefly renamed the Signal Intelligence Service Division.

One month later it was again renamed the Signal

Security Division (SSD). In 1943 the SSD became the

Signal Security Service. In late summer 1943, the SSS

became the Signal Security Agency (SSA). It remained

the SSA until 15 September 1945 when the SSA was

renamed the Army Security Agency (ASA).

13 Memorandum, “Expansion of Signal Intelligence

Service.” 18 April 1942, SRH-145, 25.

14 The SIS would achieve its first cryptanalytic

breakthrough against the main Japanese army code in

April 1943. In January 1944, Australian troops captured

the entire cryptographic library of a Japanese Army division that clinched the mastery of the Imperial Army’s

codes and ciphers. See Edward Drea, MacArthur’s Ultra,

61-92, for details of the year-long struggle.

15 That the German military traffic was placed in

Group B was a further indication that the two countries

were arriving at a division of effort dictated by geography
Page 54

and expertise. Throughout 1942, SIS had been working

on an ability to exploit Enigma, but lacked sufficient

intercept, expertise, and technical information. The

British refused to allow the SIS to join in the exploitation. However, by mid-1943 a compromise for exchange

was worked out that formed the basis for a more formal

exchange of all Axis intelligence. See Benson, 99-108.

16 One interesting multiforce, multinational intercept operation against clandestine Axis radio stations in

North Africa occurred in North Africa in late 1944. A special effort included personnel from the SIS, the OSS and

Free French forces, who operated intercept and direction-finding stations in Algiers, Tunis, and Morocco. RG

457, HCC, Box 1417, Folder 4619, “Special Report on

Clandestine Radio Activity in North Africa.” The OSS,

though excluded from performing cryptanalysis by

FDR’s directive of July 1942, and prohibited from receiving COMINT by a May 1942 agreement among the Army,

Navy, and FBI, still established its own intercept and

D/F stations outside of the U.S.

17 Major Sinkov’s Report of Cryptographic Mission,

1941.” NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 1296; also see Benson,

19-20.

18 Memorandum, “Priorities for Operations of the

Signal Security Service.” 8 March 1943. SRH-145,

Collection of Memoranda on Operations of SIS

Intercept Activities and Dissemination, 1942-1945.

(Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, 1983), 92.

19 The story of the BRUSA Agreement, which proceeded from earlier negotiations, is, itself, a tale of

bureaucratic complexity. The American Army and Navy

each made agreements with the British. They then had

to make one between themselves. See Benson, 97-133,

and Bradley Smith, 105–170. See also “Army-Navy

Agreement Regarding Ultra.” RG 457, HHC, Box 1413.

20 This major exception, the processing of undecrypted U-boat radio traffic by both the United States

and Great Britain, began in earnest in late 1942 following

the Holden Agreement of October 1942. After the

installation of the American-built “bombes” at the OP20-G Headquarters on Nebraska Avenue, N.W., in

Washington, DC, the U-boat cipher text was transmitted

there for decryption. The resulting translations were

then transmitted to the appropriate Allied naval commands. Eventually, the bombes were turned against

German Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht Enigma traffic. For

more on the Holden Agreement, see Ralph Erskine,

“The Holden Agreement on Naval Sigint: The First

BRUSA?” Intelligence and National Security, (Volume

14, No. 2, Summer 1999), 187-197.

21 SRH-349, 32.

22 Memorandum: Assistant Chief of Staff for

Intelligence, Subject: Priorities for Operations of the

Signal Security Service.” March 8, 1943, SRH – 145. 

23 David H. Hamer, Geoff Sullivan and Frode

Weirud, “Enigma Variations: An Extended Family of

machines.” Cryptologia (Vol. XXII, No. 3, July 1988);

SSA “Effort against the Swiss Cipher Machine (SZD).”

NARA RG 457, HCC, Box 1284; History of the Signal

Security Agency in World War II, Vol. 2, 237.

24 Memorandum, March 8, 1943. SRH-145.

25 Boyd, 178-9.

26 Phillips, 5-10.

27 Hinsley, Vol. 2, 670.

28 On how the Allies handled this information,

among others see Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret

(New York: Owl Books, 1998), 202-4.

29 War Department Memorandum, October 19,

1942, “Experiment in Intercepting Cable Transmission.”

NARA, RG 457, Box 1276, “Secrecy of Radio and Cables.”

30 Information on the censorship mission of the

General Post Office is located in pieces HW 53/10 to HW

53/12.

31 “Report of Colonel McCormack’s TDY to

London,” June 1943, Tab B, “Berkeley Street,” 1.

32 Initially, the U.S. Army and Navy performed this

censorship mission. It was assumed by the Office of

Censorship, which picked up the military censorship

programs. This censorship also included all mail entering and exiting the United States. Telephone calls,

whether over cable or radiotelephone, also were monitored, For a history of the Office of Censorship, see

Michael Sweeney, Secrets of Victory: The Office of

Censorship and the American Press and Radio in World

War II (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North

Carolina Press, 2001). Of interest is that the eventual

commander of the SIS, Colonel Preston Corderman,

began his wartime service in the Office of Censorship

directing and training postal censors.

33 For example, see Lisbon (Foreign Minister) to

Washington, 22 June 1944, MC-916, in which the

Washington embassy is reminded to paraphrase public
Page 55

text, such as speeches, so as to avoid the use of them as

plaintext cribs. Also, Washington (Hopenot/Baudet) to

Algiers, 13 May 1944, MC-806, in which the French

Committee for National Liberation is reminded that all

cables can be obtained by the “enemy” and exploited

because the cables were encoded with Vichy codes. RG

457, HCC, Box 879, “Code Instructions.” Also, Tokyo

(Shigemetsu), 9 August 1943, warning that the Allies

may purposely print news stories that diplomats would

quote and thereby could endanger Japanese codes

because plaintext would be known. NARA, RG 457, HCC,

MND Translation #93904. Finally, Berlin (Oshima) to

Tokyo, 5 March 1944, CI-1813, in which the Japanese

diplomats in Germany discreetly instruct Tokyo to keep

new communications routes secret from the British

“telegraph office.” RG 457, HCC, Box 954, folder 2863,

“Japanese Message Translations Categorized as CI

(Code Instructions) for Diplomats, 1943-45.”

34 “Intercepted Diplomatic Messages,” NARA, RG

226, Entry 210, Boxes 400, 402, 406 , et alia.

35 Kenneth Macksey. The Searchers: Radio

Intelligence in Two World Wars (London: Cornell

University Press, 2003), 108-9.

36 Radio frequencies are part of the electromagnetic

spectrum. The most used frequency bands during World

War II were very high frequency (30-300 Megahertz),

high frequency (3-30 Mhz), medium frequency (300

kilohertz – 3 Mhz), and low frequency (30-300 Khz).

37 During the war, in 1943, the Allies developed and

fielded a secure speech unit for use on HF radiotelephone circuits among the Allied commands and capitals.

The system, named SIGSALY, was contained in an

equipment hut that weighed 55 tons. For more on this

see J.V. Boone and R.R. Peterson, The Start of the

Digital Revolution: SIGSALY. Secure Digital

Communications in World War II (Fort George G.

Meade, MD: Center for Cryptologic History, 2000).

38 NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 202, “Study of German

Police Communications.”

39 “Radio Intelligence Companies, Locations, 3-20-

42.” SRH-145, “Collection of Memoranda on Operations

of SIS Intercept Activities and Dissemination, 1942-

1945.” 6.

40 Geoffrey Ballard, On ULTRA Active Service. The

Story of Australia’s Signals Intelligence During World

War II. (Australia: Spectrum Publishing ltd., 1991),

238-252.

41 “Directive for Station 1, listed in order of priority

(tentative).” 30 January 1943. RG 457, HCC, Box 1432,

“SSS Intercept Priorities Memorandum.”

42 “History of Intercept Control,” June 1944, NARA,

RG457, HCC, Box 1128, Folder 3634, “History of

Intercept Control.”

43 This control was not without a struggle. Several

times early in the war, service intelligence heads tried to

limit GC&CS control through bureaucratic maneuvers in

the Y-Board, a committee under the JIC that managed

intercept operations. See Hinsley, Volume II, 23-4 and

Macksey, 129. Also PRO HW 14/30, “GC&CS

Directorate, Policy Papers,” “No. 6. I.S.,” 1 March 1942.

44 Memorandum from Williams, “International

W/T Services. Cover in the U.K.” 21 January 1944, and

“History of Intercept Control,” June 1944, NARA,

RG457, HCC, Box 1128, Folder 3634, “History of

Intercept Control;” also see Macksey, 160-2; SRH-349,

15-16.

45 Edward Drea, MacArthur’s Ultra: Codebreaking

and the War against Japan, 1942-1945. (Lawrence KS:

University Press of Kansas, 1992), 52-53.

46 Philip H. Jacobson, “A Cryptologic Veteran’s

Analysis of Day of Deceit.” NCVA Cryptolog, (Vol. 21,

No. 1, Winter 2000), 3.

47 See RG457, E9032, Box 584, Folder “Optimum

Intercept Locations, 1943” 1943 1201 and Box 1382,

Folder “Choice Site for Station AY,” 1944 0328.

48 “German Police and SS Traffic,” NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 1386.

49 PRO, HW 14/11, “Report on German Section No.

4, I.S.,” 2.

50 Bertrand, 118.

51 Ibid., 129-30.

52 Stephen Budiansky, Battle of Wits: The

Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II (New

York: The Free Press, 2000), 286.

53 “Cryptanalytic Short Titles,” NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 941, Folder 2740; “Tentative Trigraphic List of

Cryptanalytic Short Titles,” Box 1370, Folder 4289;

Frank B. Rowlett, The Story of Magic: Memoirs of an

American Cryptologic Pioneer (Laguna Hills, CA:

Aegean Park Press, 1998), 253-5.

54 Hinsley, Vol. 2, Appendix 4, 656-668.
Page 56

55 Rowlett, Ibid.; “Cryptanalytic Short Titles.”

“Cryptanalytic Branch Annual Report for Fiscal Year

1944,” NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 1116, Folder 3567.

56 “History of the Solution of Vatican Systems in

SSA and GCCS, 1943-44.” (Washington: September

1944) RG 457, HCC, Box 1284.

57 For example, it took Frank Rowlett’s team in SIS

from April 1939 to September 1940 to break Purple.

GC&CS codebreakers took from September 1939 to July

1940 to master the Luftwaffe’s Enigma, and until June

1941 to exploit the Kriegsmarine version of Engima.

58 For an explanation of the double playfair cipher,

see “Study of German Police Traffic,” NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 202. 

59 For a discussion of the relative difficulty of

both systems, see William F. Friedman and

Lambros Callimahos, Military Cryptanalytics Part I

(Washington, DC: National Security Agency, 1956), 181-

188, about Playfair systems. See Lambros Callimahos

and William F. Friedman, Military Cryptanalytics, II

(Washington, DC: National Security Agency, 1959), 431-

433, for transposition systems.

60 For the work against the German systems, see

Budiansky, 218-220 and 310-11; Alvarez, 234. Also see

NARA RG 457, HCC, Box 942, Folder 2746, 11 May 1945,

“GEE Problem”; Box 1317, Folder 3945, 1944, “History

of Special German Diplomatic Net, Summer 1942 to

Winter 1944.”

61 Nigel West. The SIGINT Secrets: The Signals

Intelligence War, 1900 to Today (New York: William

Morrow, 1988), 307. See Alvarez, 176, for the Allied failure against Swedish systems. Hinsley, Vol. 2, Appendix

4, 656-668, for a summary of success against all German

systems.

62 Hinsley, Vol. II, Appendix 5, 670-2.

63 Phillips, 7-11.

64 “Memorandum for Colonel Clarke,” 3 January

1944. James L. Gilbert and John P. Finnegan, U.S. Army

Signals Intelligence in World War II. A Documentary

History (Washington, DC: Center of Military History,

1993), 63-4.

65 According to one historical review conducted by

the U.S. Navy, some 300,000 German Navy messages

were “read,” meaning they were decrypted by the

Americans or Commonwealth codebreakers. Of these,

about 69,000 were German U-boat messages. About

49,600 U-boat translations were published between

early 1941 to June 1945 for a rate of around 72 percent.

These translations are notated “SRGN” and are available

at NARA, RG 457, Entry 9019 and at the library of the

National Cryptologic Museum. “Historical Review of

OP-20-G, RS #77967, 8 October 1945, untitled background notes, Author’s private collection.

66 This is a rough calculation determined by comparing the number of translations of the Japanese diplomatic collection at NARA, Entry 9011 (SRDJ), with that

of the Multinational Diplomatic collection, Entry HCC,

Boxes 286-516. 

67 Rowlett, 253-5; Contrary to popular opinion, the

Vatican messages were in Italian, not Latin. Switzerland

had diplomatic codes for German and French texts to

account for that nation’s major language divisions.

68 Memorandum for Colonel Carter W. Clarke,

Subject: “Origins, Functions, and Problems of the

Special Branch, MIS.” 15 April 1943, Gilbert and

Finnegan, 55.

69 For example, see NARA, RG 457, Box 590, for

“Glossary of Japanese terms,” and Box 619 for “Glossary

of German Army Equipments.” For German Police messages, Boxes 202 and 1386 contain glossaries of abbreviations and shorthand terms used by the Police in their

messages.

70 MND Translations, Budapest to Ankara, 26 June

1944, H-157087, RG 457, HCC, Box 455; and Budapest

(Charmasse) to Ankara (AmbaFrance), 12 June 1944,

SIS #127775. RG 457, HCC, Box 424

71 Briefly, these series are: A – “Sensitive Diplomatic

Traffic,” Baker Cables – Translations exchanged with

Britain, CG – Coast Guard translations of Axis illicit

messages, CI/AI/GI – “Code Instructions,” D –

Japanese Military Attaché translations, F – Japanese

Air Force, FT – “File Texts”, J – Japanese military, JR –

Japanese Water Transport, H- Multinational

Diplomatic, L – Military Attaché other than Japan,

M – German traffic, not further identified, MC –

Multinational (or Miscellaneous) Code Instructions, and

T – “Restricted Diplomatic.” Interestingly, there was no

special designator for the Japanese Navy translations

produced by OP-20-G. 

72 From: Naval Inspector General, To: Secretary of

the Navy. Serial 001971, “Survey of OP-20-G Section of

Naval Communications Division of the Bureau of Naval
Page 57

Personnel which Procures Uniformed Naval Personnel.”

13 July 1945. RG 457, HCC, Box 1286. Item 23 (d)

73 Rowlett, 253-4 

74 Non-notated and unsigned memorandum on

diplomatic cryptanalysis for 1940, 31 January 1941, HW

14/11, “Government Code and Cypher School:

Directorate: Second World War Policy Papers,” as cited

in John Ferris, “The Road to Bletchley Park: The British

Experience with Signals Intelligence.” Intelligence and

National Security (Vol. 17, No. 1, Spring 2002), 53-84.

75 Peter Calvocoressi, Top Secret Ultra (New York:

Pantheon, 1980), 61-66.

76 J.E.S. Cooper, “Lecture on SIGINT History,”

September 1961. Author’s copy. Also available at PRO

HW 3, Naval Intelligence Division and Successors:

History of UK Signals Intelligence, 1914-1925.

77 Hinsley, Vol. I, 36-43.

78 Many of these studies were of political and diplomatic topics. These studies were notated as Special

Research Histories (SRH). Some examples include:

SRH-083, “Chung-King-Yenan Controversy,” and SRH094, “French-Indo-China (Political Situation).” The

SRHs can be found in NARA, RG 457 and the Library of

the National Cryptologic Museum.

79 See SRH-035, “History of Special Branch, MIS,

War Department, 1942-1944,” 9 July 1979 and SRH-117,

“History of Special Branch M.I.S., Jun 1944 – Sep 1945.”

2 March 1981. 

80 HW 16/70, CIRO/PEARL/ZIP/AT 1194/ 14.8.44

81 Hinsley, Vol. III, Part 2. 975-8, “Series Prefixes

and Delivery Groups used for SCU/SLU Signals to

Commands.”

82 Bradley F. Smith, 181; “List of Ultra Recipients

and SHAEF G-2 Organization, Mission, and Function.”

RG 457, Entry HCC, Box 1277, Folder 3735. 

83 SRH-107, “Problems of the SSO System in World

War II.” 13 December 1980.

84 Gilbert and Finnegan, 10.

85 One extant European Summary, dated 11 April

1945, carried two distributions. The first one listed 11

recipients within the War Department; the second listed

the President, his Chief of Staff, and the CINC U.S. Fleet,

and the Deputy Director Military Intelligence, British

Army Staff. SRH-005, ”Use of CX/MSS Ultra by the

United States War Department, 1943 – 1945,” 49.

86 The “Magic” Diplomatic Summaries are located

in RG 457, Entry 9006, Boxes 1-19. The “Magic” Far East

Summaries are found in Entry 9001, Boxes 1-11.

87 Hinsley, Vol. I, 295-6. Churchill’s demand for

the COMINT grew out of dissatisfaction with the tendency of the JIC and the service intelligence directors to

publish long appreciations, the “bulk of which defeats

their purpose.”

88 In order, HW 1/1, Item 30, 28 August 1941; HW

1/28, Item 643, 13 June 1942; HW 1/58, Item 1134, 24

November 1942; HW 1/65, Item 1267, 28 December

1942; HW 1/129, Item 3113, 26 July 1944; HW 1/149,

Item 3658, 1 April 1945; HW 1/151, item 3713, 27 April

1945.

89 Churchill received GC&CS items from “C” that

had not been given to the various department and ministry chiefs. They often were unaware of the material the

prime minister used to criticize them. Ibid., 295-6.

90 In order see HW 1/58, Item 1134, 22 November

1942; Ibid.; HW 1/23, Item 469, 2 April 1942.

91 David Kahn, “Roosevelt, Magic, and Ultra.”

Cryptologia (Vol. XVI, No. 4, October 1992), 289-319.

92 Christopher M. Andrew, For the President’s Eyes

Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency

from Washington to Bush (New York: Harper Perennial,

1996), 139.

93 SRH-111, “Magic Reports for the Attention of the

President, 1943-1944.” 1980; Bradley F. Smith, 187.

94 See Eric Larrabee, Commander-in-Chief:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants and Their

War (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 11-12, 16, 643-4;

James F. Schnabel, History of the JCS and National

Policy, 1945 – 1947. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1996), 3;

Andrews, 125-6; Ibid., SRH-111.

95 Alexander S. Cochran Jr. The Magic Diplomatic

Summaries: A Chronological Finding Aid (New York

and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1982). From 1942

to the end of the war in Europe, there were fewer than 12

references to Jews or the Holocaust. For example,

Summary No. 397 from 28 April 1943 contains information from a German diplomatic message to Dublin concerning Aryan spouses of Jews.

96 “Collection of Multinational Diplomatic

Translations of White House Interest.” RG 457, HCC,

Boxes 833,1030 to 1032.
Page 58

97 Jan Karski, an alias for a Polish intelligence courier, Jan Kozielewski, visited the Warsaw ghetto and

Belzec. He came to London in late 1942 with information

about the Holocaust. See Laqueur, 118-120, and E.

Thomas Wood and Stanislaw M. Jankowski, Jan Karski:

How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust (New Jersey:

John Wiley & Sons, 1994).

98 Persico, Joseph. Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR

and World War II Espionage (New York: Random

House, 2001), 218-220.

99 Laqueur, 94-5.

100 Breitman, 105, 151-3; MND Translation, Kabul

(Pilger) to Berlin, 10 May 1943, SIS #81006 (RG 457,

HCC, Box 363), concerning Reuters News Agency publication of information about gassing of the Jews; MND

Translation, Berlin to Buenos Aires, 14 April 1943, SIS

#82728(RG 457, HCC, Box 363), which urges the

German embassy there to make no statement on the

protests against the perceived anti-Jewish policy of

Churchill. (This “anti-Jewish policy” is not further

explained in the German message.); MND Translation,

Berlin to Far East stations (NPD (Neue Presse Deutsche)

Broadcast), 3 March 1944, SIS #112776, (RG 457, HCC,

Box 399) which urges German correspondents to push

stories about behind the scenes machinations of world

Jewry.

101 Perhaps the most famous anecdote, though false,

was the bombing of Coventry on 14 November 1940.

Winterbotham was the first to claim that Churchill

allowed Coventry to be bombed to protect the Ultra

secret. (See his Ultra Secret, 94-96) However,

Winterbotham got it wrong. Ultra carried no information on Coventry. For the correct story of Ultra and

bombing of Coventry see Hinsley, British Intelligence in

the Second World War, Vol. I., Appendix 9, 528-48, and

Nigel West, A Thread of Deceit (New York: Random

House, 1985), 9-17.

102 Hinsley, Vol. I, 138, 145, 417, and 570-1.

103 PRO, HW 1/XX, Item 1470, 13 March 1943,

Memorandum from SCU Algiers. For more, see Hinsley,

Vol. 2, 283-7, about the Mediterranean convoys.

104 For the Yamamoto ambush, see SRH-288,

“Radio Intelligence in WWII: Tactical Operations in the

Pacific Ocean Areas, April 1943.” 336-7, and Edwin

Layton (along with Roger Pinneau and John Costello),

And I was There, Pearl Harbor and Midway –

Breaking the Secrets (New York: William Morrow and

Company Inc., 1985), 474-476.

105 Hinsley, Vol. 2, 58-67; see also Smith, Sharing

Secrets with Stalin.

106 Breitman, 93-4, 106.

107 Hinsley, Vol. II, 87-9; Smith, Sharing Secrets

with Stalin, 30-33.

108 Breitman, 92-96; Philipps, 84-5.

109 It is also possible that another standing concern

of the police command was the possibility that someone

within the police or SS organizations might reveal information about the massacres to the Allies or neutral

countries. Passing the reports by radio meant that a

number of people saw the messages: radio operators,

code clerks, dispatchers, etc. Sending the reports by

courier limited the number of people who might see

them.

110 On 6 December 1941, the Nobel Laureate

German author, Thomas Mann, made a radio speech

from Los Angeles on the CBS network in which he called

attention to the massacre of 300,000 Serbs and

“unspeakable deeds” against Jews and Poles. It is not

clear if this speech provoked a similar reaction from the

Germans. – New York Times, 7 December 1941, Vol.

XCI, No. 30,633.

111 HW 14/54, “GC&CS Directorate, Policy Papers.”

1942, October 1-10.

112 NARA RG 457, HCC, Box 1386, “German Police

and SS Messages.”

113 HW 14/128, “GC&CS Directorate, Policy

Papers.” 1945 May 16-31, Notes from 26 and 28 May.

The British developed a number of categories of cover

names for the various German cipher systems, both

machine and manual. Here are some representative

examples:

Luftwaffe: Colors (Red, Yellow)

Weather: Vegetables (Leek, Garlic)

Army: Birds (Albatross, Bullfinch)

SS: Fruit (Orange, Quince, Grapefruit)

Police (Playfair): Games (Rummy, Poker) 

114 Breitman, 218.

115 For example, a Colonel Taylor, presumably

Telford Taylor, was named in the distribution for

CIRO/PEARL/ZIP/AT 1194/14.8.44, HW 16/70,

“German Police Decrypts.”

116 Breitman, 219-221
Page 59

117 Robert E. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg (New

York: Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1983), 16

118 Smith, Ultra-Magic Deals, 212-214

Page 61

There are two major locations of cryptologic

records of interest concerning the Holocaust, the

National Archives and Records Administration

(NARA) in the United States and the Public Record

Office (PRO) in the United Kingdom. (Since April

2003 the Public Record Office has been renamed. It

is now the National Archives.) The record collections in both archives reflect the unique approaches to records management and disposition taken by

both countries. In addition to the national archives

of both countries, the library of the National

Cryptologic Museum also contains partial sets of

certain PRO holdings in which there occur occasional references to the Holocaust.

The National Archives and Records

Administration

The cryptologic records at NARA in College

Park, Maryland, that contain information pertinent

to the Holocaust are located in Record Group (RG)

457, the records of the National Security

Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS), and

the RG 226, the records of the Office of Strategic

Services (OSS). Another major cryptologic collection, the Commander Naval Security Group series

in RG 38, the records of the Chief of Naval

Operations, most likely does not contain any relevant material except for duplicates of that found in

RG 457. Also, while it is logical for World War II

cryptologic records to be in RG 457 - the NSA is the

most recent successor to the wartime SIS - the presence of such material in the OSS records group will

require an explanation that will be given below. The

relatively recent discovery (2000) of relevant cryptologic records in the OSS group, which was part of

the records review process conducted under the

auspices of the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese

Imperial Records Interagency Working Group, is

symptomatic of the peculiar and sometimes unpredictable nature of the intelligence exchange process

during World War II. The implication of this discovery is that there may be more such records located in records groups hitherto considered unrelated

to communications intelligence operations.

There are five collections of records in RG 457

that hold material relevant to the Holocaust. The

first one is the collection of German Police (GP)

decrypts (these messages are referred to as decrypts

German Police Decrypts, ZIP/G.P.D.353/14.9.41. Decrypt No.1 is from the Senior Commander of the SS and Police in

Southern Russia to Heinrich Himmler, the Chiefs of the Order and Secret Police and the Himmler’s staff. (Source:

NARA, RG 457, Box 1386)

Chapter 3

Sources of Cryptologic Records Relating to the Holocaust
Page 62

and not translations because the text is in the original German) and technical reports about the police

ciphers. The decrypts are located in Box 1386 in the

Historical Cryptographic Collection (HCC), which

is also referenced as Entry 9032. The NSA collection of police and SS decrypts is only a small portion – the exact percentage is unknown – of the

much larger PRO collection located in HW 16 (See

PRO section). These German Police decrypts were

transferred to NARA as part of a January 1996 NSA

release of 1.3 million pages of previously classified

World War II records. In Great Britain, the German

Police and SS messages were released to the public

in 1997 when the British Public Record Office made

these available in early May of that year.

These police decrypts first came to the NSA

because of the postwar search for Nazi war criminals. The decrypts originally were not part of any

wartime exchange; these messages were intercepted and decrypted well before the BRUSA exchange

agreement of mid-1943. They arrived in the U.S. as

a result of a 1982 request by the U.S. Justice

Department’s Office of Special Investigations

(OSI), relayed through the National Security

Agency to the British SIGINT organization, the

Government Communications Headquarters

(GCHQ). The OSI was reviewing files of individuals

suspected of being war criminals who may have

entered the United States after the war. It was

believed that the decrypts might help in the investigations since they contained much information on

the personnel, organization, and operations of the

German Police and SS units that operated in the

western Soviet Union during the war.

There are four other boxes in the HCC that hold

technical information about the German Police

ciphers and organization. In Box 202 there is a folder, “Study of German Police Traffic,” that contains

technical reports on the cipher system used by the

German Police. There is an instructional guide on

the system and some sample undecrypted and

decrypted police messages. Another Box, 171, in the

HCC contains a glossary titled “German Police

Abbreviations.” This document is useful when reading the decrypts since the address portion of police

and SS messages contain numerous abbreviations,

in German, of SS and Police title and organizations.

Similarly, the texts of many police messages contain German language abbreviations and shorthand

references to units and activities. In Box 91 of the

HCC, there is a copy of volume XIII of the GC&CS

Air and Military History series about the German

Police. Finally, Box 1279 in the HCC contains a folder titled “German Police Material” that holds some

additional technical publications on the German

Police, the SS, and SD. These are mostly short U.S.

War Department and British reports on the organization, ciphers, and activities in Russia. There are

also many reports on Abwehr illicit agent radio nets

and organization of overseas espionage rings.

The second collection of records is known as the

Multinational Diplomatic Translations and is located in boxes 286 to 516 of the Historical

Cryptographic Collection, in RG 457. This collection consists of individual translations of diplomatic communications issued or received by the Army

cryptologic organization at Arlington Hall. There

are over 202,000 individual translations in this set

that total a little under a quarter million pages. The

collection extends from early 1939 and runs to the

14 August 1945 Japanese acceptance of the Allied

surrender demands.

The diplomatic communications of virtually all

countries of significance were targeted and collected during the war. Included in this mix were the

major Axis powers, minor Axis allies, minor Allied

nations, Allied governments-in-exile, neutral

nations, and some nongovernmental organizations

(NGO) such as the Jewish Agency for Palestine and

the International Red Cross. The latter sent their

messages via commercial cable or used the diplomatic communications facilities of certain countries, such as Switzerland. The proportion of intercepted messages from individual countries reflected the wartime priorities of the Allied commands

and the technical capabilities of the Allied cryptologic agencies. Japan was the priority diplomatic

COMINT target, and the translations of its mes-
Page 63

sages account for as much as 54 percent of the total

translations in this collection. The translations of

intercepted German, Swiss, French (Vichy and

Gaullist), and other nations’ diplomatic messages

account for much smaller percentages of the total

translation collection.

The translations of German diplomatic messages would be of particular interest to those interested in the Holocaust. These translations, though,

consist mostly of consular traffic, press releases by

German news services, and traffic from embassies

located in countries of less importance to Germany

such as Afghanistan, Argentina, and the Republic of

Ireland. This diplomatic radio traffic was encoded

using a codebook and then further enciphered with

an additive phrase. This system was a code named

FLORADORA by the Allies and was partly

exploitable beginning in 1943. German high-level

diplomatic communications to embassies located

in countries important to Germany such as Japan,

Spain, and Switzerland, etc., were encrypted in a

one-time pad (OTP) that, for most of the war, resisted the efforts by both American and British cryptanalysts. However, in March 1945, this system succumbed to American codebreakers at Arlington

Hall.1

It should be mentioned here that, when it

comes to the national diplomatic translations, there

is some overlap among other entries within RG

457. This is because in the early to mid-1980s,

NSA separately released Japanese, German, and

Vichy French diplomatic translations.2 Certain

technical information was sanitized from these

early releases. The original versions of the translations remained at NSA until their release in

1996 as part of the aforementioned Historical

Cryptographic Collection. The diplomatic translations in the HCC appear in a number of forms.

It can be either an original version of the translation or, if the original paper version has been lost

or put on microfilm, a copy of the original. During

the war, the translations were typed on stencils,

and then numerous blue ditto copies were run off

and distributed. The HCC set of translations contains both ditto pages and xeroxed copies of these

sheets.

The third relevant collection is known as the

Multinational Diplomatic Summaries. This collection is not to be confused with the so-called

“Magic” Summaries that were digests of diplomatic messages from other countries, but mostly

Japan, and included with intelligence from other

sources. The “Magic” Summaries were issued by

the Special Branch of the U.S Army’s Military

Intelligence Service (MIS) of the War

Department’s General Staff. The summaries

under discussion here actually were a compilation on one or more pages containing a number of

Diplomatic translation – message from Vichy minister in

Washington, Henry Haye, to Vichy regarding American

visas for foreign Jews in France
Page 64

shorter translations from a single diplomatic target,

for example, Spain. Why this approach was taken,

instead of issuing a single translation for individual

messages, is not fully understood. These summaries contain some fairly long texts and occasionally have items of high interest. Arlington Hall

issued four sets of these summaries: In addition to

the multinational set, there were ones for the

Japanese, German, and French (which included

Vichy) diplomatic messages. They are notated as

follows: SMM – Summary of Multinational

Messages; SFM - Summary of French Messages;

SGM - Summary of German Messages; and SJM -

Summary of Japanese Messages. These Summaries

are scattered throughout the Historical

Cryptographic Collection. Most can be found from

boxes 881 to 902, 933-4, 948, and 1281.

The fourth collection is what is popularly

referred to as the “Nazi Gold” translations and can

be found in Entry 9009 of RG 457. This collection

of translations is of Swiss diplomatic messages

between Washington and Bern from August 1945 to

June 1946. Of the total of 371 translations, about

170 are related to the Allied Tripartite Commission

– Swiss negotiations in Washington, DC, on the

issue of the disposition of looted

national gold from European countries

overrun by the Germans and German

assets retained in Swiss banks and corporations. The negotiations lasted from

March to June 1946 and produced the

Washington Accord. These translations

were released in the spring of 1997

as part of the 1997 interagency

Preliminary Report on U.S. and Allied

Efforts to Recover and Restore Stolen

Gold and Other Assets Stolen or

Hidden by Germany During World

War II. More details on this topic can

be found in Section VI.E.

The fifth collection resides in the

Historic Cryptologic Collection in boxes

517 to 521. This set of translations is

entitled “Decrypted Diplomatic Traffic

(Primarily German and Japanese) from

World War II,” and is referred by its

short title, the “T-series.” Originally,

this collection was meant to contain

translations from sensitive or restricted

diplomatic sources. When it was started in 1943, the collection consisted of

translations of Axis diplomatic messages that detailed espionage activities

originating in the Japanese embassy

in Madrid and the German embassies

in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Dublin,

Republic of Ireland. Later, with the Sample SMM – Swiss message about Jews in Hungary
Page 65

expanded American exchange with the British, government agencies contributed more translations to

this series from other sources considered “sensitive.”3 These included messages from the Vatican to

its apostolic delegates, radio and cable traffic of the

French Committee for National Liberation, Polish

and Czech intelligence reports from occupied

Europe, and selections from the so-called Boston

source, the OSS source inside the German Foreign

Office.

Boston was the cover name given to documents

from the German Foreign Office (Auswaertiges

Amt) taken or copied by a mid-level official, Fritz

Kolbe, who passed them to the OSS station chief in

Switzerland, Allen Dulles. Kolbe, assigned the covername “George Wood” by the OSS, passed these

documents to the OSS from 1943 through 1945. The

Allies found these documents of great interest.

Some of the documents, mostly Foreign Office messages, were translated and then incorporated by the

SIS into the “T-series.” Some of the messages were

from the German embassy in Bern, Switzerland,

and concerned issues such as Swiss-German trade,

currency negotiations, and transit permissions for

supply trains from Italy. A few were from the

German mission in Hungary that was in charge of

rounding up the Jews in Hungary and sending

them to Auschwitz. (See Chapter 6.) Although not

strictly communications intercepts, the messages

acquired from Kolbe were included in the translations of the T-series.4

Another group of translations of interest in the

T-series consists of messages between the Vatican

and its apostolic delegates stationed in several

countries. The British had intercepted and decrypted Vatican diplomatic messages from before the

war. The messages that could be exploited were

largely administrative and were of little intelligence

interest to the Allies. Beginning in late 1944,

though, there were a number of intercepted Vatican

messages dealing with the relief of refugees and

prisoners of war (mostly Axis), as well as Vatican

intercession for the release of high-profile Catholics

and other internees held by Germany in various

concentration and detention camps. In several

messages, the Vatican urged its delegate in

Germany to intervene on the behalf of prisoners,

among whom were French politicians held in

Germany since 1940, individuals such as a Signora

Navet and her daughter held in Ravensbruck, and

the royal family of Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria,

which was rumored to have been transported to

Germany.5 There are about seventy-five Vatican

translations in this series.6

All of the above-mentioned records, decrypts

and translations, are categorized as “basic” intelligence documents, that is, primary product from

T-2574, 17 April 1945, from Apostolic Delegate in

Lausanne, Switzerland, to the Vatican regarding reports

of deportees from camps in Germany (Source: NARA,

RG 457, Box 520)
Page 66

the intercepted original. Another set of records in

RG 457, located in the Entry ‘“Magic” Diplomatic

Summaries’ (a portion are carried also in Entry

9006), has been a popular source of research for

scholars since their release in the early 1990s.

However, the “Magic” Summaries, produced by

Special Branch, are digests of the much greater

body of translations, and do not offer anywhere

near the detailed information available in the latter.

The information is summarized under five major

categories: (1) military, (2) political, (3) economic,

(4) psychological and subversion (mainly items on

propaganda, nationalist agitation, and resistance

movements), and (5) miscellaneous (for example,

outbreaks of epidemics).

The “Magic” Summaries were a major method

of disseminating selected information from the

translations of intercepted Axis and neutral communications, as well from other intelligence

sources such as press, foreign radio broadcasts,

prisoner of war debriefs, U.S. diplomatic reports,

and traditional espionage. The COMINT easily is

the largest single source of information in the

Summaries. The Summaries often contain an

appreciation of the information by the Special

Branch analysts. The “Magic” Summaries

are much less important as a research tool

about the Holocaust. The only incident

covered with any depth is the roundup of

the Jews in Hungary during the latter part

of 1944. A survey of the summaries reveals

only about twenty entries of various

degrees of details on subjects related to

the Holocaust; this is out of a total of

around 11,000 entries in the entire

wartime Summary series. These few

entries also are only a fraction of the many

hundreds of translations available in RG

457 that reference the Holocaust. (See

Chapter 2, pages 45-47 , for more on

the role of the “Magic” Diplomatic

Summaries.)

In Record Group 226, the records of

the Office of Strategic Services, there are

located some translations of intercepts

produced by the British GC&CS during

the war. These translations were discovered in mid-2000 as part of a review of

wartime OSS records under the provisions

of the 1999 Nazi War Crimes Act. The

appearance of these COMINT translations

in OSS records initially surprised

researchers. A directive from President

Franklin Roosevelt signed in July 1942

had ruled against the Service performing

cryptologic functions, specifically codebreaking. Only the Army, Navy, Federal

“Magic” Diplomatic Summary, No. 1103, 2 April 1945. Source:

NARA, RG 457, Entry 9006
Page 67

Bureau of Investigation, and United States Coast

Guard could produce communications intelligence.

The directive had been meant to prevent government agencies, other than the SIS, OP-20-G and

the FBI, from performing cryptanalysis. Somehow,

the Army and Navy construed the order to mean

that these other agencies were to be denied access

to all COMINT information, as well.7 The result was

that government agencies such as the OSS, the

Federal Communications Commission, and Office

of Wartime Information were denied access to

American-produced communications intelligence.

However, the explanation for the appearance of

such records in the OSS files was quite simple. By

early 1943, the OSS had been allowed to send a staff

to join the counterintelligence group of British

Secret Intelligence Service, known as M.I.6, Section

V. The Radio Security Service (RSS) was the principal interceptor of radio traffic sent by Axis illicit

agents and security and intelligence organizations.

All decrypts of topical interest to counterintelligence, which included Axis espionage, intelligence,

and security activities, were sent to this site. By

March 1943, OSS counterintelligence (X-2) personnel had joined their British counterparts and were

soon sharing all such decrypts.8 Most of the

decrypts, and some translations, were strictly espionage or security related. Amongst these translations and decrypts were those of the SS, the SD and

German Police. These latter groups, while they performed counterespionage operations and criminal

investigations, were charged with eliminating Jews

and other groups targeted by the Nazis.

Of particular interest to historians are the translations of messages concerning the roundup of the

Jews in Rome during October 1943. These translations include messages from Police Leader Karl

Wolff, who had arrived in Rome to oversee the situation; Herbert Kappler, the German Police attaché

in Rome; and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, SS General and

head of the Reich Security Office (RSHA) that

included the SD. Whether any of these translations

reached the OSS reporting element, the Research

and Analysis Branch, is not currently known. In all

likelihood, the British may have restricted the X-2

organization in regards to what other branches of

the OSS could have shared the German decrypts.

The SD translations can be found in RG 226, Entry

122, boxes 1 and 2.9

The OSS also benefited from another exchange

arrangement with M.I.6 that started early in

America’s involvement in the war. Beginning in

March 1942, the OSS (and its predecessor, the

Central Office of Information) received, via the

British Security Coordination (BSC) element in

New York City under Sir William Stephenson,

copies of so-called “Q” material, or copies of intercepted diplomatic messages, most likely, again, to

have come from M.I.6. Interestingly, this material

predates the formal exchange program of 1943

between the American and British cryptologic

agencies. It is not always clear what the source (or

sources) of the translations may have been. Some

may have been received from postal and cable censorship offices. It also appears that many of these

diplomatic messages may have been purloined

from diplomatic pouches or couriers. Almost all of

the translations are marked with the caveat “Most

Secret Source,” which was a standard British reference to intelligence derived from high-level cryptanalytic processes.

Many of the translations in the OSS files consist

of excerpts from the original diplomatic messages.

Also, most of these translations are of messages

from lower level diplomats, attachés, or consular

officials of neutral countries or Axis friendly

regimes like Vichy France. The contents of the

majority of translations are about internal conditions in Europe. Some of the translations contain

references to the situation of Jews in various countries, but these are not common. The “Q” series can

be found in Entry 210, boxes 400, 402, 403, 405,

408, 412, and 415.10

The Public Record Office

The central collection of cryptologic records of

the Government Communications Headquarters,
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as the GC&CS has been known since after World

War II, is located at the Public Record Office, Kew,

United Kingdom (in Southwest London). The

records include material dating from 1914 to 1946.

British PRO record grouping designations differ

from the NARA record group system. The British

use the term “Class List” instead of Record Group to

specify the records of a single ministry, agency, or

commission. The Class List is followed by a numerical designator, one or two digits that specifies a collection of related records. This is followed by another set of digits called a “piece” or “folder” that refers

to a specific record, which could be a single document or set of documents. Within “HW” are 49

series, each an individually titled collection of

records, usually representing types of correspondence and records of singular COMINT targets or

functions, such as intercept activity or administration.

However, for purposes of searching and locating records, the PRO/National Archives catalogue

uses a different set of descriptors for the locations

of the folders/pieces. This system is used by the online search engine called the PROCAT. Consider for

example, the reference HW 16/46. This would consist of the Class List HW 16, German Police

Decrypts, with a piece or folder 46, “Illustrations of

war crimes from the GPD.” For a researcher, the

catalogue divides this reference in the following

manner: “HW” is called the Department; the twodigit designator “16,” or German Police Decrypts, is

the series; while the two-digit group to the right of

the dividing slant, “46,” is known as the “subseries” that consists of a group of related “pieces”

within a series.11

The GC&CS records are, for a number of reasons, more extensive in time and scope than those

of the American cryptologic agencies held in RG

457 at NARA. For one thing, British cryptology was

engaged in intercepting communications in Europe

even before hostilities began in 1939. The British

had intercept facilities in the British Isles and imperial and mandated holdings in and around Europe,

such as Gibraltar, Egypt, and Palestine. From these

sites, the British intercept organizations, such as

the Radio Security Service, as well as numerous

military monitoring facilities, could collect, analyze,

and distribute reports based on the communications of the Axis and neutral nations. Also of particular value was the British censorship office that

obtained copies of selected letters posted overseas

as well as all cable traffic moving through London

and other overseas British or Commonwealth controlled cable terminals. This collection effort

included message traffic of the Allied governmentsin-exile based in London, and the missions of all the

neutral countries.

SS concentration camp monthly report on slave labor

population in Buchenwald for November 1942.

ZIP/GPCC82/3.12.42. Source PRO, HW 16/10
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In the GC&CS records, information about the

Holocaust have been found in the following Class

Lists:

HW 1 – GC&CS Signals Intelligence Passed to

the Prime Minister, Messages and Correspondence.

HW 12 – GC&CS Diplomatic Section and

Predecessors: Decrypts of Intercepted Diplomatic

Communications (BJ Series).

HW 14 – GC&CS: Directorate: Second World

War Policy Papers.

HW 15 – GC&CS and GCHQ: Venona Project:

Record

HW 16 – GC&CS: German Police Section:

Decrypts of German Police Communications during [the] Second World War.

HW 19 – GC&CS: ISOS and ISK Sections:

Decrypts of German Secret Service (Abwehr and

Sicherheitdienst) Messages (ISOS, ISK, and other

Series).

HW 29 – GC&CS: untitled “Commercial

Reports,” January 1938 -December 1945.

HW 1 is the collection of GC&CS signals intelligence materials that was passed to the prime

minister. It consisted of the intelligence material

selected (and often briefed) by the head of M.I.6, Sir

Stewart Menzies (known as “C”), whose service

administratively controlled Bletchley Park.

Normally, this material was presented to the prime

minister daily, sometimes even twice a day; but it

was not uncommon for Churchill to demand more.

The intelligence consisted mainly of Enigma

decrypts, Axis and neutral naval intelligence, and

diplomatic translations of interest (known as “BJ’s”

for “blue-jackets,” or “Black Jumbos”). There are

3,785 folders or pieces of material in the briefing

files of the prime minister. For the most part, there

is no general content title list for a particular volume, so the files have to be reviewed individually.

For example, the piece HW1/62, is listed with the

title “no description available,” but it is from

September 1941, when the P.M. was informed of

German Police massacres on the Eastern front.12

HW 1’s contents illustrate Churchill’s voracious

appetite for all levels and kinds of intelligence:

strategic, tactical, military, diplomatic, security,

and scientific. After late 1941, the prime minister

continued to receive occasional intelligence on the

Holocaust.

Perhaps the most pertinent class list, HW 16, is

the German Police decrypts. This collection constitutes the most complete set of existing police

decrypts. Within this department there are four

pieces or series, 16/44 to 16/47, which are titled,

“GP (German Police) War Atrocities – Executions

in Russia.” The first, 16/44, contains miscellaneous

notes and working aids to the police decrypts, such

as order of battle, names of the police units’ commanding officers, breakouts of the police and SS

radio callsigns, and of the abbreviations to the

addresses of the decrypts. This series closely follows

the contents of those in boxes 1386 and 202 of the

HCC in the NARA RG 457 and probably was the

source for the latter. The next three series contain a

number of decrypts that illustrate the scope and

nature of the executions carried out by the police

units, especially in the central and southern fronts

of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

HW 16/10 contains the German Police

Concentration Camp (GPCC) monthly reports of

the inmate totals for a number of camps. These

totals include arrivals, losses, and various nationalities and groups, including Jews. These reports did

not carry information about those who arrived in

the trains and were immediately murdered in the

gas chambers. Instead, these reports list the

inmate, or slave labor population totals. As transmitted by the Germans, these were formatted messages, known as “proforma” reports, that is, the

intercepted text was a series of numbers preceded

by a columnar indicator. The sending and receiving

police or SS organizations understood the meaning

of the columns and the figures. The Bletchley Park

analysts recovered the meanings for the various

columns of figures in the reports. The camps did

not all send the same categories of figures in these

reports. For example, Auschwitz (identified as “F”

in radio traffic) would send population totals for the

beginning and end of the day. Buchenwald (identi-
Page 70

fied as “D”) sent only a single daily total.13 A number of other files in this series contain messages

from concentration camps, notably HW16/17 to

HW 16/26. (See Section 5.A, pages 78-80, for more

on these reports from the slave labor camps, as well

as the recent discovery of an intercepted report on

death totals from selected death camps in Poland

for 1942.)

Another relevant series is HW 19, the records of

the section in GC&CS that was responsible for

decrypting messages of the Abwehr, German military intelligence, and Sicherheitsdienst, or intelligence arm of the SS.14 Messages from Abwehr

agents and foreign reporting centers that were

encrypted using manual systems (paper codes and

ciphers) were called ISOS, Intelligence (or Illicit)

Source Oliver Strachey. The decrypts of Abwehr

messages encrypted with an Enigma device were

known as ISK, or Intelligence Source Knox for

A. Dillwyn Knox. Strachey and Knox were senior

leaders in GC&CS. Both were veterans of the

Admiralty’s famous World War I code-breaking

operation known as Room 40, whose most famous

exploit was the decoding of the Zimmermann

Telegram in 1917. A third subseries within HW 19 is

composed of SD messages known as ISOCICLE

(breakout unknown) that were encrypted with SD

manual ciphers.

Messages relating to all aspects of the Holocaust

are sprinkled throughout this series. For example,

series HW 19/237 contains SD reports on the situation in Italy after its surrender to the Allies. There

are as many as 1,500 messages in this subseries.

Some of the messages report the roundup of the

Jews in Rome in October 1943. Others detail the

transfer of Albanian gold, probably seized originally by Fascist Italy when it occupied Albania in 1939,

to Berlin and the attitude of the Vatican to events in

and around Rome. Other subseries containing

information on Jews in Italy can be found in subseries HW 19/238 to HW 19/240. Another subseries, HW 19/236, deals largely with events in

Bulgaria. Of the nearly 2,000 decrypts in this subseries are some reports about the expulsion of nonBulgarian Jews, emigration of Jews to Palestine

through Bulgaria, messages about Finnish Jews,

and the Jewish population in North Africa.

HW 29, the “Commercial Reports,” contains

translations of commercial code messages intercepted by the British during the war. Commercial

codes were designed primarily to decrease transmission time and message length by reducing standard business expressions and statistical entries in

business correspondence to a series of short code

groups. Shorter messages meant cheaper communications costs. Commercial codes were available

to the public and therefore did not provide security

for the contents of business correspondence.

Businesses and financial institutions, such as banks

and insurance companies, could produce customized versions of the standard commercial codes

for security and privacy purposes, but this was not

done often probably due to the cost of designing

custom code variants and printing sufficient copies

for all recipients.

There are 321 folders containing 61,188 translations of commercial messages in HW 29. They run

from January 1938 to December 1945. They are

labeled with the prefix “CS,” which probably stood

for “commercial series.” There are a number of

messages from the Reichsbank in this collection.

Some messages deal with credit transactions for

overseas official German diplomatic and military

representatives such as consuls and attachés.

However, there are some Reichsbank cables and

messages that are part of gold sales and purchases,

currency exchanges, and trade activity with neutral

countries such as Switzerland.

There are two other Class Lists that contain

commercial reports. One is HW 31, “Commercial

messages sent in privacy company codes.” This list

contains some 2,770 reports that run from June

1943 to August 1945. These reports carry the prefix

“PRI.” The other Class list is HW 32, “Commercial

Messages passed over diplomatic channels.” This

list spans March 1942 to June 1945. There are

32,471 translations in this list and are prefixed by
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“COM.” It is not known currently if these last two

commercial Class Lists carry any information about

the disposal of funds, gold, or property looted by

the Nazis.

A number of other HW series house collections

of diplomatic decrypts and translations produced

by GC&CS, dating from 1919 to 1945. While there

are a number of relevant translations, it is not certain how many pertain to the Holocaust. One series,

HW12, contains translations of diplomatic messages from 1919 to 1945. Since 1997, the British

have been slowly releasing the body of wartime

diplomatic translations. This turnover to the PRO

was completed in early June of 2003.

The diplomatic translations are arranged in

monthly files for a single year and then further subdivided alphabetically by country. The largest portion of the collection consists of translations from

all European countries leading up to and including

the end of the war. Many of the intercepted messages were of the governments-in-exile of the

minor allied nations that resided in Great Britain.

GC&CS also intercepted messages from many

countries in the Middle East, such as Iraq, Saudi

Arabia, and Egypt. Of peculiar interest is the

GC&CS continued to intercept diplomatic messages

from the United States up to early 1942.15 From

September 1939 to September 1945, GC&CS produced more than 74,000 translations of intercepted

diplomatic messages.

Two other series contain diplomatic translations that might pertain to the Holocaust. They are

HW 36, “Reports of German Diplomatic Messages”

(1942-1943), and HW 37, “Diplomatic Decrypts

Passed to the Secret Intelligence Service for

Distribution” (1935-1945).

One final Class List deserves mention and that

is HW 13, “GC&CS: Signals Intelligence, World War

2.” This collection is composed of summary reports

published by GC&CS. Of interest are pieces HW

13/118 to 13/124 (26 July 1941 - 6 April 1945) that

are titled “Reports on Railway Movements based on

German Army and Air Force High-grade Traffic.”16

During the war, GC&CS was able to exploit the socalled German railway Enigma, known as “Rocket,”

and then later as “Blunderbuss” and “Culverin.”

The railway Enigma was exploited beginning in

February 1941. The decrypts initially were

processed and reported by GC&CS. But its efforts

were hampered by the esoteric format and text of

the messages. An element of the British Ministry of

Economic Warfare (MEW), the Railway Research

Service, soon complemented the Bletchley work.

The information from these messages was about

German military logistics shipments. They proved

to be useful in determining future German strategic

and theater military initiatives.17

Since the Nazis made use of the railway system

of Germany (and later that of occupied Europe) to

transport Jews to the death camps, it would seem

that there should be much information in these

summaries. However, it is not clear from the limited research conducted of these files if they contain

any such information. To date, messages about

trains transporting Jews to the camps have been

found only in HW 16, the decrypts of German Police

messages.18

Miscellaneous Collections

There are other collections of cryptologic

records that have a few translations among them

that apply to the Holocaust. These records include

the intercepts and translations of clandestine communications from European communist party

organizations and resistance groups to Moscow

(known as ISCOT, or Intelligence Source Scot), the

Communist International (MASK), and Soviet

intelligence organizations (Venona). These collections are available in whole at the Public Record

Office/National Archives or in part at the United

States National Archives and the library of the

National Cryptologic Museum at Fort George G.

Meade, Maryland.

The Venona translations probably are the most

famous of the three collections. These are the trans-
Page 72

lations of messages between various Soviet intelligence network controls, or “rezidants,” and the

Moscow headquarters of Soviet intelligence

agencies – the NKVD (Narodniy Komissariat

Vnutrennikh Del, “Peoples Commissariat for

Internal Affairs”) and the GRU (Glavnoye

Razvedyvatelnoe Upravleniye, “Main Intelligence

Direcorate” of the Soviet General Staff). There are

only two translations in the over three thousand

that refer to any aspects of the Holocaust. These

include the movement of German gold into Swiss

banks and a discussion of the Wallenberg family.19

The Venona translations are available in RG 457 at

NARA in College Park, Maryland, the PRO (HW

15), and at the library of the National Cryptologic

Museum.20

The ISCOT material, named after the head of

the section at the GC&CS that handled illicit communications, is a collection of translations of messages between the various European (and Asian)

communist party organizations and resistance

groups and party headquarters in Moscow during

World War II. These messages were intercepted,

decrypted, and translated by the GC&CS and

turned over to the responsible section in M.I.6.

They date from mid-1944 to the end of the war. Of

the nearly 1,500 translations, only six pertain to the

Holocaust. The ISCOT translations are located at

the PRO in series HW 17, pieces 39-118,

Government Code & Cypher School Decrypts of the

Communist International (COMINTERN). A set of

the ISCOT translations also is available in the

library of the National Cryptologic Museum.

Finally, there is the so-called MASK material

collection, which consists of intercepts of COMINTERN material decrypted by the famous British

cryptanalyst, Brigadier J.H. Tiltman, from 1934 to

1937. The Communist International was the

administrative conduit through which foreign communist parties were controlled and financed by

Moscow. The messages in the collection are from

the International’s headquarters in Moscow to various local communist party organizations in several

European countries, the United States, and China.

The reports are mostly what one would expect:

espionage and illegal tradecraft, party and network

finances, propaganda, travel plans of COMINTERN

agents, and messages about domestic political, military, and economic situations. There are several

messages that report on conditions in Germany

after Hitler’s accession to power and the situation

in Austria prior to the Anschluss of 1938. Although

there is no direct information about anti-Jewish

measures, there are references to the concentration

camps that, in those early years of the Nazi reign,

held a large number of opposition political inmates

such as communists, social democrats, and others.

The MASK translations (and decrypts in French)

are located in folders 1 to 38 of HW 17.21 The

National Cryptologic Museum’s library also has a

set of the MASK translations.

ISCOT 399, issued 21 October 1944 (intercepted 25 June

1944) reporting the gassing of Hungarian Jews at

Auschwitz (Osvencim)
Page 73

Even though there are number of translations

relating to the Holocaust from the above three

smaller collections, they represent only a small portion of the actual number of messages transmitted

on these illicit radio networks. It is possible that the

archives of former Soviet intelligence organizations

and the COMINTERN may contain a number of

messages concerning all aspects of the Holocaust

and other Nazi depredations.

Notes

1 For more on the Allied effort against German diplomatic systems, see Alvarez, 164-6.

2 These are: Entry 9011, Japanese Diplomatic

Messages (SRDJ) and Japanese-German Diplomatic

Messages (SRDG); and Entry 9021, Vichy French

Diplomatic Messages (SRDV).

3 The British placed restrictions on “sensitive” material that the Special Branch representatives attached to

GC&CS work centers could see and pass back to G-2 in

Washington. This material was referred to as the

“Reserved Series.” See “History of Special Branch,” 21

fn., NARA RG 457, Entry 9032, Box 1113.

4 A complete set of the Boston series can be found in

the records of the Office of Strategic Services, RG 226,

Entry 210, boxes 440-446. Other captured Axis messages were placed in similar relevant translation series.

For example, Japanese messages, captured during the

Philippines campaign, were placed in the appropriate

Japanese military (SR) and air force (SRF) translation

series available in RG 457, entries 9005 and 9012,

respectively.

5 Vatican to Berlin, 11 October 1944, T-1124, NARA,

RG 457, HCC, Box 518, “Decrypted Diplomatic Traffic;”

Vatican (Montini) to Apostolic delegate to Germany

(Eichstatt), 8 May 1945, T-1996, NARA, RG 457, HCC,

Box 519, “Decrypted Diplomatic Traffic”; Vatican City

(Montini) to Apostolic Delegate to Germany (Eichstatt),

7 April 1945, T-2056, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 519.

6 Information regarding the British and American

cryptanalytic effort against Vatican codes and ciphers

can be found in RG 457, HCC, Box 1284, “History of the

Solution of Vatican Systems in SSA and GCCS, 1943-44.”

(Washington: September 1944)

7 Benson, A History of Communications

Intelligence 54-5. Along with the OSS, the Federal

Communications Commission and the Office of

Censorship, both of which were conducting small-scale

intercept and cryptanalysis, were barred from further

cryptologic work. The Coast Guard’s intercept and codebreaking sections were absorbed into the Navy’s cryptologic effort and designated as OP-20-GU.

8 Bradley F. Smith, The Ultra-Magic Deals, 149.

9 This set is only part of the larger collection contained in the PRO. The distribution list of British officials

who received the translations from this period named

eight individuals and their departments – four from

M.I.6, one from M.I.5, and one each for the Directors of

Intelligence for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. 

10 Other translations that were distributed through

OSS and passed on to other U.S. government elements,

such as the U.S. Department of State, carried the caveats

“Secret Source,” or “A Most Reliable Source.” These distributed versions usually had certain pieces of source

information, such as the name of the official under

whose signature the message was sent and the date of

the message, removed or “sanitized” from the original

version. Interestingly, it appears that none of these

diplomatic translations were shared with the SIS. Also,

these translations, for the most part, are from minor

neutrals and even some cables from diplomats that contain mostly personal information. A useful discussion

about one particularly important translation of a Chilean

diplomatic message concerning the situation of Jews in

Prague in November 1941 can be found in the Richard

Breitman monograph “What Chilean Diplomats Learned

about the Holocaust.” It is available at the NARA

Interagency Working Group website: http://

www.archives.gov/iwg/research_papers/breitman_chil

ean_diplomats.html

11 For a more detailed and complete description of

the catalogue and the PROCAT search system, go to

the PRO/National Archives website at http://catalogue.pro.gov.uk. The equivalent NARA on-line search

engine is called ARC (archives research catalogue) and is

available at the U.S. National Archives website:

http://www.archives.gov.

12 “The Special Action Staff assigned to the 302nd

Police Battalion, subordinate to the regiment assigned to

Army Group South, reports shooting 4200 Jews.”

“Signals Intelligence Pass[ed] to the Prime Minister,
Page 74

Messages and Correspondence.” HW 1/62, September

1941.

13 In late 1942, the various concentration camps that

sent status messages by radio were identified by single

letters thusly: A – Oranienburg, B – Dachau, C –

Mauthausen/Gusen, D – Buchenwald, E - Flossenburg,

F – Auschwitz, G – Hinzert, H- Niederhagen, I – Lublin,

K – Stutthof, and L – Debica. Two of these letters, and

possibly the others, may have been derived from the last

letter of the radio callsign of the camp. In those cases,

Auschwitz was identified with callsign “OMF” and

Buchenwald with “OMD.” Obviously, this list does not

include all of the camps. See ZIP/OS 4/27.11.42, Section

II, “Concentration Camps,” PRO, HW 16/66 and

Phillips, Lt. E.D., GC&CS Air and Military History Vol.

XIII. The German Police. 83. Also, it appears that the

Death Camps in the General Government (the part

of Poland directly overseen by the Nazis) had their

own letters: B – Belzec, L – Lublin, S – Sobibor, and T –

Treblinka. However these designators may have been

arbitrarily assigned. See Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas,

“A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of

Jews during ‘Einsatz Reinhardt’ 1942.” Holocaust and

Genocide Studies (Vol. 15, No. 3, Winter 2001), 468-486,

fn 8, 480.

14 The SD merged with the Reichssicherheitshaupamt (RSHA) or Reich Security Office in September

1939. The SD’s foreign activities, Branch III (Ausland)

were transferred to RSHA VI, or foreign intelligence

headed by Walter Schellenberg.

15 See HW 12/272, January 1942.

16 These summaries are marked with the serial

“CX/MSS/SR.” The files of the MEW were transferred to

FO 935.

17 Hinsley, Vol. 1, 357-8.

18 See Breitman, 116-7, for a discussion of the railway decrypts and potential importance to Holocaust

research.

19 Venona Translation T840, 21 June 1945,

Washington to Moscow, and T2201, 13 April 1942,

Stockholm to Moscow, National Cryptologic Museum.

20 For a description of the messages and a short history of their intercept and decryption see Robert L.

Benson, The Venona Story (Center for Cryptologic

History, National Security Agency, Fort George G.

Meade, MD; 2001), Reproductions of the Venona translations are also available online at the NSA website:

http://www.nsa.gov/docs/venona/index.html

21 Curiously, many ISCOT and MASK decrypts were

in French and were not translated by GC&CS into

English. Also, many intercepted French diplomatic messages, whether Vichy or Gaullist, which were exchanged

with the Arlington Hall remained in the original French.
Page 75

As mentioned previously in this guide, the

records from the Allied COMINT agencies hold

information on a wide array of incidents and certain aspects of the Nazi campaign of extermination.

However, a historian could not write a complete

general narrative of the Holocaust based solely on

these records. The information from the records is,

for the most part, episodic and partial. Where in

those few instances there is much detail, the information is often concentrated in a single aspect of a

larger event.

For some these limitations may appear a disappointment. However, historians recognize them as

part of the landscape of the process of historical

reconstruction of events by utilizing data from a

number of sources. For historians of the war and

the Holocaust, the body of records composed of the

messages decoded by the Allies is another source

of information. By itself, the information from

decodes is not a “secret key” to understanding the

war or the Holocaust. Instead, these decodes must

be combined with information from all other

sources to produce the narrative fabric that is history. In some cases, the decodes can add a new or

telling aspect to a story already familiar, provide the

insightful anecdote or quote, or allow the historian

to add an exclamation point to a thesis.

This chapter of the guide is intended to demonstrate how some of the available information from

Allied cryptanalysis of Axis and neutral messages

can contribute additional information to the history of the Holocaust. This section will begin with a

general review of the course of the Holocaust and

what the information from decodes sometimes can

add to it. This will be followed by some selected topics for which there is some substantial information

from COMINT sources. These include the refugee

phenomenon and the growing strife in wartime

Palestine, Vichy and the Jews, the destruction of

Hungary’s Jews, Japanese attitudes and treatment

of the Jews in the Far East, and Swiss and German

wartime trade and transfer of stolen gold and other

personal and national assets.

Before beginning this chapter, one general

observation should be made. It is that Allied communications intelligence discovered nothing of the

prewar and early wartime high-level Nazi planning

for the general campaign against Europe’s Jews

and other groups targeted for elimination. This situation also was true for most of the large-scale

wartime plans, such as the massacres in the western Soviet Union or the death camps. There were

few exceptions to this trend, most notably the intercept and decryption of German police messages

that indicated that Italian Jews were soon to be

subjected to roundup and deportation to camps in

October 1943. Usually, though, Nazi planning,

preparations, and orders to carry out these operations were not communicated in a means such as

radio that could be intercepted by the Allied monitoring stations. Plans and orders were delivered by

courier or were communicated orally at meetings

and thus denied to Allied monitors. As a result,

information that could have warned of an impending operation was missed. Generally, the communications that supported activities such as the

German Police massacres in the western USSR

were intercepted only after the latter had begun.

The intelligence that was recovered came from a

variety of communications sources: message traffic

from neutral, Allied and Axis diplomats, Axis security forces, anti-Axis partisan groups, and Axis and

Allied covert intelligence networks.

Chapter 4

Selected Topics of the Holocaust
Page 76

A. The General Course of the Holocaust and

Allied Communications Intelligence

Immediately after the conquest of Poland in

September 1939, German security elements moved

to implement hostile policies directed against targeted segments of the Polish population and Jews

in general. A limited number of German Police

messages reported such events as the mass arrest of

Polish officers near Warsaw and the transfer of

2,000 Jews from the town of Nasielesk to Novydvor

(both towns about twenty kilometers north of

Warsaw).1 Yet, information about anti-Jewish

actions in Poland remained sparse, and there were

no further decrypts of police messages in 1940 and

1941 from Poland.2 The lack of intercepts of radio

messages suggests that the telephone and telegraph

network in Poland had been repaired by the

Germans shortly after the occupation had begun.

During the second half of 1941, the Nazis made

a number of decisions about the course of the plan

to exterminate the Jews. In late July, Reich

Marshall Herman Goering signed a memorandum

that authorized the SS to plan for “the complete

solution to the Jewish question within the German

sphere of influence in Europe.” The memo further

called for a Final Solution of the Jewish question.3

In October 1941, SS chief Heinrich Himmler

banned any further Jewish emigration from

German-occupied Europe. In November 1941, the

first massacres of German Jews, who had been

deported to the east, occurred in the Baltic cities of

Riga and Kovno (Kaunas).

On 20 January 1942, in the Berlin suburb of

Wannsee, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich

Security Head Office, chaired a meeting of senior

German officials from the SS, other security offices,

the General Government (western Poland), occupied Poland, the German Foreign Office, and the

Ministry of Justice to work out the details for the

final solution of all European Jews. The German

officials discussed policies that had been in effect

for some time inside the Reich, and laid out a general plan for coordinating similar plans for countries allied to the Axis, as well as for occupied

Europe. The decisions reached at this meeting were

not revealed outside of Nazi leadership circles.

Germany’s allies were uninformed of any impending changes. This secrecy is suggested by a fragment of a Japanese diplomatic message from about

the time of the Wannsee Conference. A 28 January

1942 message to Tokyo from the Japanese minister

in Sofia, Bulgaria, stated that the “German policy

towards the Jews is well known. It is seen that the

aim is their complete elimination from the

European continent (perhaps to the Island of

Madagascar).”4 But if the German policy decisions

had not been publicized at the time, the results of

those policies already were being felt in the occupied territories of Europe and the Soviet Union.

The first indications from COMINT sources of

large-scale efforts to annihilate Jews and others

came shortly after the invasion of the Soviet Union

in June 1941. The Nazi policy for several groups living in Russia was one of extermination. This policy

had been established by the Nazi leadership some

months before the invasion. In a speech to German

military leaders in March 1941 during the planning

for Operation Barbarosa, Hitler had explained that

the upcoming campaign in the Soviet Union would

be different than all others, that a war of extermination was at hand, and that Russia was to be

cleared of all racial groups that were not Aryan. The

slaughter of Jews would be complemented with the

policy of allowing the hundreds of thousands of

Russian prisoners of war taken in the early part of

the campaign to die of starvation, neglect, and disease.5

In the wake of the invading Wehrmacht formations came police and SS units charged with killing

“undesirables” such as communist party officials,

COMINTERN (Communist International) personnel, commissars, and Jews in official positions.

(Whether all Jews were included in the original

orders is unclear. Some latitude may have existed,

but within a short time Jews everywhere in the

occupied Soviet Union were targeted for death.)6

Some of these formations were known as
Page 77

Einsatzgruppen. There were four of these groups

whose manpower totaled about 3,000. They were

composed of a mixture of SS and Sicherheitdienst

(SD or Security Service) personnel. The four

groups were assigned regions of operations.

Einsatzgruppe A operated mostly in the Baltic

region; Einsatzgruppe B, worked near Smolensk in

the western Russian Federated Republic along

main axis of attack for German Army Group

Center; Einsatzgruppe C operated area Kiev in the

central Ukraine; and Einsatzgruppe D worked in

the southern USSR along the Black Sea coast and

the Crimea. Working in conjunction with these

groups were some SS brigades, such as the Reiter

and Cavalry Brigades. The largest single element of

these forces was the German Police. Over thirty

reserve and regular German Police battalions,

numbering about 12,000 policemen, participated

in the massacres in Russia. As far back as the

Wilhelmian Empire, German police had existed as

paramilitary organizations organized into regional

or municipal formations. These formations were

known as Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) or Order Police.

Referred to originally as Uniformed Police, these

formations were easily integrated into the German

military and traditionally had performed rear area

security duties early in the war.7

Because of the vast distances involved and the

inadequacy (and destruction) of the Soviet domestic telegraph and telephone cable communication

system, the police and SS units exterminating the

Jews and other groups relied on HF radio communications to send their action reports and administrative messages back to SS and Police headquarters. Within a month of the invasion, GC&CS,

thanks to the British army intercept station at

Beaumanor, and partly through the intercept and

the cryptanalytic work by the covert Allied site in

southern France, P.C. Cadix, was producing

decrypts and translations of the German reports

about many of the massacres. The police and SS

reports were specific about the numbers and categories of victims: Jews, “Bolsheviks,” partisans,

“bandits,” and Russian soldiers are listed in the

police unit reports sent to higher headquarters.8

The first intercept that referred to a massacre

probably was an 18 July 1941 radio message from

the Police Regiment Center (that is, assigned to

Army Group center) that reported the execution of

1,153 Jewish “plunderers” near the town of Slonim

in Belorussia.9

And the numbers of victims mounted as the police and other groups moved east into

the Soviet Union. On 3 August the SS Cavalry

brigade reported it had liquidated some 3,274

partisans and “Jewish Bolshevists” (judische

Bolschewisten).10 On 7 August 1941 the same

brigade reported that it had executed some 7,819

people since the invasion had begun, while an

accounting of all actions in the sector where Army

Group Center operated totaled some 30,000 executions.11 On 11 September 1941 Police Regiment

South reported to Police and SS Headquarters that

it had liquidated 1,548 Jews.12 One of its subordinate battalions, the 314th, had shot 69 Jews.13

Within a short period, the German units were supplemented by formations composed of ethnic

groups such as Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and others

in the newly conquered territories. There is also a

German Police and Ukrainian militia shooting Jews from

the village of Chrystnowka (Courtesy: United States

Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Page 78

suggestion that Germany’s lesser allies contributed

to the massacres. A June 1942 Japanese message

from Budapest noted that Hungarian troops serving in the rear near Kharkov in the Ukraine had

been “successful in mopping up some 38,000

“guerillas.”14

Complementary information about the effects

of similar large-scale massacres or liquidations

from elsewhere in the occupied Soviet Union was

provided by a Japanese diplomatic message from

Berlin in late February 1942. It contained a partial

list of “population changes” in the Baltic States that

the Germans had occupied. The Japanese reported

that in the first six months more than 180,000 civilians had been interned or executed. In Estonia it

was estimated that the male population between

the ages of 20 and 35 had declined about 45 percent.15

In late 1941 the Nazis began implementing

some of the legal and administrative machinery to

carry out effectively their plans for exterminating

Europe’s Jews, including those in occupied countries. German police decrypts carried information

about the rail transport of German Jews from cities

such as Berlin and Bremen, to ghettoes in occupied

territories to the east in cities like Kaunas,

Lithuania, and Minsk in the Ukraine.16 Other

reports from neutral and Axis diplomats carried a

small amount of information on conditions in various countries. In Vienna a Japanese report from

late February 1942 mentioned that 10 percent of

the workers in the area were kept in concentration

camps and that the police were watching all for suspect activity.17 A report from the Chilean consulate

in Prague, dated 24 November 1941, carried information on the legal proscriptions against German

Jews: revocation of citizenship for German Jews

living overseas and limits to property transfer and

sales. The report also mentioned that Jews in the

Protectorate would be sent to Poland or to Terezin

[Theresienstadt] in Czechoslovakia.18

At the same time, another critical part of the

Nazi direct extermination plan began to operate –

the death camps. The Nazi system of camps,

known generally as concentration camps

(Konzentrationslager) had been started within a

year of Hitler’s accession to power. The early camps

were used to incarcerate all “anti-social elements”

and political opponents to the Nazi regime. These

included Jews, communists, Social Democrats,

trade union representatives, religious dissenters,

homosexuals, ordinary criminals, and others. Over

the years the camp system expanded and diversified into various functions. The most infamous, and

largest, was Auschwitz, which actually was a complex of about forty separate camps. Auschwitz had

been started in mid-1940 as a labor camp. In the

fall of 1941, the Nazis began building the first “special treatment” (sonderbehandlung) camp,

Birkenau. Birkenau represented the most sinister

part of the Nazi plan for eliminating the Jews. On

8 December 1941, the extermination camp

(Vernichtunslager) at Chelmo, Poland, went into

operation. The less direct methods of extermination, such as starvation and overcrowding that had

been employed in the ghettos like Warsaw and

Lublin, had proven too slow for the demands of the

Nazi hierarchy. The death camps were set up to

speed along the Final Solution.

The camps communicated periodic reports to

SS and Police headquarters in Berlin by radio. The

SS had set up a radio network over which its general administrative communications were transmitted. The SS had their own version of the Enigma

cipher machine, which they used to encrypt messages that reported the conditions and the population counts of the various camps. The GC&CS,

which broke this SS Enigma cipher in late 1940,

gave the network, and the key used to encrypt these

communications, the cover name of Orange. This

radio net carried most of the early reports from the

concentration camps sent in 1942. Each camp sent

a daily report, or a monthly report, listing for each

day the tally of laborers from various ethnic and

national groups. An example of a typical report,

sent on October 3, 1942, detailed the totals and

subtotals of the slave labor population from

Auschwitz, which was identified by the single letter
Page 79

“F” (derived from the last letter of the camp’s radio

callsign, in this case “OMF”). There were eight

columns of numbers that broke down in this way:

“Total at the beginning of the day,” “Increase,”

“Decrease,” “Total at the end of the Day,” “Jews,”

“Poles,” Unknown,” and “Russians.” These reports

tallied only the slave labor population and not those

being executed upon arrival at the death camps.

The numbers from the available messages usually

reported significant changes to a camp’s population. For example, a report from Auschwitz for

September 1942 shows a loss at the end of the

month of about 32 percent of the total labor population. A report from Dachau for November 1942

shows an increase in the labor force of about 2.5

percent.19

Only recently have scholars discovered that the

SS also radioed information to Berlin regarding the

extermination totals of Jews in the death camps. An

article published in the late 2001 issue of Holocaust

and Genocide Studies described a message sent

from the SS leader in Lublin to the SS commands in

Cracow and Berlin on 11 January 1943.20 This message, located in the PRO in HW 16/23, enumerated

the numbers of Jews eliminated as part of

Operation Reinhard (Einsatz Reinhar[d]t) at four

death camps in the General Government (Lublin,

Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka) for both the last

two weeks of December 1942 and for the year 1942.

The total number of persons eliminated for 1942

was 1,274,166. This number agreed with (and probably was) the basis for a statistical report of

September 1942 SS Report from Auschwitz listing available slave labor force. Handwritten notes are by Bletchley analyst

that read “Total at beginning of day,” “Increase,” “Decrease,” “Total at end of day,” “Jews,” “Poles,” [unknown], and

“Russians.” Source: PRO HW 16/10 ZIP/GPCC/3.10.42
Page 80

Reinhardt’s effectiveness that had been commissioned by the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in

December 1942. It appears the British analysts who

had decrypted the message missed the significance

of this particular message at the time. No doubt this

happened because the message itself contained

only the identifying letters for the death camps followed by the numerical totals. The only clue would

have been the reference to Operation Reinhard, the

meaning of which – the plan to eliminate Polish

Jewry that was named after the assassinated SS

General Reinhard Heydrich – also probably was

unknown at the time to the codebreakers at

Bletchley.21

From February 1942 to about February 1943,

these radio messages continued to be sent from the

camps to SS headquarters. However, there were

limitations to what could be learned from these

decrypts. Not all the camps set up by the Germans

in the east reported by radio; nor did the camps set

up by minor Axis powers and Vichy France that

were used to hold Jews for transport to the Nazi

death and labor camps to the east. By early 1943,

these SS reports completely ceased to be sent by

radio. It is likely that the SS leadership was concerned about the security of the information that

was transmitted in these messages, not unlike

Daluege’s worries about Police messages in October

1941. By this time it is possible that telephone or

telegraph lines had been run out to the camps and

messages could be sent without the worry of eavesdropping. Later in the war, as conditions in Eastern

Europe worsened with the Russian advance, the SS

may have returned to using radios to communicate.

GC&CS broke a few messages about the camps

encrypted in the new SS Enigma key given the cover

name “Grapefruit.” But these decrypts remained

few in number.22

From early 1942 until the end of the war, the SS

organized and oversaw a system in which Jews

from occupied Europe, and from Axis-aligned

countries, were transported to the various labor

and death camps in Eastern Europe. Adolf

Eichman’s special bureau within the SS main security office that dealt with the evacuation of Jews

worked with the German Foreign Ministry to facilitate this system. The transport of mass numbers of

January 1943 message listing number of Jews killed as part of Operation Reinhard

(Source: PRO HW16/23 ZIP/GPDD 355a/ 15.1.43)
Page 81

Jews required the cooperation of national governments and their local security or paramilitary

forces. The scope and effectiveness of these cooperative arrangements varied according to country.

Generally, Jews living in those regions under

the German direct administration (the General

Government), German military occupation

(France, Serbia, and Salonika), and the

Reichskommissariate (Netherlands) were affected

the most. Ironically, countries allied or associated

with Germany had more latitude when it came to

policy towards their Jewish populations, though

this does not mean that their Jewish populations

ultimately suffered less grievously. In countries like

Hungary and Italy, resident Jewish populations

temporarily were spared being rounded up and sent

to the camps. Before the war, the regimes in Rome

and Budapest had imposed their own anti-Semitic

measures that aimed at restricting the Jewish presence in national economic, social, and cultural

activities. While more restrictions were added during the war, there were no large-scale incarcerations in concentration camps; nor were there any

major deportations. However, these reprieves

ended when German SS and police units arrived in

Italy shortly after its surrender in July 1943 and

Hungary in May 1944.23

The first non-German Jews transported to the

death camps came from the Slovak Republic in

early 1942. (German Jews deported to the Baltic

States and Polish Jews from the General

Government regions of Poland already were in the

process of being sent to the first death camps.)

Beginning in the summer of 1942, Vichy officials

started the deportation of foreign Jews from France

to the camps in the east. (See Section C, Vichy

Regime and the Jews, for a description of world

reaction to this roundup.) By the fall of 1942, trains

transporting Jews to the camps at Auschwitz now

included Czech and Dutch Jews. Decrypts of

German police messages indicated that these trains

sometimes were accorded priority routing through

the German rail system.24

In 1943 the Nazi roundup of Jews extended to

more countries in occupied Europe. By March of

that year, allied cryptologists were intercepting

messages from a number of sources that indicated

that the Nazi plan was in full operation. In the

southern Balkans, it was learned that Bulgarian

authorities had gathered up about 14,000 Jews

from occupied Thrace and put them in the concentration camps at Gorna Dzhumaja and Dupnitsa.

In Macedonia, Jews living in Skopje and Bitolj had

been “stripped of their belongings” and left out in

the open near the latter town, and that many

infants had died, presumably due to exposure to the

cold. Other Jews from the region were shipped

to the death camps by rail.25 A Japanese report

from May mentioned that some 4,500 Jews from

Thrace who had been interned previously by the

Bulgarians had been shipped to Poland.26

Because it had aligned with Germany, Bulgaria

was allowed to garrison adjacent stretches of territory in neighboring Greece and Yugoslavia that

contained large numbers of ethnic Bulgarians.

Bulgaria carried out a campaign of expulsion

against all foreign ethnic groups living in the newly

acquired lands. The Bulgarians expelled some

30,000 Turks from Thrace and as many as

500,000 Greeks who lived in the region. Jews

amongst the expelled ethnic groups lost their

Bulgarian citizenship and were shipped to the

death camps.27 Vichy diplomatic cables from Sofia

noted that there was much popular opposition to

the wholesale removal of the Jews from these territories. According to the French diplomats, the

Bulgarian government had explained to their mission that, since Jews, as a group, desired Germany’s

defeat, it had arrested them as “enemies of the

nation.”28 Still, Sofia resisted the wholesale surrender of Bulgarian Jews to the Nazi killing machine.

In Romania during mid-1941, some 200,000

Jews were deported to Transniestria, the

Romanian-occupied region of the Ukraine. There

about 120,000 Jews were slaughtered by the

Romanian occupation authorities. However, in

November dictator Ion Antonescu ended deporta-
Page 82

tions of Romanian Jews to the region. During the

roundup of Jews in Hungary in 1944, Bucharest’s

diplomats worked to obtain passports and aid to

Romanian Jews trapped there.29 Still, approximately some 425,000 Romanian Jews perished

during the war. This was about half of the prewar

population.

A Japanese report from Budapest regarding

conditions in Greece mentioned that, since the

German occupation, Greek Jews had been forced to

wear a yellow star. The Japanese also estimated

that some 50,000 to 70,000 Jews had been sent to

Poland and another 25,000 to 30,000 had been

exiled.30 Ultimately about 80 percent of all Greek

Jews died during the war.

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, by June 1943

messages from the Dutch communist underground

to Moscow that were intercepted by British Radio

Security Service revealed that there was substantial

local opposition to the early May roundup of Dutch

Jews. A 4 June message described how only 10 percent of the Jews in Amsterdam had appeared for

registration prior to deportation to the east. The

city’s Jewish Council responsible for supervising

the registration had failed to bring in the number

required by the Nazis for deportation to the east.

Finally, on 26 May the Germans sealed off the center of Amsterdam and rousted out whatever Jews

they could find.31 Some Dutch Catholic clerics

protested the roundups. Another translation

reported that a pastoral letter was read on 16 May

to protest the roundup and deportation. The letter

countered German arguments that the struggle

against the Soviet Union was the equivalent of victory for Germany. The letter added that, “...those

who fight against bolshevism, which is condemned

so sharply through [one word missing], must not

suppress Christianity as this is being done by the

National Socialists.”32

The Nazi drive to transport Europe’s Jews to the

camps continued in other countries. In Italy, in late

July 1943, a coup in Rome unseated Benito

Mussolini, who had been the Fascist dictator since

1923. Secret negotiations followed and Italy signed

an armistice with the Allies. On 3 September Allied

troops crossed over from Sicily and began the slow

drive north up the Italian peninsula. Hitler rushed

additional troops and security forces into Italy and

propped up a rump Fascist regime in northern Italy

under a recently rescued Mussolini. In late

September 1943, Heinrich Himmler ordered the

roundup and deportation of Jews living in Rome

and dispatched SS General Karl Wolff to oversee

the operation. Due to an unexpected cryptanalytic

window of opportunity – the exploitation of an SD

Enigma key beginning in late August 1943 – the

British were able to monitor this operation from

September through October 1943.33

The German police attaché in Italy, SS Major

Herbert Kappler, who also performed duties for the

Gestapo and SD, was placed in charge of the actual

operation to round up Rome’s Jews. He had reported to Berlin in early September that some Jews had

attempted to escape Rome on a train with Spanish

diplomats. He added that these Jews had bought

Spanish, Portuguese, and Mexican passports from

the Vatican.34 Initially, Kappler had attempted to

extort the Jewish community in Rome. The Irish

minister in Rome reported to Dublin on 6 October

that Rome’s Jews were required to supply the

Germans with fifty kilograms of gold within twentyfour hours, or else 200 Jewish youth would be sent

as hostages to Germany. According to the message,

the “Vatican offered help,” though no specific aid

from that source was mentioned.35 The message

also noted that the Germans were looting the houses of wealthy Italians and taking silver, paintings,

antiques, furniture, and jewelry. Presumably those

being robbed were Jewish, though it is unclear from

the translation who was targeted. By the second

week of October, SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner

cabled Kappler with the order to evacuate the Jews

from Italy without delay. He added that it was no

longer a question of using the Jews for labor, or

even trusting the local Italian authorities to do the

job. The longer the delay, the better chance that
Page 83

Jews would move to the houses of sympathetic

Italians and then disappear.36

The roundup began on 16 October. It was carried out by 365 German policemen from the

Sicherseitspolizei and Ordnungpolizei. Italian

police units were not used by the Germans because

of their “unreliability.” Kappler reported to Berlin

that 1,289 Jews had been arrested. After releasing

those of mixed blood, mixed marriages, foreigners,

and family servants, some 1,002 were retained.

Interestingly, Kappler reported that there was

much passive resistance by Italian citizens.37 A

report by Irish diplomats on 18 October that

claimed, “All Jews in Rome, including women and

children have been arrested,” clearly had exaggerated the results of the initial German police dragnet.38 Actually, this first sweep arrested about a

sixth of Rome’s Jewish population. On 18 October

the train with 1,007 Italian Jews left Rome.39 A

report from the Argentine ambassador from early

November estimated that the Germans, using a

municipal “Civil register” had imprisoned some

5,000 Jews, including men and women eighty

years old and infants.40 Arrests by the German

Police in Rome would continue for months afterwards. In early February 1944, the Japanese

ambassador to the Vatican, Harada Ken, reported

to Tokyo that, on 4 February, police raided buildings adjoining the Church of San Paolo’s, which

enjoyed extraterritoriality status under the Lateran

Treaty. Harada reported that some sixty people

were arrested, including Italian army officers, Jews,

and draft dodgers. According to Harada, the

Vatican had “expressed regret” over the incident

and, in a letter to Rome’s diplomatic community,

promised that indemnity proceedings would be

started soon.41 Ultimately, about 20 percent of all

of Italy’s Jews were victims of the Holocaust.

At about the same time that the German police

began seizing Italian Jews, in Denmark there

occurred one of the rare examples of an effective

national humanitarian effort on behalf of its Jews.

In early October the German occupation forces in

Denmark planned a nationwide roundup of Danish

Jews. The Danes, including their monarch King

Christian, had publicly supported the Jewish population since the Germans had occupied the country

in April 1940. When news of the impending

German sweep became known, the Danish underground carried off the escape of virtually all of

Denmark’s 9,000 Jews to Sweden. The Germans

reacted to this virtually empty bag of Jews with

extreme embarrassment. German Foreign Office

instructions to its press representatives overseas

contained the broad statement that as of 2 October

“...they [the Jews] have been eliminated from the

public life of Denmark and have been prevented

from further poisoning the atmosphere. In conversations, please do not go into the subject deeply

(my italics). Up to now, a few hundred full-blooded

Jews have been deported to Germany.”42

In late 1943, as the Axis forces retreated west all

along the front before the resurgent Red Army, the

Nazi authorities were faced with the problem of

destroying the evidence of the earlier massacres

perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen, police and SS

formations. In October 1943 intercepted and

decoded radio messages of the SD revealed that the

Germans were in the process of exhuming the sites

of mass executions and destroying the remains. The

texts of the intercepted messages were written in

the obtuse language that the Germans used for all

matters pertaining to the Holocaust. These messages indicated that such work, executed by

Sonderkommandos (Special Detachments), and

included cleaning up “special places of work” in the

Baltic region southwest of Leningrad, near the

cities of Novgorod and Pskov. Interestingly, in trying to identify the murder sites, SS officials had to

rely on information from Latvian and Russian collaborators.43

One of the most important sources of information about the death camps, specifically Birkenau at

the Auschwitz complex, was the Vrba-Wetzler

report of June 1944. Rudolph Vrba and Alfred

Wetzler were two young Jews who had escaped

Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. They made it safely to Slovakia where they composed a report of what
Page 84

they had learned while inmates at the camp. There

had been some prior knowledge of Auschwitz from

other sources, but the Vrba-Wetzler report contained many new details. The report was carried to

Budapest and then on to Bern, Switzerland. There a

copy was shown to the OSS regional chief, Allen

Dulles, who, according to reports, was so shocked

by it that he wired Washington about its contents.44

Another copy was cabled to the Czech governmentin-exile in London. The cable was intercepted by

the British censors and turned over to GC&CS. A

copy of it was sent to Arlington Hall Station as part

of the standard exchange program, but it did not

reach the U.S. Army until early January 1945.

Among the details the two escapees provided

were the daily food ration level (300 grams or about

11 ounces), the treatment policy for ill slave laborers

(sent to the Krankenbau, literally sick place or

infirmary), the procedures for gassing those selected for immediate extermination, numbers and

nationalities of those exterminated, the procedure

for killing “Aryan” prisoners (by shooting), the creation of a half million false discharge documents to

cover those who actually had been gassed, and a list

of the SS camp leaders who were responsible for

these acts, as well as people identified as “criminals” who also participated in killing Jews.45 (See

attached document No. 1 for a complete copy of the

Vrba-Wetzler cable to London.)

More information about the camps was learned

when some in the east were overrun by the advancing Red Army. In July 1944 Russian troops liberated the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin,

Poland. The German administrators had not had

the time to dismantle the camp and destroy its

records, most of which were captured intact by the

Russians. Journalists from Allied and neutral countries were invited to view the camp. Reports carried

in Soviet newspapers estimated the number killed

at Majdanek at over a million. After a review of the

captured records, it was realized the Soviet estimate

was much too high. Later estimates ranged between

175,000 and 235,000. In mid-September 1944, the

French ambassador to Moscow, Roger Garreau,

cabled the French Committee of National

Liberation (FCNL) in Algiers with a report on the

newspaper stories about the camp. He pointed out

to the FCNL that of the executions for March 1944

at the camp over 6 percent were French nationals.

He also observed that the current publicity given

“to the enormity of the crimes committed” was not

enough. He urged that the committee consider publishing the reports about the camp.46

As Nazi Germany’s military situation continued

to deteriorate during 1944, fears grew in the Allied

and neutral capitals that the Germans would accelerate the extermination of Jews and others in the

remaining camps, or that they would move prisoners from the various slave labor camps into what

was left of the Third Reich’s territory. What had

happened to Hungary’s Jews seemed to set a precedent for what might come elsewhere in Europe.

There a special SS detachment had arrived and

organized the deportation of Hungary’s Jews to

Auschwitz and later marched thousands of other

Jews to slave labor factories in the Reich. (See

Section D of this chapter for a description of the

action against Hungary’s Jews.) In mid-1944, some

countries had begun diplomatic measures to protect their own citizens, Jewish and Gentile, held by

the Germans or residing in Germany as foreign

workers. In other cases, neutral nations were asked

by private groups to intervene with Germany to

save the remaining Jews held in Nazi-occupied

Europe.

In May of 1944, the Portuguese charge d’affaires

in Vichy cabled Lisbon that during a meeting at the

German embassy he had been told that orders were

soon to be given to return to France those

Portuguese workers who had been forcibly sent to

Germany. At the same time, the Germans told the

charge that a visa for a collective passport for Jews

would be granted in another ten days. How these

plans turned out is not clear from the intercept; nor

is it certain specifically what group of Jews was

referred to in the cable.47 In June, the Romanian

ambassador to Hungary signaled Bucharest that

several thousand ethnic Romanians living in north-
Page 85

ern Transylvania were being rounded up to be sent

to Germany and Hungary as forced labor. At least

50,000 ethnic Romanians already had been conscripted into labor battalions throughout Hungary.

The ambassador reported that many towns in the

region of Transylvania had been “denuded of population.” He was going to protest these forced drafts

to the German ambassador and the Hungarian

prime minister.48 In the summer of 1944, the Irish

and Spanish ambassadors in Berlin had brought to

the attention of the German Foreign Ministry the

precarious situation of numerous Jews held in a

camp in Vittel, France. Many of the remaining Jews

were from South America and supposedly were

being held to counter any possible actions against

German civilians interned in those countries since

1942.49

In mid-October 1944, the Spanish ambassador

to the United States reported that he had met with

a committee of American rabbis, who had been recommended by Congressman Sol Bloom (D-NY),

the chairman of the House Foreign Relations

Committee. The rabbis delivered a memorandum

that stated, “Reliable sources indicated that

German authorities intended to exterminate all

those who are interned in Concentration Camps.”

The rabbis asked that the Spanish government

intervene with German authorities to respect

internment laws of countries and international law.

The Spanish ambassador, Cardenas De Silva, added

his own comment to Madrid that any action by

Spain would bring about a “very favorable atmosphere for our government and would change public

opinion in this [USA] country.”50 The next week,

the Irish ambassador in Washington reported that

he had been asked by Leon Kubotinski, an official of

the World Jewish Congress, if the Irish government

could follow the example of the Swedish diplomatic mission and help save some of Hungary’s threatened Jews51

In January 1945 the Jewish Agency for

Palestine asked the Czech government-in-exile to

send a message to its representative in Stockholm

to be relayed to the Soviet ambassador, Madame

Alexandra Kollontay. The message, intercepted by

the British, asked that the Soviets initiate some surprise military action to seize the German death

camps in Poland before the Germans executed the

thousands of Jews and “other anti-fascists” still

held in them.52

By early March 1945, other countries, such as

Brazil, France, Turkey, and Italy, had heard rumors

that Jewish nationals held in the concentration or

internment camps were in danger. In many cases,

these governments had been informed that the

Germans had separated Jewish prisoners of war

from the other prisoners. These countries appealed

to neutral nations to intervene with the

International Red Cross for help.53 Reich Foreign

Ministry officials responded to these claims by issuing a statement that there was “no truth to the

claim” that Jewish prisoners of war are treated differently than others. Jewish persons, the statement

said, were separated from other prisoners for the

sake of “camp discipline.”54 Right up to the Nazi

surrender, fears persisted of a possible last spasm

of extermination of Jews held by the Germans. A

number of neutral countries, including Sweden,

Switzerland, and the Vatican, made demarches

with Germany to not carry out this extreme measure.55 A 17 April 1945 message from the Apostolic

delegate in Lausanne, Switzerland, to the Vatican,

reported that Italians held in concentration camps

in northern Italy in the late summer of 1944 had

been transferred to Auschwitz and other “unascertainable destinations.” The report added that the

International Red Cross had gotten German assurance that these transfers had been suspended.56

In mid-February 1945, the Allied armies stood

prepared to cross the last major river obstacles to

Germany: the Rhine River in the west and the Oder

in the east. On 18 February 1945, the few remaining

diplomatic posts of the Third Reich received an

extremely long (19 pages) message that contained a

statement from the German foreign minister

Joachim von Ribbentrop. He instructed his diplomats to seek out a secret channel to relay the points

in the address to “important English and American
Page 86

personalities.” The speech possibly was done on

Ribbentrop’s own initiative. It was a rationalization

of Nazi Germany’s war against the world. Among

other points, it claimed that, in reality, Germany’s

war all along had been a crusade against world

Bolshevism. He further claimed that Germany had

liberated many ethnic groups from their oppressors

and that Nazism had a “positive attitude to

Christendom.”

As for the effort to exterminate world Jewry,

Ribbentrop had this to say:

The question of the Jews is a German

domestic affair which, if Germany

doesn’t want to fall to Communism,

must be solved in Germany. The

Jewish Question in other countries

does not interest Germany, in fact, in

Germany we are even of the viewpoint that we can cooperate with

other countries in the solution of the

world’s Jewish problem.57

B. Jewish Refugees, the Holocaust and the

Growing Strife in Palestine

The history of the Holocaust is notable for the

duration and intensity of the resulting refugee

flood. From the earliest days of Nazi rule in

Germany in 1933, until the very end in 1945, Jewish

refugees from the Holocaust were an ongoing concern for many countries. In some nations, such as

France, the Jewish refugee presence aggravated

already tense domestic antipathies towards foreigners and Jews. This domestic strife led to further

restrictions against foreign Jews. This large number of those fleeing Nazi oppression would test the

immigration policies in other countries, such as the

United States and Britain, whose refusal to either

increase or waive quotas on refugees sealed the fate

of further thousands of Jews.

In the first years of the Nazi regime, American

and British cryptology discovered little on the

refugee issue. It was not until early 1939 that

American codebreakers began to pick up any reflections of the refugee problem. These hints came

mostly from intercepts of messages from Japanese

diplomatic legations around the world, but mostly

in Europe, who were reporting to Tokyo on efforts

by Jews to leave Germany and annexed Austria.

This preponderance of Japanese diplomatic messages as a source for information is an important

point. Knowledge on the part of American intelligence officials about the plight of Jewish refugees

was filtered through the biases of Tokyo’s diplomats.

In one Japanese message from Washington to

Tokyo of 17 January 1939, the Japanese ambassador recounted that, in late 1938, President

Roosevelt and Secretary of the Interior Harold

Ickes had made public statements criticizing

German treatment of the Jews. The U.S. State

Department had followed up with a note including

the same charges to the German Foreign Ministry.

The Japanese ambassador reported that Berlin had

responded to Ickes’ statements and requested that

Washington advise it of one instance in which an

American citizen had been mistreated. Berlin

added that if Washington could produce one case in

which treaty rights had been violated it would settle

it. According to the Japanese, in this case,

Washington had conceded that no Americans had

been maltreated during the period in question. To

the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, the American

concession had suggested that the issue was

resolved.58

Through the first nine months of the war, at

least until June 1940, Allied COMINT revealed that

Japanese steamship lines, notably Nippon Yusen

Kaisha, were some of the prime carriers of Jewish

refugees from European ports to destinations,

which, in many cases, were located in the Far

East.59 In one instance in early 1940, the Japanese

shipping lines encountered difficulties from

Portuguese authorities. It seemed that Jewish passengers had received limited visit visas from

Lisbon, but upon landing they had stayed instead of

departing for other destinations. To fix the prob-
Page 87

lem, the Portuguese demanded that, from now on,

Japanese shipping officials either get permission

for extended visas or not allow Jewish passengers

to leave the ships when they docked.60 These sea

routes for refugees ended with the German invasion of France and the Low Countries in May 1940. 

From the next year, until June 1941, one of the

remaining principal avenues of escape for refugees

was across the Soviet Union to its Pacific ports,

principally Vladivostok. Typically, Jewish refugees,

mostly Poles and Germans, obtained visas from

Japanese diplomats in the USSR or a nearby country. They then secured transit papers from Soviet

authorities and traveled east along the length of the

Trans-Siberian Railroad to the Pacific coast port of

Vladivostok. From there the refugees would

embark to Japan for further transit to ports in the

United States, Latin America, or to the substantial

and established Jewish settlement in Shanghai.

From the translations it is not certain how many

Jews eventually escaped over the Siberian route.

Some historians suggest that as many as 30,000

Jews fled by this route, the majority of whom ultimately arrived in Shanghai.61

One of the interesting sidelights of this overt

“underground” railroad was the contribution of the

Japanese consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, Chione

Sugihara. Sugihara was a diplomatic official who

also doubled as an intelligence officer. He was stationed first in Koeningsberg and later in Kaunas.

He issued nearly 2,000 visas to Polish and German

Jews, often against Tokyo’s explicit orders, from

late 1939 into 1940.62 He accomplished this before

the consulate was closed after the occupation of

Lithuania by the U.S.S.R.63

Another interesting aspect to the refugee phenomenon was the increasing number of Jews who

emigrated or fled to the British Mandate of

Palestine during the war. Palestine had been part of

the Ottoman Empire for centuries. A small Jewish

Japanese consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, Chione Sugihara

(Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum (USHMM))

Jewish refugees from Transnistria arrive at the Athlit

reception camp in Palestine. (Source: Central Zionist

Archives via the USHMM)
Page 88

population had lived in Palestine. In 1917 British

foreign secretary Arthur Balfour declared that the

government favored the establishment of a Jewish

homeland in Palestine, provided that nothing

would be done to “prejudice” the non-Jewish communities already there. After the First World War,

the League of Nations made Palestine a Mandate

under British control. For the next two decades,

there was a growing antagonism between Jewish

immigrants and settlers and the indigenous Arab

population. The British, in their 1939 White Paper,

had set a limit of 70,000 Jewish immigrants as a

concession to the local Arab population. However,

Arab leaders in the region, and especially in

Palestine, complained to London that many more

Jews than allowed for by the paper’s limit had

arrived during the war. An intercepted message

from the Japanese diplomatic mission in Ankara

reported an Arab claim that over 100,000 Jews had

entered Palestine between 1939 and 1943.64

As early as 1942, the Japanese reported additional Arab concerns caused by the formation of the

Jewish Brigade in the British 8th Army, the establishment of a Jewish police force of some 36,000

personnel, and agitation by the communist Jewish

labor organizations in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.65

Later Japanese reports dated in early 1944 from the

Japanese embassy in Ankara stated that an agent

who had recently returned from Palestine noted

that the Jewish underground had been building up

arms caches that included machine guns. These

had been smuggled in from Egypt or purchased

from British or Polish soldiers garrisoned in

Palestine. The Jewish underground also had set up

secret factories for manufacturing more arms and

ammunition. Because of these Jewish efforts, the

agent suggested that the British probably would “be

lenient” when looking into Arab acquisition of arms

in order to placate the latter. The report ended with

the observation that there would be large scale “disturbances” in the future.66 In February 1944 the

Saudi Arabian consul in Jerusalem described a

gunfight between British police and Jewish terrorists in Haifa in which twelve policemen were killed.

The terrorists also entered a church and murdered

a well-known British scholar. The same consul

reported that there were other “incidents” in Tel

Aviv. The Saudi diplomat added that the cause of

the recent attacks stemmed from a Jewish agency

demands for the abrogation of the White Paper, due

to take effect in May.67

Early in 1944, members of both houses of the

United States Congress drafted resolutions that

called for the establishment of a Jewish state in

Palestine and the abrogation of the British White

Paper. The Arab nations of Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi

Arabia were opposed to these proposals since they

would open Palestine to virtually unlimited Jewish

immigration. Arab diplomats in Washington especially were upset over the attacks on the Arab people and the American lawmakers’ casual dismissal

of their rights to the same land. In February

the Iraqi minister in Washington reported that he

and his Egyptian counterpart had met with

Undersecretary of State Edward Stettinius to

protest the proposed resolutions in the House and

Senate. Stettinius assured the Arab diplomats that

President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell

Hull were committed to leaving the solution of the

problem of Palestine until after the war. Despite

this assurance, the Arab ministers informed their

capitals that they intended to monitor the situation.68

On the other side of the Palestine question, a

cable from the French ambassador, Henri Bonnet,

to Paris in early April 1945, recounted a meeting

between embassy staff and a Mr. Akzin [sic], a representative from the Jewish Agency for Palestine.

Mr. Akzin was sounding out the position of the

French regarding Zionist representation at the

upcoming San Francisco United Nations

Conference. He was hoping that the issues of immigration and the formation of a Jewish State in

Palestine could be settled. The French reminded

Akzin that these problems were not included in the

purpose of the conference. Akzin told the French

that the various sponsors of the conference, except
Page 89

for Great Britain, seemed either not opposed to or

in favor of such a representation.69

C. The Vichy Regime and the Jews

The historical experience of the Jews in France

differed from that of the rest of modern Europe.

This difference stemmed from the changes brought

about by the French Revolution of 1789, which

made French Jews the first national Jewish population emancipated from the medieval legal and

administrative strictures of ghetto life. Prior to

1789, Jews living in Paris were considered foreigners. Elsewhere in France, their status varied: there

were legal restrictions in the east, while some Jews

in some communities in southwest France could

vote in the Estates General. Statutes passed in 1790

and 1791 by the Revolutionary government granted

Jews full civil rights throughout France.

During the 19th century, Judaism in France

identified with the values of the revolution and

Republican France. Many Jews adopted a secularized identity – officially members of a distinct

religion, but living with a French cultural and ethnic identity. However, in the last quarter of the

nineteenth century, Jews came under attack from

an increasingly polemical conservative wing of

French politics, which included the Jews as a target

of their general attacks against the liberal tendencies of the Third Republic. The French right, which

combined a strong nationalism with a radical

socialism, made anti-Semitism a major part of its

platform.70 The Dreyfus affair (1894-1906), in

which a Jewish French Army officer was accused

falsely of treason and then exonerated, seemed to

be the lightning rod for the forces of anti-Semitism

in France. The most powerful of these voices,

Charles Maurras and his Action Francaise,

emerged in the midst of the drama, and would continue to make anti-Semitism a part of extreme conservative opinion for many more decades. In the

end, though, the supporters of Dreyfus won. The

anti-Semitic storm abated, and soon the worst

aspects of it were forgotten temporarily with the

spirit of the union sacree’ of the First World War.71

However, by the 1930s the situation in France

had become again difficult for Jews. A combative

French nationalism had emerged in reaction to

France’s postwar economic and political decline. It

had, as one of its foundations, a widespread xenophobia. Caught in this backlash against foreigners

were Jews of foreign ancestry living in France.

Many French Jews could trace their ancestry for

generations. But another sizable segment of the

Jewish population, perhaps as many as 75,000 or

so, had arrived in France as part of the flood of

300,000 immigrants and refugees that lasted during the postwar period from 1919 until the very eve

of the Second World War. Some 55,000 of these

arrived after 1933 as a result of the Nazis taking

power in Germany.72 With a France weakened by

its war losses and the Depression, and rent by internal political strife between extremes on the left and

right, Jews, especially foreign Jews, would be doubly vulnerable if a reactionary, nationalist regime

ever came to power. Unfortunately for the Jews in

France, this occurred after France surrendered in

June 1940. The Third Republic collapsed and

Marshal Philippe Petain became chief of state. The

seat of the French government moved to Vichy in

the unoccupied southern part of the country.

Since the beginning of the Second World War,

Allied code-breaking agencies had been attacking

successfully a number of French codes and ciphers.

The new Vichy regime continued to use the fallen

Third Republic’s prewar diplomatic and colonial

office cryptographic systems for its overseas communications. Some of the most lucrative sources of

French communications were those to Washington,

D.C., and capitals in Latin America. These messages were sent via the transatlantic cable that had

terminals in the United States. The retransmission

of these cables required that a copy be turned over

to the U.S. cable censors. With so much traffic in

hand, French codes were exploited relatively early

after the formation of the Vichy regime.73 American

codebreakers soon found references to the anti-
Page 90

Jewish laws in Vichy diplomatic and colonial cable

and radio traffic.

By the fall of 1940, the first Statutes des Juifs

were promulgated by Marshal Philippe Petain’s

regime. These laws were designed to remove Jews

from public service and various skilled professions

such as architecture, law, and medicine. Jews also

were excluded from the press and other media. The

restrictions carried in these statutes would be continuously refined, expanded, and then reissued

over the next two years.

In October 1940 Vichy informed colonial

administrators throughout the French empire to

start registering government employees of Jewish

descent for a later determination whether they

would be retained past a 19 December deadline previously set in the statutes.74 Vichy regulations provided some exemptions to the groups targeted for

removal, mainly for military veterans, among others. However, Vichy’s requirements for identifying

Jews actually were more rigorous than even those

of their German overseers. As one intercept went,

Vichy told its colonial administrators that if certain

Jews claimed they were not practicing their religion, then the civil servants were to consult birth

certificates or even go scour Jewish cemeteries for

proof of ancestry.75

From COMINT sources it is not certain how

many Jews were discharged from various governmental positions within France and its overseas

colonies. In late October 1942, a messge from the

Japanese naval attaché in Vichy reported that,

according to SS sources, Laval’s policies were being

resisted by the eighty or so Jews left in the various

government departments. In August 1942 in

Indochina, the governor-general, Admiral Jean

Decoux, reported that nearly 700 military personnel stationed throughout the colony had been

released from duty under the Vichy exclusion laws.

However, this number, besides including Jews, also

counted members of “secret” societies, such as the

Masons, and German members of the French

Foreign Legion.76 However, it does not appear that

any Jews from France’s colonies were returned to

France.

Free French propaganda targeted the Vichy

regime over its treatment of Jews. In early 1942 the

Vichy French minister in Havana, Cuba, recommended to Vichy that it press Havana to deny visas

to refugee French Jews arriving in that city. He

reported that a number of these refugee Jews had

been contributing to the spread of propaganda hostile to the Vichy regime. He noted that Free French

representatives in the city were pressuring Jewish

refugees to make critical statements about Vichy.

Visas to the United States were so scarce that the

Free French officials had insinuated to the refugees

that the only way to get a visa was to agree to make

such statements. The Vichy diplomat noted that the

campaign was subtle and referred to the possible

influence on the refugees by fellow Jews who had

“important financial means.”77 Later, in August

1942, the same minister queried Vichy for a current

statement that contained the whole body of legislation relating the Jews.78

In the summer of 1942, France, under pressure

from the German occupation authorities, began to

round up Jews for shipment to the so-called “resettlement sites” in the east. In reality, this was the

start of the dispatch of Jews in France to the death

and labor camps to the east. Vichy’s role in this

event was notable for its cooperation with the

German occupation authorities: as German officials

would report, French officials were exemplary in

their roundup. On one occasion, Vichy administrators even offered SS General Heydrich to include, in

the roundup, Jews from the unoccupied part of

France over which the Germans had little control!79

The Vichy leadership always could find ample

rationale for its actions. In late September 1942, the

Vichy representative to Washington, Henry Haye,

received a long cable from Vichy, under the signature of Pierre Laval, who held both offices of the

Vichy prime minister and foreign minister, which

explained the government’s actions regarding the
Page 91

Jews. The message revealed much about the longstanding nationalist French attitude towards foreign Jews and the supposed influence of them on

the social and political life of France. In it, Laval

claimed that the war had created an “excessive”

percentage of Jews in a “region” of France that

already had contained a high number of them.

These “people without a country” (apatrides) were

an element that was “manifestly dangerous” to

France. Faced with a variety of tribulations, Laval

claimed that the foreign Jews were especially susceptible to outside propaganda and would be a

source of disturbances. The only solution, according to Laval, was repatriation to Eastern Europe,

the “land of their origin.” Laval claimed that this

“operation” was not a persecution. He lambasted

other countries that dared to criticize France,

notably the United States, which had “close[d] their

doors to Jewish immigration.” 80 [See attachment 6

for the translation of the full text of Laval’s statement.]

Laval’s September statement added new rationalizations for Vichy policy that he previously sent to

his ambassadors in Latin America on how to

respond to the criticism from that region. In one

earlier message for the Vichy mission to Brazil, he

said that France could not “permit the prolongation

of the stay on its soil of [alien?] Jews whose principle [sic] occupations are black marketing and

Communistic propaganda.” He would go on, “None

of them works, but each consumes and diminishes

by so much the [supplies?], which are indispensable to the French.”81

The Allied codebreakers recorded the international reactions to Vichy’s policy and performance in regard to the Jews. As a result of the

roundup, the cable lines and airwaves between

Vichy and foreign capitals, especially Washington,

Roundup of Jews on the boulevard Voltaire in the

eleventh arrondissement (district) of Paris. (Courtesy:

Bilbiotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris via the

USHMM)

Translation of message from Vichy mission in

Washington to Vichy inquiring after status of visas for

foreign Jews living in France

(Source: RG 457, HCC, Box 332)
Page 92

were filled with desperate appeals by Jews in the

U.S. and Latin America seeking information about

relatives who awaited a decision on their fate while

interned in French concentration camps at Drancy,

Rivesaltes, Casemeuil, Gurs, and other sites. Pleas

for exit visas for the interned Jews came through

the Vichy mission in Washington, DC, which

relayed the requests from the consulates in other

American cities, such as New York, Chicago, and

San Francisco.82 In other cases, important individual Americans, such as Congressman Samuel

Dickstein (D-NY), chairman of the House

Immigration and Naturalization Committee, personally interceded in appeals for exit visas. Also,

influential Jewish organizations, such as the World

Jewish Congress and the Jewish Relief Society

intervened on behalf of Jews stranded in Marseilles

and in North Africa.83

Allied COMINT also recorded the international

tide of protest heaped on France as a result of the

roundup of the Jews. The sharpest rebukes were

contained in the reports from French diplomats in

Latin America. They itemized for Vichy the many

protests against the deportation of Jews from the

mostly Catholic populations of the region. As one

French diplomat in Argentina noted, the most

influential paper in that country had editorialized

that France, once the fatherland to Saint Louis

and Joan of Arc, was now “an anti-Christian country.”84 In a message intercepted by the Canadian

Examination Unit, the French ambassador in Brazil

asked Vichy for a clarification of charges in the

British and American press that the French clergy

and press have attacked the deportations. “Because

of the repercussions these two [last] allegations can

have in strongly Catholic countries, I should like to

be sent the true facts of the matter.”85 Other diplomats reported how the Western press services

reported on the arrests and deportations of Jews,

and “incidents,” such as the arrest of a school headmaster in Lyons who refused to turn over a list of

Jewish children of whom he had taken charge.86

In Washington, Ambassador Haye reported on

31 October that the Polish ambassador stationed

there had passed along the complaint of the Polish

government-in-exile in London about the deportation of Polish Jews and veterans who had fought in

the French army in 1940. The Pole also protested to

Vichy the recent obligatory mobilization of Polish

workers for work in Germany.87 In a response to

Haye’s cables, Vichy dismissed the protests and

claimed that, since there were no diplomatic relations between Vichy and the Polish government-inexile, there was no need to answer the ambassador’s complaints. Vichy did allow Haye to verbally assure the Poles that no Polish workers from the

unoccupied zone would be mobilized. The situation

of the Polish Jews was not even mentioned in the

dispatch.88

Other countries complained to Vichy regarding

the treatment of their nationals by the Vichy

authorities. In one case, the Mexican government

strongly objected to the seizure of the property of a

Jewish Mexican national living in Nice. The

Mexican diplomats also objected to the harassment

of this person by French police. The French offered

to appoint a Mexican administrator to oversee the

liquidation of the individual’s property. The

Mexican ambassador reported that Vichy had

ignored earlier protests regarding the treatment of

its citizen. He urged the foreign ministry in Mexico

City to make the strongest statement possible and

consider commercial reprisals against Vichy. The

Mexican ambassador also informed his superiors

that Vichy was seizing the property of Jewish citizens of the United States and Turkey, as well as

restricting their activities.89

The Vichy regime would continue to be

unmoved by foreign criticism. Marshal Petain

appeared to believe that he was acting in the best

interest of the French state. But he would be chastised by no less an authority than the Pope’s representative. At a late July luncheon at a hotel in

Vichy, Petain commented to the Apostolic Nuncio,

Cardinal Valerio Valeri that he was consoled by the

fact that the Pope understood and approved his

policy on the Jews. Valeri had to correct Petain.

According to a report by the Ecuadorian minister to
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Vichy that was intercepted by the British, the

Nuncio told Petain at the luncheon that he was mistaken about the Pope. The “Holy Father does not

approve of it.”90 Valeri later asked for another

meeting in which he delivered the Pope’s plea to

stop the persecutions. Even the personal protest of

the Pope to Marshal Philippe Petain, the chief of

state, stirred “Le Marechal” only to limit the ongoing deportations to foreign Jews living in the

occupied zone of France.91 Vichy’s attitude

remained fixed. Another intercepted cable of 13

September carried the revealing statement that, “It

is a matter of purifying France of the foreign Jews.”

The same cable carried another remark attributed

to a Vichy official that “nothing would divert the

French Government from the policy it is following

about the Jewish question.”92

An emotionally charged case that arose during

the deportations concerned the fate of about 5,000

(maybe as many as 8,000) children of foreign Jews

left in France as orphans after their parents had

been “sent east.” The governments of both the

United States and Vichy France took up the issue.

In late August 1942 the U.S. charge d’affaires,

Pinkney Tuck, had approached Laval about the

orphaned children. Laval played a cynical game

with the Americans. His administration leaked an

offer it claimed to have made to the United States:

that France would send all of its Jews to America if

Washington would grant them exit visas. This leak

was probably a ploy to embarrass the U.S., for it

appears that Laval never intended to allow the children to leave. He already had turned down an offer

by the Dominican Republic to take in many of the

children.93 He soon released a statement that

France would solve this problem in a “humane”

manner and not separate the children from their

parents. But France would not stop deporting the

foreign Jews. Privately, though, Laval continued to

play with the Americans. He insisted that no fanfare would accompany the children’s arrival in the

U.S. The situation became more confused when

stories were published that claimed that children of

French workers sent to Germany as forced labor

were to go to the United States.94

On 30 October the Vichy ambassador in

Washington, Henry Haye, met with Undersecretary

of State Sumner Welles, who assured Haye that the

U.S. would not “make one believe” that the children

belonged to French workers. Welles added that the

State Department publicly would explain that not

all of the orphans were Jewish so as to calm the

fears of unidentified “groups of Americans” that

“too many Jews” were coming into the country.”95

Despite a public statement by Secretary of State

Cordell Hull that “negotiations were going along

satisfactorily,” the French had backed off from

releasing the children. Ultimately, Quaker relief

workers managed to get about 350 of the children

out, but the rest remained in France. Many reasons

have been put forward for Vichy’s clumsy and cynical handling of the issue – the foreign Jewish children helped meet the German quotas for Jews and

protected French Jews; it made administrative

sense not to separate families; or Laval’s desire to

avoid further tension with German occupation

authorities.96

With the Allied invasion of French North Africa

in November 1942, the communications intelligence window to the roundup and incarceration of

foreign Jews in mainland France closed. Axis covert

intelligence agents, located in Spanish-controlled

Tangier, reported that the Jews, along with communists, and Allied national internees in the newly

liberated regions of French North Africa, had been

freed from the numerous concentration and labor

camps established by Vichy.97 The number of Jews

held in French detention camps in North Africa

numbered about 15,000 out of a population of

around 295,000.98 The Axis agents also reported

that the prohibitions against the Jews in governmental service and the schools had been lifted.

Interestingly, though, the removal of these sanctions only occurred months after the Allies had liberated French North Africa. The new regime in

North Africa under Admiral Jean Darlan and

General Henri Giraud had refused to abrogate the
Page 94

Statutes des Juifs immediately after liberation. One

of their claims was that to remove the laws would

incite the Arab population. However, Moslems as a

group steadfastly and consistently had refused to

participate in Vichy’s anti-Jewish program. In fact

many of the Moslem elite openly had supported the

Jews.99

After the Allied invasion of North Africa, Vichy’s

propaganda organs continued to crank out a range

of pieces that emphasized the claim that there were

Jewish connections with communist front groups

that, in turn, were working for the eventual

Bolshevik takeover of France’s former colonies.

Vichy’s propagandists in their effort to discover any

Jewish connection with the Free French, also pointed out the fact that the wife of General Georges

Catroux, one of General De Gaulle’s principal subordinates, was Jewish.100

An interesting sidelight to the liberation came

from the intercepts of the messages from the

French Committee for National Liberation to its

High Commissioner in Algiers that indicated that

many Jews in North Africa had resisted the reinstatement of the provisions of the Cremieux Decree,

an 1870 law that conferred French citizenship

specifically on Jews in Algeria. Many Algerian Jews

felt that the decree created animosity between them

and the Arab population, and “preferred to recover

their citizenship as did every other group.”101

For the rest of the war, the only hints from

Vichy communications as to the fate of Jews in its

territories came out of Indochina. There, in

January 1945, Governor-General Decoux had

decided to drop the various repressive statutes

instituted under the Vichy regime. Among others,

the bans against secret societies and the antiJewish statutes were repealed. The French administration in Hanoi had claimed that it had instituted the laws only because of pressure from Vichy.

Now that Vichy had vanished, the colonial administration saw no need for the strictures. The governor-general’s administration in Hanoi restored former university and lycee professors, employees,

and officials to the positions they held prior to the

decrees. As the colony’s chief political officer noted

to a Japanese official, all of this only came “after it

had become obvious that Vichy was virtually

extinct.”102

As for the Holocaust in France, ultimately

90,000 Jews from that country were sent to the

camps in the east. Fewer than 3,000 returned.

While Allied COMINT revealed their roundup and

transport to holding camps in France, it did not

record their ultimate fate in the East.

D. The Destruction of Hungary’s Jews, 1944

If one were to look at a map of Europe in early

1944 to see what havoc had been wreaked on its

Jewish population, there would have been much

devastation. One of the few exceptions in this landscape of death was the Jewish community of

Hungary with its approximate 800,000 members.

Hungary’s Jewish community could hardly have

been unaware of what had happened elsewhere in

Europe. Information on the fate of Jews elsewhere

in occupied Europe had been flowing to Budapest

for some time, but had been largely ignored or discounted as not being relevant to the situation in

Hungary.103 Ultimately, Hungarian Jewry suffered

enormous losses after the Nazi extermination

machinery was turned on them. This happened in

the last year of the war in Europe when the power

of the Nazi regime was falling before Allied military

assaults from east, south, and west. The reduction

of Hungary’s Jews is also remarkable because it

happened in full view of the outside world, mainly

before Budapest’s community of foreign diplomatic

missions and nongovernmental organizations, such

as the Red Cross, which reported on the initial

roundups in the countryside and the final

onslaught in Budapest itself.

That the fury of the Holocaust was visited late

on Hungary’s Jewish population was the result

largely of that country’s role in the war as a limited

ally of Germany. Hungary had aligned itself with

Nazi Germany for opportunistic reasons. This
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alliance allowed Hungary to annex land from

neighboring Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and

Romania. Hungary had long-standing territorial

claims and historic concerns over sizable ethnic

Magyar populations living in all three countries.

Hungary also picked up a sizable ethnic Romanian

population when it received Transylvania. The

price for this cooperation was that Hungary got

involved in the battle between Nazi Germany and

the Soviet Union. Within the context of the gigantic

campaign on the eastern front, Hungary’s limited

territorial aims were meaningless; hopelessly

entangled with Berlin’s fate, Budapest had to go

along with the war against Moscow and, ultimately,

the Nazi plan for the liquidation of its Jews.

Hungary’s prewar Jewish population was a little

over 400,000. The government had implemented a

number of restrictive measures against its Jews

through a series of decrees from 1938 to 1941. The

early laws applied only to Jews defined by their religion. In August 1941 Hungary’s first law that

defined Jews in racial terms was adopted. This definition applied even to Jews who had been baptized

into Hungary’s Christian churches, though the law

was not ironclad. This ruling increased Hungary’s

Jewish population by about another 100,000.

By 1941 Hungary’s Jewish population totaled about

800,000. This was nearly double its prewar number. Much of the increase was due to Hungary’s territorial expansion; lands annexed from its neighbors contained many Jews. Other Jews had fled to

Hungary with the illusion that it would remain a

haven. Still, the full effect of the implementation of

these anti-Semitic measures was mitigated for

almost three years until early 1944. Much of this

restraint was due to the critical position that many

Jews held in Hungary. To a large extent they constituted a large segment of Hungary’s professional

and middle class and were considered indispensable to its economy.104

The Nazi leadership was never pleased with

Hungary’s unenthusiastic prosecution of the war

and of the “Jewish Question.” Even as early as

October 1943, Japanese diplomats reported that

Hungary might “follow in Italy’s footsteps.”

Germany, they reported, was unhappy with

Hungary and convinced that Premier Milkos Kallay

was backed by a “Jewish financial clique.”105 This

tolerance appeared to Berlin as just another example of Budapest’s overall lukewarm participation in

the war and implementation of German racial policies.106 So, in mid-March 1944 Hitler personally

presented the Hungarian regent and dictator,

Admiral Miklos Horthy, with the choice of German

military occupation or the formation of a Germanapproved government dominated by Hungarians

friendly to Germany. The new prime minister (and

foreign minister) was Dome Sztojay, the former

Hungarian minister to Berlin. A number of German

officials moved into Hungary and directed that

country’s military, economic, and security activities. Horthy agreed to form a new government on

22 March.

A German SondereinsatzKommando (a special

task force) was formed in Germany under Adolph

Eichmann to organize the roundup and destruction

of the Hungarian Jews. Among the first efforts by

the Germans and their Hungarian allies was the

enforcement of more stringent economic measures

against Jewish businesses and investments. In

early April, Japanese diplomats in Budapest notified Tokyo of these new measures.107 Three months

later they noted that by June all of the stock held by

Jews in Hungary’s mining and heavy industrial

firms had been transferred to the Hermann

Goering Werke. The Japanese also reported that

the massive deportations had been efficient and

estimated that some 200,000 Jews were on their

way to Poland. Already, they noted, this action was

being “praised” as reducing Jewish influence

in Hungary.108 Regarding the deportation, a

Hungarian diplomatic dispatch to Ankara, Turkey,

from 12 June contained the curious statement that

Hungarian Jews were being sent to Germany to

work, and that, because “Jews are willing to go to a

strange place to work if not cut off from their families, the members of families are sent with them.”

The Hungarian officials in Turkey were assured

that the conditions for the Jews in Germany were
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“satisfactory.”109 Between the middle of May to the

middle of July, the first massive deportation of

Jews by the SS task force was completed.

Not all Hungarians approved of the new government or the deportations. In April some

Hungarian diplomats in Finland, Switzerland,

Portugal, Spain, and Sweden refused to recognize

the newly installed, German-supported government. As a result of this opposition, some of these

diplomats were removed from their positions or

stripped of Hungarian citizenship. In another case,

during the roundup of Jews in June, the Hungarian

minister to Switzerland sent a message to Baron

Apor, the Hungarian representative to the Vatican,

begging him to publicize the danger to the Jews.110

Presumably, Baron Apor was to alert some element

within the Papacy to the crisis in Hungary. 

An ancillary issue that arose during the first

operations by the SS was the status of foreign Jews

living in Hungary. During the summer deportations, the diplomatic missions of Vichy France,

Romania, and Switzerland were ordered by the

Hungarian government to facilitate the departure

of their nations’ Jews from the country.111 In the

fall, more countries would intervene on the behalf

of their Jewish nationals trapped in Hungary and

threatened by the Nazi dragnets.

In late July there was a lull in the deportations.

After the failed attempt on Hitler’s life, the

Germans backed off from pressing Horthy’s regime

to continue further, large-scale deportations.

Smaller groups continued to be deported by train.

At least one German police message decoded

by GC&CS revealed that one trainload of 1,296

Jews from the town of Sarvar in western Hungary

Hungarian Jews being rounded up in Budapest (Courtesy: USHMM)
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had departed for Auschwitz on August 4.112 In

late August Horthy refused Eichmann’s request to

restart the deportations. Himmler ordered

Eichmann to leave Budapest. During this time,

some foreign missions and nongovernment organizations began modest rescue efforts of the remaining Hungarian Jews. For example, the

International Red Cross (IRC) was working on an

agreement with so-called “competent” Germans to

reroute 600 Hungarian Jews originally destined to

be transferred to Bergen-Belsen on 30 June. The

IRC was planning to move these Jews into

Switzerland. From there they would travel through

France to arrive in Spain.113 This latter message

probably referred to a train with 1,684 Jews aboard

who had paid a ransom to flee Hungary. A member

of the Budapest Jewish Refugee Committee, Rezso

Kastner, had arranged with local SS officials for this

train to be part of a trade of a “Jews for trucks” deal.

On 30 June, Eichmann, angry over the proposed

plan, ordered the train diverted to Bergen-Belsen.

Later that month, Swiss diplomats were arranging a transfer of Jewish children to hospitals in

Switzerland and Sweden. In late September, Swiss

diplomats in Budapest reported that the Germans

had layered on various conditions for the rescue of

these Jewish children. These included the stipulation that the first train out of Budapest contained

only “Aryan” children (possibly a reference to baptized Jews). The Jewish children were to be added

to a group of refugees slated for Palestine. (It is

possible that the Swiss originally intended to

send these children to Tangier, but that the plans

were changed. Instead, they were to go to

Switzerland.114) However, the Nazis and Hungarian

authorities stipulated that the children could not

leave until a general deportation of Jews from

Budapest to the Hungarian provinces had begun.

The Swiss diplomats said they could not agree to

this last condition. However, on 12 October, despite

the holdup of the train with the Jewish children, the

Swiss recommended to Bern that the train with the

Christian children, of whom 40 percent were converts, be sent. “We recommend saving as many

children as possible,” the diplomats informed

Bern.115 However, from the limited COMINT it is

unknown if this particular rescue initiative was successful.

In September Hungarian authorities relaxed

some restrictions on the Jews living in Budapest. At

the same time, some Hungarian politicians and

diplomats began secret surrender negotiations with

the Allies. German intelligence knew about these

maneuvers both from sympathizers within the

Horthy regime and their own intercepts of

Hungarian diplomatic messages that contained

surrender overtures to the Allies.116 In eastern

Hungary, the military situation for the Axis had

turned critical. In early October the Red Army had

crashed into southern Hungary and was only a hundred miles from the city. The Germans moved

swiftly to retrieve the situation, and on 15 October a

sudden coup spearheaded by a commando team

commanded by the SS Sonderkommando’s Oberst

Urbannfuhrer Otto Skorzeny toppled Horthy’s

regency. The OSS reported that German officials

planned to remove all Hungarian national gold,

estimated at some 30 million Reichmarks, to the

Reichsbank branch in Dresden.117

Meanwhile, the Red Army’s advance into

Poland forced the SS to close the camp complex at

Auschwitz. The Germans were in need of slave

labor for the underground plants producing jet aircraft and the various V-missiles. A decision was

made to use Hungary’s remaining Jews in these

and other assembly plants.118 Eichmann returned

to Budapest on 17 October to oversee the new

deportations. With rail transport unreliable and

scarce because of Allied air attacks and military priorities, the only way to get these Jews to Germany

was by forced march across central Europe’s

autumn and winter landscape. The Hungarian minister of interior announced that Jews would be

“mercilessly” treated. The Portuguese reported that

all Jewish homes had been closed and that

Budapest was “still in a state of siege.”119 The situation ameliorated by the 21st when exemptions to

the deportation decrees were allowed to Jews who
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had married Aryans or had received the protection

of foreign legations.120

There were few illusions among outside

observers as to what would happen to these Jews.

On 24 October the Portuguese minister to Budapest

reported to Lisbon that 60,000 Jews, men and

women, were going to be deported. He added that

14,000 had already left for Vienna, Austria, in a

forced march of twenty kilometers a day with “minimum” rations. “It is evident,” he reported, “that the

great majority will die even before crossing the

frontier.”121 In the days to come, the Portuguese

legation’s messages would be one of the principal

sources of communications intelligence about the

Hungarian Holocaust.

In October the foreign delegations banded

together to try to save as many Jews as possible.

They had already done this once before in the summer, but the forced exodus of the remaining Jews

under impossible conditions, and a new inhospitable Hungarian regime, was a spur to further

action. Other countries, such as Mexico, considered

granting visas for Jews to escape.122 One of the

major problems for the diplomats was the question

of recognition of the puppet regime under Ferenc

Szalasi. Szalasi, a cashiered army officer, who previously had led the Arrow Cross, had replaced

Horthy after the German coup. As the Portuguese

minister reported, it was known that Horthy had

been forced to sign a decree renouncing plans for

an armistice with the Allies. Most of the foreign

delegations were uncertain what to do. The

Swedish diplomatic mission was reluctant to

accommodate Szalasi. For some time it had been

handing out numerous “protective passports” to

Hungarian Jews. Raoul Wallenberg, the third secretary of the Swedish delegation and son of the

Swedish banking family, was the central figure

handing out the passports, arranging for food supplies, and interceding on behalf of detainees.123 The

Papal Nuncio to Budapest decided, on his own, to

recognize Szalasi, because of “the great interests of

the Catholic Church” in Hungary. He also was concerned about his Jewish “protégés...who would be

the first victims of the eventual rupture in relations.”124 According to Portuguese diplomats in the

Vatican, that country had not recognized the Szalasi

regime, though papal representatives were hoping

that “events will take it upon themselves to resolve

this contradictory situation before it becomes necessary to make its [Vatican] attitude clearer and

more coherent.”125 The other delegations, however,

were awaiting instructions from their capitals.126

The actions by Raoul Wallenberg have earned

him a justly deserved high regard in the annals of

the rescue of victims of the Holocaust. The Allies

could not exploit high-level Swedish diplomatic

messages that would have contained information

about conditions in Budapest and information

about Wallenberg’s rescue efforts.127 The only reference to Wallenberg in Allied SIGINT translations

appears in an intercepted Spanish diplomatic message from Washington to Madrid that referred to

his appointment to Budapest.128 Diplomatic messages from other delegations in Budapest refer to

Raoul Wallenberg

(Courtesy: USHMM)
Page 99

unnamed Swedish representatives attending meetings by the neutral diplomats as the latter tried to

coordinate a rescue policy. It is likely that some

or all the reported comments at these meetings

made by the unnamed Swedish delegates(s) can be

attributed to Wallenberg.129

However, the foreign delegations saw much of

their work defeated when the German and

Hungarian security forces arrested Jews who held

these protective passports. As the Portuguese

reported, the Germans did not respect the passports because, in their view, the Jews had not surrendered Hungarian citizenship when they received

the papers. The Portuguese ambassador somberly

informed Lisbon that he and the Swedish minister

were “equally incapable at this moment of averting

the impending tragedy.”130 Furthermore, by midNovember 1944, the Hungarian government

planned to abolish the extraterritoriality of the foreign legations in Budapest. It claimed that it could

no longer protect the diplomats’ premises. In practical terms, any effort by a third country to try to

save Jews would have to be conducted between

Berlin and its foreign ministry.131

Still, some diplomats continued to press relief

efforts. In Berlin, the Portuguese ambassador, acting under instructions from Premier Antonio

Salazar, took the matter to the German Foreign

Office State Secretary Adolf von Steengracht.

Steengracht told the ambassador that Germany or

Hungary would not admit that any Jews holding

foreign passports or protection cards would receive

protection from the deportations. The German

went on to state that the situation for Hungary’s

Jews was similar to that experienced earlier by

Germany’s Jews. Either they leave the country or

they remain subject to the laws set for the Jews.

Steengracht went on that Germany would not

assume responsibility for Hungarian actions. He

denied the ambassador’s claim that Germany controlled Hungary. He ended the meeting by stating

that Germany would not intervene in the matter.132

By late November, the Szalasi regime, in order

to organize and facilitate the final deportation,

established five categories of Jews: (1) Jews with

protective passes were to be concentrated in certain

houses and they would be approved to leave pending permission from Berlin to transit Germany;

(2) so-called “borrowed Jews” (Leih Juden), who

were to be handed over to Germany for labor service; (3) remaining Jews – children, elderly, pregnant women – were to be put in a ghetto; (4) clergy

and persons with special military or other honors

were to be separated, but not in a ghetto; and

(5) Jews from neutral nations who were to leave by

1 December.133

The conditions for the Jews who remained in

Budapest remained hard and dangerous. Left to the

depredations of the Germans and the Arrow Cross,

another 10,000 would die. Some of those who

received protective passports would reach safety in

Switzerland and other neutral countries. But by

war’s end, Hungarian Jewry had been largely

destroyed. A German diplomatic message of 30

December from Edmund Veesenmayer, the main

Nazi official in Hungary, reviewed the results of

Eichmann’s special task force. A total of 493,000

Jews had been deported from Hungary. Of these,

some 440,000 had been shipped out. Another

42,000 had been sent to build fortifications or work

in munitions plants. In the Ghetto in Budapest,

about another 100,000 remained, mostly “old men,

women as well as Jewish children.”134

E. Japan and the Jews in the Far East

During the war years, the Jewish communities

in the Far East living under the Japanese occupation - principally the 30,000 in Shanghai, but also

small communities in other Chinese cities and

throughout the Netherlands East Indies and

Philippines – lived under an administrative policy

that was noteworthy for its generally neutral attitude. (Another group lived in French Indo-China,

but they were subject to Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws

and suffered removal from government positions

and had prohibitions placed on their activities. See
Page 100

Section C.) Although a small number of Jews suffered maltreatment at the hands of individual

Japanese officials, few were imprisoned or restricted because of their identity. In these latter cases,

the Jews were singled out because they were stateless persons, having been stripped of their Polish or

German citizenship by Nazi policy, not necessarily

because they were Jews. Overall Japanese policy

and actions towards Jews as a group was one that

could be characterized as studied even-handedness.

The Japanese did not single out the Jews for special

attention or restrictions because of their “ethnic” or

religious uniqueness. On the other hand, the Jews

shared equally in the suspicion that the Japanese

held for all neutral and non-Japanese nationals living within the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity

Sphere.

The Japanese view of the Jews probably grew

out of the complicated mixture of racism, nationalism, and fear of foreign conspiracy and secret control of international events that dominated

Japanese national attitudes towards all foreigners,

especially those living in western countries.135

Significant anti-Semitism first appeared in Japan

after World War I and was probably part of the

extremist, anticommunist reaction against the

Bolshevik Revolution that strongly emphasized the

Jewish “nature” of the revolution, its ideology, and

its leaders. With the signing of the GermanJapanese Anti-COMINTERN Pact in 1936 and the

Tripartite Treaty of September 1940, anti-Semitism

gained a more formal footing in some of Tokyo’s

ruling circles. Meanwhile, the Japanese public was

exposed to a campaign of defamation that created a

popular image known as the Yudayaka, or the

“Jewish peril.”136

Still, attitudes among individual Japanese

diplomats and politicians varied greatly towards

the Jews and the attendant myths about them like

that of Jewish worldwide political and economic

influence. For example, in October and November

1937, Japanese diplomats in Paris reported to

Tokyo that part of the West’s opposition to Japan’s

invasion of China came from “English, American,

and French Jewish plutocrats.” These bankers were

intent on supplying China with arms, and were willing to sustain this support “in a long struggle.”137

An earlier Japanese diplomatic message from Paris

had reported that the Jews were also making use of

local newspapers to stir up opposition to Japan.

This message also mentioned that a Japanese

national in Paris had deplored the change that had

occurred since the “days of the Russo-Japanese

War when the Jewish financial clique was trying to

help Japan in retaliation against Russia.”138

On the other hand, in 1939 the Japanese

ambassador to Berlin, Baron Oshima Hiroshi,

reminded Tokyo of Japan’s debt to certain Jews

who had helped it during the war with Russia in

1905. On 16 January 1939, he cabled Tokyo about

one Jew, unnamed, who had fled Nazi Germany for

Britain and was in dire personal straits. Oshima

admitted that there was little that Tokyo could do

for this man. However, Oshima noted that the person performed valuable intelligence work for Japan

during the 1905 war by notifying it of the sailing of

the Tsar’s Baltic Fleet, and that his steamships (presumably this individual owned a shipping line) had

been used to gather intelligence from Russian

ports. Oshima suggested that this individual should

be given some sort of token of Tokyo’s gratitude.139

In another similar case that same month, Tokyo’s

ambassador to Washington, Kensuku Horinouchi,

went out of his way to assure an American acquaintance that a German Jew, Kurb Singer, a professor

of economics teaching at a university in Tokyo, had

not been removed from his position because he was

a Jew. The ambassador insisted that Jews were not

discriminated against in Japan. Horinouchi suspected that the professor had been let go for some

other reason and that he was cabling Tokyo to find

out what had happened.140

These few examples illustrate the difficult problem of attempting to generalize the variety of opinions held by Japanese diplomats and other officials

towards the Jews. The majority of the Japanese

political, diplomatic, and military leadership probably did not embrace the philosophical, theological,
Page 101

racial, or pseudo-scientific bases that underpinned

the Western, and primarily European, versions of

anti-Semitism. On the other hand, many Japanese

officials appear to have been impressed enough by

the claims of Jewish worldwide political and economic influence to try to use it to Japan’s advantage. Based on Western signals intelligence sources,

in this case almost exclusively Tokyo’s diplomatic

message traffic, the Japanese attitude towards

world Jewry was revealed in further detail as a subtle, complex, and contradictory structure that combined a suspicion of everything foreign with a pragmatic, opportunistic effort to exploit a “Jewish

card” in relations with Western countries, especially the United States.

In the late 1930s, the Japanese were examining

various political and economic tactics by which to

exert some leverage on American leaders regarding

problems such as Pacific-wide security arrangements, trade relations, and the ongoing war with

China. In late 1939, for example, Japanese diplomats in Washington had urged Tokyo to establish

guidelines for the Imperial Army that would avoid

or minimize damage to American economic interests in China.141 Tokyo’s politicians suggested

another approach to take with Washington. The

plan was to organize a liaison effort with American

Christian missionaries in China so as to remove

that source of friction with Washington.142

Along the economic front, Japanese officials in

occupied China and the puppet regime in

Manchukuo had tried various measures to lure foreign investment capital from the U.S. so as to ease

relations between Tokyo and Washington. One

tack, revealed by intercepted messages, was to tie

the investments to a policy of eased immigration for

European Jews to Shanghai.143 In late 1939 to early

1940, a series of intercepted Japanese diplomatic

messages revealed that a private Japanese citizen

with quasi-official connections to Tokyo and a

prominent Jewish manufacturer from New York

had developed a similar plan that included a subsidy for Jewish immigrants to Shanghai. However,

both plans went nowhere as they ran aground on

the reefs of heightened mutual suspicion between

Tokyo and Washington.144

The Japanese also were interested in exploiting

the possibilities offered by individual Jews with

whom they believed held a certain influence in

international affairs. One such person was Sir

Victor Sassoon, an investment banker and leading

citizen of the long-standing Sephardic Jewish community in Shanghai. (Jews from the Iberian

Peninsula originally were referred to as Sephardic

Jews. Later, the term included all Jews from North

Africa or the Middle East. In the late 19th century,

a large number of Sephardic Jews from Iraq had

immigrated to Shanghai and established the community there.) In 1939 Sassoon traveled to the

United States on a business trip. Translations of

intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages revealed

that Tokyo had alerted its diplomats to watch

Sassoon at his every stop, record what he said, and

with whom he met. In fact, in New York City, an

individual, termed a “secret agent,” made a covert

contact with Sassoon’s private secretary to determine the businessman’s purpose for the trip. It

turns out this “agent” was a United Press correspondent who told the Japanese that Sassoon was

staying at the Ritz Towers for about a month.

Apparently the banker was looking into building a

manufacturing facility in New Jersey.145 On his

return trip to Shanghai, Japanese diplomats in

Honolulu reported Sassoon’s comments at a press

conference there regarding the situation in China.

After the start of the war in the Pacific and with

the resulting closer workings with the other Axis

powers, the Japanese were pressured by the

Germans to do something about the Jewish communities under their control – principally

Shanghai. The Japanese were aware that Berlin’s

cancellation of German citizenship of all Jews who

had left Germany that affected several thousand

Jews in Shanghai. And in May 1942, an intercept of

a message from the Japanese embassy in Berlin

revealed that Alfred Rosenberg, Nazism’s “philosopher” and Minister to the Occupied Eastern

Territories, had urged the Japanese to do some-
Page 102

thing about the Jews living in their territories

before they became a “problem.” He was particularly anxious to limit their free travel through the rest

of southern Asia.146

Yet, the Japanese refused to go along with the

German demands. In late January 1942, even as the

German authorities met at Wannsee to finalize the

mechanisms for the Holocaust, Tokyo’s policy was,

as some of their diplomats said, “to go easy in our

policy towards the Jews.”147 In mid-March 1942,

the Japanese policy towards the Jews was set out in

a message broadcast from Tokyo to all diplomatic

stations in the Far East. The message declared that

the fundamental policy towards Jews, as set out in

a Japanese Diet declaration in 1938, would be only

partly modified to account for the Axis alliance.

Jews would still be considered as any other group of

foreigners, although the distinction of “Jewishness”

would be based on race and culture. But this distinction applied only to stateless refugees – which

meant German and Polish Jews. Any expulsion of

Jews from Japanese-controlled territory was considered contrary to the stated Japanese national

policy of the Common Brotherhood of Mankind

(Hakko Ichiu – literally “8 roofs, 1 house”).

Therefore, Tokyo’s official policy was this: Jews

holding citizenship of any country would be accorded treatment comparable to citizens of that country.

Jews without citizenship would be considered

stateless, in the same category as White Russian

émigrés. This group of Jews would be under surveillance because of their “racial characteristics.”

Another category of Jews, those who could be considered “useful” to Japan because of their political

or economic influence, would receive the same

treatment that they received prior to the war.148

For the duration of the war, the Japanese held

to this policy in the lands that they occupied. Aside

from some isolated incidents of harassment by

individual Japanese occupation functionaries and a

A row of shops owned by Jewish refugees on Seward Road in Shanghai

(Courtesy: USHMM from YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)
Page 103

small number of Jews who were interned in detention camps in Malaysia and the Netherlands East

Indies, the Japanese treated the Jews no differently than other neutral or national groups.149 In the

Philippines, the Japanese military occupation

administration issued a general warning to Jews

believed to have been involved in black market

operations, price manipulation, and espionage. A

German report from its embassy in Tokyo noted

that the Japanese threatened drastic actions

against anyone involved in these activities, “irrespective of the nationality of the persons concerned.”150

True, Jews in Shanghai were legally circumscribed in their daily activities. Yet these restrictions were the same the Japanese had ordered for

all neutral nationals.151 In French Indochina, the

Japanese requested that the French institute similar restrictions of Jews and citizens of neutral countries who held anti-Axis opinions. They also asked

French authorities to keep Jews and neutrals under

surveillance and that the Vichy colonial regime

limit any influx of “such people” into Indochina.152

Japanese concerns about Jewish attitudes towards

them (and the Axis in general) grew more anxious,

especially as the course of the war turned against

Tokyo.153 Overall, though, the Japanese remained

scrupulously correct in their treatment of the Jews.

Interestingly, the Japanese official attitude was

tested in mid-1944. In May, Baron Oshima Hiroshi,

the Japanese ambassador to Berlin, reported to

Tokyo that he had been invited by the German

Foreign Office to participate in a forum sponsored

by the international anti-Jewish front to be held in

June or July in Krakow, Poland. The theme of the

forum was “The Role of the Jew in Contemporary

World Politics.” Participants would include scholars of the “Jewish question” such as ethnologists,

historians, economists, and others. The Germans

were anxious to secure the attendance of representatives from neutral countries in order to “underscore the international character of the meeting.”154

Oshima reported that a number of high-ranking

individuals from occupied Europe were going to

participate in the forum. These included Premier

Tuka of Slovakia, a General Bonnard from France,

the interior minister of Hungary, and the Grand

Mufti of Jerusalem.155 The Baron cautioned Tokyo

about participating in this forum. He mentioned

that Japan’s current racial policy precluded it. “The

Germans do not consider the Jewish question as

one related to the human race, but the proposition...is not held generally.” The ambassador added

that the Allies would make much propaganda from

Japan’s participation. Yet he mentioned that the

“Jewish question” was going to play a greater role in

European politics. Also, for purposes of solidarity

with the Axis, Japan should attend as an observer.156 Tokyo agreed with Oshima’s reasoning and

told him to do as he had suggested. However,

because of the Allied invasion in Normandy, the

conference was postponed until the fall of 1944.

This conference never convened.157

During the war, the biggest problem facing the

Jewish communities in the Far East was the constant shortage of supplies and money for the relief

of the tides of refugees that had arrived at the various cities since 1939. Throughout the war, Japanese

officials in Chinese cities were reminded to allow

Jewish relief organizations to operate and that

Tokyo’s officials were to cooperate with the agencies in their efforts. They were to cooperate even if

suspicious of their “direction and leaderships.”158

Interestingly, in September 1944 Swiss diplomats

in Shanghai reported that the Japanese were reluctant to allow the International Red Cross to intervene and help the Jews in the city. The Swiss added

that the Japanese claimed that Jewish organizations were adequately helping the refugees. The

Swiss representative finally noted that he had

refrained from passing along individual complaints

from the refugees about mistreatment by certain

[Japanese] officials since it might jeopardize his

work with prisoners of war and interned civilians.159
Page 104

This relief work was especially difficult in

Shanghai because of the nearly 20,000 refugee

Jews who had arrived at the city during the previous few years. Allied intercept of Swiss, Vichy

French, and Japanese diplomatic messages from

that city offered glimpses into the various efforts to

get funding from donations and remittances from

Jewish relief agencies, primarily those in the

United States.160 For example, from late 1943 to

late 1944, the stateless Polish population in that

city, including many Jews, was in dire straits. Both

the Polish government-in-exile and Vichy France –

many Poles were living in the French Concession –

provided relief funds for various aid groups and

individuals in Shanghai.161

A number of Jews, maybe as many as 15,000,

and made up probably of a large number of stateless persons, were living in a restricted area in

Shanghai already heavily damaged by the fighting

between Japanese and Chinese forces in 1937. In

late July 1945, during several American 14th Air

Force bombing attacks on the city, stray bombs had

hit this section killing some 30 inhabitants and

injuring another 300. Because of the damage, the

Japanese allowed many of these Jews to relocate to

other sections of the city. They also allowed the

American Joint Relief Committee to extend war

relief funds to those affected by the bombing. 162

By the end of the war, the Japanese attempted

to press a propaganda theme that pointedly contrasted their treatment of the Jews in Asia to that of

the Nazis in Europe. Some of Tokyo’s diplomats

and other government officials seemed to believe

that this distinction would gain them influence

among Jews around the world. Following this line

of reasoning, then, these Japanese officials believed

that Jews in the United States and Great Britain

would influence government policy favorably

towards Japan.163 However, the Japanese consulgeneral in Harbin informed Tokyo on 6 March 1945

that the Jews in his region looked upon the

impending defeat of the Germans as “divine punishment,” and believed that the Japanese had no

hope of victory.164 The idea that the Japanese could

persuade Jews from around the world, based on

their fair treatment of the latter, to influence Allied

policy, comes full circle to the prewar belief of the

Japanese about Jewish influence, which was as

mistaken in 1945 as it had been in 1939.

For whatever reasons, it was true that the

Japanese had treated the Jews in their territories

equitably, but Tokyo had an entire hemisphere of

atrocities and war crimes for which it had to

answer.

F. Nazi Gold: National and Personal Assets

Looted by Nazis and Placed in Swiss Banks,

1943 - 1945

The expression “Nazi Gold’ has become a popular, shorthand reference that covers a number of

illicit wartime economic activities carried out by

Nazi Germany in collusion with neutral countries

like Sweden, Portugal, Spain, and, most importantly, Switzerland. These activities included the expropriation of personal wealth from Jews by the

Nazis; the seizure of national gold holdings by

the Germans; its processing and shipment to

Switzerland as payment for purchases of war material from other neutrals; and the exchange of

German Reichmarks into more acceptable currencies such as Swedish kroner or Swiss francs. It also

refers to the wartime activities by private and public Swiss banks, notably the Swiss National Bank in

Bern, which purchased the German gold, as well as

the postwar expropriation of the assets from dormant accounts of Holocaust victims by these banks

and other financial institutions.

In the fifty years after the end of World War II,

a number of separate efforts in Europe and the

United States coalesced and refocused attention on

the issue of settling the claims of Holocaust victims

whose private assets were stolen by the Nazis or

expropriated by Swiss financial corporations. While

this aspect of the issue was prominent in the daily

news during the mid-to late 1990s, the related

problem of national gold looted by the Nazis and
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transferred to Swiss banks resurfaced, as well. In

1997 the National Security Agency released to the

National Archives over 300 Swiss diplomatic translations dealing with the Allied-Swiss negotiations

over this issue that produced the Washington

Accord of May 1946. These translations were used

in the U.S. government’s report U.S. and Allied

Efforts to Recover and Restore Gold and Other

Assets Stolen or Hidden by Germany During

World War II – Preliminary Study.

165 However,

there also was some wartime cryptologic intelligence that related to the Nazi looting. This section

will discuss briefly that wartime information. Those

interested in the postwar negotiations between the

Allied Committee and Switzerland should refer to

the U.S. government study cited above, pages 63-

88.

From the beginning of the war, Great Britain

was aware of the importance of the economic,

industrial, and financial underpinnings of the Nazi

war machine. Germany could benefit from trade in

strategic raw materials such as chrome from

Turkey, wolfram (tungsten) from Spain, and iron

ore from Sweden. Germany also purchased industrial products from Sweden and Switzerland. It was

the potential industrial and financial support that

Switzerland could provide to Germany that most

concerned Great Britain and, later, the United

States. Switzerland’s industries could produce war

material from finished steel to actual military

equipment such as optics, ammunition, and guns.

In the financial sphere, the Swiss banking structure

could facilitate currency exchanges, gold transactions, international fund transfers, asset liquidation, and the formation of front corporations to

acquire restricted raw material and other contraband.

To manage the war on the economic front, the

British formed the Ministry of Economic Warfare

in 1939. The United States established the Board of

Economic Warfare in December 1941 that replaced

the Economic Defense Board. The Allies also made

a number of administrative actions and declarations that expanded the boundaries of economic

restrictions against the Axis. Beginning in April

1940, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order

8389 that froze Norwegian and Danish assets in the

United States. Many European country’s assets,

except for those of the United Kingdom, were

included in this order. This was followed by declarations against trade by hostile firms and individuals, and transfers of property in occupied countries.

On 22 February 1944, the United States declared

that it would not recognize the transfer of gold by

the Axis. Project Safehaven, established in the late

summer of 1944, was the Allies’ major effort to curtail all Axis economic, financial, commercial activity outside occupied territories during the war. It

also was charged with ensuring that German assets

would be available for reparations, and that looted

properties would be returned to its rightful owners.

Safehaven also was meant to prevent the Nazis

from accumulating funds to finance any postwar

resurgence. Included in these many aims were

more detailed instructions to restrict the flow of

capital and gold from Germany for the purchase of

war material.166 Despite this and similar efforts by

Great Britain, it is estimated that Nazi Germany

still confiscated some 579 million dollars in gold

from eleven countries and that about 300 million

dollars’ worth had gone to Swiss banks (figures in

1945 dollars).167

It should be noted that Allied concern with neutral trade in war-related material with the Axis was

not restricted solely to Switzerland. Other neutrals,

such as Spain, Portugal, Turkey, and Sweden also

were pressured during the war to cease favorable

currency trading and the export of raw materials

and manufactured items that the German war

machine could use.168 In the case of Sweden,

Japanese diplomats reported in late March 1945

that Stockholm had protested to Washington about

the February announcement of an American socalled “blacklist” that included about 550 Swedish

firms accused of trading with the Axis. The United

States government declared that it would prohibit

any trade with any of these firms, or any other firms

that traded with those on the list. According to the

Japanese diplomats, the Swedish minister of
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Commerce had detailed the discovery and crackdown on Swedish firms that were involved in the

transfer of German capital. By mid-March, the

Japanese reported that the Americans had softened

their stance on Swedish trade.169

Most of the communications supporting substantive trade and financial negotiations and agreements between Berlin and Bern, and other

European neutral capitals, were done in ways that

were generally inaccessible to Allied communications monitoring: cables, telephones, couriers, or

direct talks. What signals intelligence had been

obtained about German-Swiss economic activity

came from Allied intercept of Axis and neutral

diplomatic and commercial radio traffic. One

prominent source about these talks and transactions was the communications of the ubiquitous

Japanese diplomats, in this case, the Japanese minister in Bern, Kase Shunichi. The Japanese had a

vested interest in the commercial and economic

talks between the Germans and Swiss because they,

too, were affected directly by Allied efforts to curtail

Axis economic activity. The Japanese purchased

war material in neutral and Axis-dominated

Europe. Japan often paid for its purchases in gold

or used Swiss francs.170 So when the German and

Swiss representatives met to discuss trading activity, payment, and Nazi accounts, the Japanese took

an interest in the outcome and reported what they

learned to Tokyo.

Another SIGINT source was the intercept of the

messages of the German Reichsbank’s foreign

transactions by the monitoring stations of the

GC&CS and RSS. Their take was turned over to a

small effort within GC&CS mounted against commercial traffic that had been started in 1938. With

the beginning of the war, this section significantly

expanded and subsequently settled in working

spaces near the GC&CS diplomatic effort in

London. Surprisingly, most of the effort was aimed

at commercial message traffic either sent in the

clear or that used publicly available commercial

codes such as the Bentley system. In the case of the

Reichsbank, the messages were transmitted in the

Peterson Code, another popular and publicly available commercial code.171

A third source of information was the translations of the diplomatic and commercial dispatches

provided to the OSS in Bern – the previously mentioned Boston Series from source George Wood

(a.k.a. Fritz Kolbe). Some of the messages that

Kolbe turned over to Allen Dulles were cables from

German diplomats in Switzerland who reported on

financial and trade negotiations, and messages

from Emil Puhl, the vice president of the

Reichsbank, who often journeyed to Switzerland

and conducted meetings with Swiss bank representatives regarding economic and financial activity

such as gold and currency exchange transactions.

Interestingly, the Germans also had a COMINT

source that allowed them, in turn, the limited

ability to monitor Allied efforts to curtail German

trade and financial activities within Switzerland.

Three German cryptanalytic bureaus – the

Forschungamt (Directorate of Research) controlled by Herman Goering; the codebreaking office

(Chiffrierabteilung) of the German Armed Forces

Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht),

or OKW/Chi; and the German Foreign Ministry’s

Pers Z – were able to exploit a number of U.S.

Department of State cryptographic systems during

the war. This ability came through a combination of

physical compromise of some State Department

cryptographic systems and pure cryptanalysis of

some other codes and ciphers. Specifically, the

Germans were able to read cables secured in the

Department’s Black and Brown Codes, and the O-2

Strip Cipher System, though mostly from the latter.172

Beginning in early 1943, and continuing

through December 1944, the OKW/Chi exploited

cables from over fifty overseas U.S. diplomatic

facilities. The intercept was done by two German

monitoring stations at Treuenbrietzen near Berlin

and Lauf-an-der-Pebnitz near Nuremberg. The

Germans had a limited ability to read the American

minister’s messages, and it sometimes took time for
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the intercept to be turned into a reportable form.

These intercepts were decrypted and translated

into German. The resulting translation, known

as a ‘VN’ (for Verlaessliche Nachrichten or

“Trustworthy Reports”) was circulated among the

membership of the Nazi hierarchy. According to

Nazi officials, useful intelligence was retrieved from

the messages. One official recalled that as many as

three or four of the dispatches from the U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, Leland Harrison, were

included in the daily summaries known informally

as the “Brown Sheets,” or they were included in

the German High Command’s (OKW) daily briefing.173

The traffic between the overseas diplomatic

missions and Washington covered a number of topics of interest to Berlin: Allied proposals to restrict

German trade with Switzerland, limits to bank

accounts opened by German nationals, the status of

efforts on behalf of Jewish refugees, postwar asylum to war criminals, assignments of OSS personnel, and intelligence gathered by the Allies in

Switzerland.174 Among the many messages were

State Department reports on the plight of Jews in

Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania.175 Also intercepted were several U.S. intelligence reports sent by

Harrison to Washington about the German financial and economic situation, such as the effect of the

Allied bombing offensive on Reichsbank note circulation and gold reserves, and the smuggling of

German, French, and Italian currency into

Switzerland.176

It is not known what, if any, specific use was

made of these decrypts by the Germans.

Considering the time frame, especially during late

1944, of negotiations between Emil Puhl, the vicedirector of the German Reichsbank, and various

Swiss banking and trade officials, it is possible that,

because of the VNs, the German bankers were

aware of some of the concurrent talks between the

Allies and the Swiss to limit Berlin’s trade and

financial activity.

The Bretton Woods Conference of July 1944,

known as the United Nations Monetary and

Financial Conference, approved a resolution that

called on neutral countries to take measures to prevent movement or the disposition of stolen assets

from occupied countries within their jurisdictions.177 On 11 October 1944, the Japanese reported

that, because of the pressure from the Allies to

enforce the Bretton Woods Agreement, the Swiss,

as well as the Bank for International Settlements,

were instituting several restrictions on the opening

of new accounts and were establishing limits on

the functions of current accounts. Furthermore, the

Swiss Banking Association had sent a notice to

its members to take action that would block the

movement of capital from Axis to neutral countries.

The Japanese believed that there was “some room”

in interpreting the limits of the new rules, but

they held out little hope since the “Swiss were

exceedingly weak-kneed towards the British and

Americans.”178 In a cable from the previous day,

which the Americans had intercepted and decrypted, Kase had noted in its final paragraphs that “of

course the Germans have a good deal of money

tucked away in secret, in various types of currency,

and of course, in gold and so on. I understand that

there is already an (? enormous amount?) of money

hidden around under Swiss names.”179Another

Japanese official, Kojiro Kitamura, the Yokohama

Specie Bank representative in Berlin, who was in

Switzerland at the time, added that while the Swiss

banks were refusing to make remittances of Axis

funds to Spain and Portugal, the Germans had set

up Swiss “straw men” in whose names the remittance could be made. 180

In December 1944 Kase sent two messages to

Tokyo describing a series of meeting he had with

Puhl who, at the time, was in Switzerland for negotiations with the Swiss National Bank on a variety

of economic and financial issues. One of the points

of discussion, in which the Japanese had an interest, was a Swiss proposal to restrict foreign currency transactions. Kase reported several further comments that Puhl had made to him. Among other

things, Puhl had told Kase that the acquisition of
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viable currencies, such as Swiss francs and Swedish

kroner, was almost impossible. The German also

mentioned that the Bank for International

Settlements was insisting more strongly that credit

to Germany be withdrawn.181 In a message sent to

Tokyo a week later, Kase revealed more comments

from Puhl and the president of the Swiss National

Bank, Ernst Weber. Kase was told that, due to the

problem of currency payments to Germany, the

Swiss were going to pay for German commodities

with gold purchases to a “proportionate degree,”

but not with “looted gold.” (This latter expression

was included in the Japanese message in English.)

Puhl also mentioned that a Swiss seizure of the

assets of German firms in Switzerland would be a

“last resort” to settle back payments. Puhl added

that such remaining German assets in late 1944

amounted to no more than 100 million Swiss

francs. Puhl mentioned to Kase that there must be

a good deal of money in funds related to the “Party,”

presumably Nazi, and other “obscure funds,” but

that every bit is held under Swiss names.182

Interestingly, a Boston translation provided a

slightly different aspect to the December 1944

Puhl-Weber meetings. In a message from the

German mission in Bern to Berlin, it was pointed

out that the Swiss bankers were still in favor of a

free currency exchange and purchase of foreign

currency balances. The bankers “would not give up

the advantages of a free currency...unless they were

forced to by the [Swiss] Federal Council for political

reasons.” The German message also added in the

next paragraph:

The negotiations with Mr. Weber and

the directorate of the Swiss National

Bank were conducted in the same

atmosphere of confidence that has

always prevailed. The National Bank

recognized that since July of this year

the Reichsbank has exercised the

restraint in payment of gold which

the National Bank recommended earlier. The National bank is now agreed

to take over in December and in

January a considerable sum from the

Reichsbank’s gold deposit in Bern. It

is also agreed to replenish the gold

deposit in Bern in which connection

the National Bank will itself undertake to move the gold over the

Frontier in the interest of camouflaging operations.[my italics]183

In late January 1945, the United States, United

Kingdom, and eventually, France, put together a

delegation to go to Switzerland to negotiate the

cessation of all trade between Germany and

Switzerland, and gain agreement from the Swiss to

adhere to Safehaven objectives.184 The delegation

was headed by Lauchlin Currie, a special assistant

to President Roosevelt. Currie had served in several positions in the Roosevelt administration going

back to the early days of the New Deal. Among

these was as a monetary expert in the Department

of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board.

Another major figure in these negotiations, from

the Washington end of the negotiations, was

Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter

White, who was prepared to push for severe measures against the Swiss.185

Japanese diplomats in Bern reported that

although the Swiss population generally seemed to

be enthusiastic about the arrival of the Allied

Economic Delegation, many government and banking officials privately were upset with the

Americans. Kase reported that Bern had received

no official communications from Washington

about the delegation and its purpose and only had

learned about it from a U.S. State Department press

release. Bern feared the pressure this delegation

would cause by raising expectations of a complete

rupture of all economic activity with Germany.

Some Swiss bankers also suspected that the Allies

were trying to eliminate the possibility that some

Nazi groups might use their funds in Switzerland to

continue the fight even after Germany fell.186

In particular, the head of the Swiss National

Bank, Ernst Weber, saw two more issues above and
Page 109

beyond that of Swiss trade with Germany: stolen

gold and the privacy of personal accounts. Weber

dismissed the idea of a flight of German funds out

of Switzerland. He was not concerned about any

large purchase of Swiss francs, since that was limited to payments for living expenses of Germans

residing in Switzerland. However, Weber insisted

that the “Jewish plutocracy,” composed of those

who had escaped to the U.S., was pressuring the

American government to recover all stolen Jewish

property. Weber further believed that not all of the

stolen wealth was still in Switzerland. He opined

that there was proof that “great quantities” of it had

gone to Spain, Portugal, and Argentina, and that

the Allies should investigate this possibility before

all others.187

The other major issue for Weber was that of privacy of Swiss bank accounts, a legal arrangement

that went back to 1934. Weber conceded that there

would be great pressure from external sources,

principally the United States, and internal groups

such as Swiss socialists, to reveal the identities of

account holders. Weber told Japanese minister

Kase that the Swiss were prepared to be stubborn;

if a reversal of policy would be unavoidable, then

maybe a deal involving some sort of distinction in

types of funds and accounts could be made with the

Allies.188

On 16 February 1945, the Swiss Federal Council

agreed, under certain conditions, to block German

assets in Switzerland. This agreement was not

unlike similar Swiss decrees promulgated in 1940

that blocked assets of combatants such as France,

Belgium, Italy, etc.189 On 8 March 1945,

Switzerland and the United States reached an

agreement that stipulated general controls on

German monetary activity, hidden enemy assets,

and an accounting of German assets in Switzerland.

Although Currie considered his efforts a success,

revelations from various intelligence sources,

including intercepts, of continued Swiss purchases

of German gold and new meetings in April between

Swiss banking officials with Emil Puhl cast a pall on

later U.S.-Swiss relations.190

In late February 1945, a German diplomatic

official in Bern provided a different version of the

same meeting’s substance. After meeting with

Walter Stucki, a high-ranking member of the Swiss

Foreign Office and former representative to Vichy,

the German filed a report on the effects on German

trade and financial activity caused by the Swiss

agreement to Allied demands. Stucki had told the

German that the Allies had “showed their fists.”

Currie had demanded that is was time for

Switzerland to “take its stand on the side of the

Allies.” The Americans demanded some “spectacular” display of Swiss compliance. The Swiss were

threatened with the loss of navicerts (certificates

issued by the Allies that allowed the transport of

Swiss goods on the Rhine River) and transportation

through Allied territory unless they made a complete break in economic relations with Germany.

Stucki reported that the Swiss Federal Council had

decided not to attack Germany “from behind” by

banning exports or transit of goods from Italy

through Switzerland to Germany. Switzerland

would not follow the Swedish example.191

The German reported that the Federal Council

also had received a demand from the president of

the Italian Republic, Ivanhoe Bonomi, to cease all

transit of Italian coal through Switzerland to

Germany. Bonomi claimed that the source of the

coal, the northern Italian Fascist rump state, was

not a country but German-occupied territory, and

that the Gotthard Agreement of 1909 guaranteeing

transit through Switzerland therefore did not apply.

Stucki reported that the Federal Council was close

to stopping all such traffic from Italy. Stucki also

told the German that the Federal Council was prepared to block all German funds or balances in

accounts to insure that the assets would not be used

for a new war. Since late 1944, the Allies considered

this demand to be sine qua non in any arrangement

with Switzerland. The German considered the net

effect of Switzerland’s agreements would end any
Page 110

further basis for economic activity between the two

countries.192

In early April 1945, Puhl returned to Bern for

new negotiations. He reported to Berlin that he had

“practically” broken the blockade on German-Swiss

commercial and monetary transactions concluded

by Currie’s delegation in the previous month. Later

that month, Puhl also persuaded the Swiss National

Bank to purchase some gold for German payments

to Switzerland. How much total gold the Swiss purchased was not clear. Ministry of Economic

Warfare intercepts indicate that Puhl, during this

period, had transferred about 1.5 tons of gold to the

Swiss National Bank, Bern, and the Bank for

International Settlements, Basel, Switzerland.193

However, Puhl was not certain if the Bank for

International Settlements would take it owing to

some “unspecified objections from Basel.”194

Almost two weeks later, Kitamura reported

another conversation he had with Puhl regarding

the Allied discovery of the hidden cache of gold, art,

and stolen art and personal possessions in the

Merkers salt mines in Thuringia in southwest

Germany. Puhl complained that the early press

claims of 100 tons of gold were exaggerated.

Kitamura went to report to Tokyo that he was given

to understand from Puhl that the Reichsbank had

deposited gold in various other hidden places in

southern Germany along the Swiss border.195

After the war, Puhl’s activities with the Swiss,

which constituted a major circumvention of the

agreements achieved by the Currie mission to

Switzerland, became a significant issue between the

United States and Switzerland. During the SwissAllied negotiations in the spring of 1946 in

Washington, the Swiss Legation informed Bern

that, as long as the issue of German assets in Swiss

banks remained unresolved, American suspicions

about control of them would remain. There was

even a concern that these assets could be used to

fund a fifth column of Nazi sympathizers or secret

atomic research.196

In the summer of 1946, the Allied-Swiss Accord

was finalized. The Swiss promised to liquidate

German assets and distribute them on a 50-50

basis with the Allies. Switzerland also was to make

available to the Allied Gold Pool some $58.1 million

on demand in gold. The United States promised to

unblock Swiss assets and discontinue the “black

lists” of Swiss firms and individuals. However, the

issue continued to percolate and the Nazi Gold

problem would return fifty years later to haunt the

Swiss. 

Notes

1 PRO HW 16/1, GB 221: Police W/T decrypts: 7

November 1939, 18 November 1939

2 Philips, 16

3 Quoted from Lena Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate

of European Jewry (New York: Oxford, 1987), 254-5

4 MND Translation, Sofia to Tokyo, 1 February 1942,

SIS #29056, RG 457, HCC, Box 303.

5 Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms, 190 

6 Breitman, 44-5 

7 There were a number of German police organizations, among them the Schutzpolizei (Schupo), or civil

police, the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo), or security police

that included the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo), or

Secret State Police, and the Kriminalpolizei (Kripo), or

criminal investigation police. The most prominent police

organization was the Ordnungspolizei (Orpo), or uniformed police. The uniformed police were organized into

military style battalions and worked with the SS units

and the Einsatzgruppen on the Russian front. These

police units performed a number of functions in

Germany and occupied Europe. The Sipo worked with

other Reich security services against partisan activity

behind German lines and in occupied Europe. The Kripo

was concerned with criminal activity and escaped POWs.

There was a technical branch of the Orpo that performed

direction-finding operations against Allied agents using

radios. The Sipo was involved in the German program of

controlled Allied agents who had been “turned” and were

then forced to send phony radio reports to their handlers

in London, a technique known as Funkspiel or radio

deception.

8 For descriptions of the atrocities, see the GCCS

History, Vol. XIII, The German Police, 83-6, and
Page 111

Appendix B, 234-6; Hinsley, Vol. II, 671-3. Breitman

carries the most detailed narrative, 54-68.

9 ZIP/G.P.D. 292R/18.7.41, NARA, RG 457, HCC,

Box 1386, “German WWII Police and SS Traffic.”

10 ZIP/G.P.D. 309R/2/4.8.41, RG 457, HCC, Box

1386, “German WWII Police and SS Traffic.”

11 ZIP/G.P.D. 316R/24/7.8.41, RG 457, HCC, Box

1386, “German WWII Police and SS Traffic.”

12 ZIP/G.P.D. 353/114/9.41, RG 457, HCC, Box

1386, “German WWII Police and SS Traffic.”

13 ZIP/G.P.D. 335R/18/26.8.41, RG 457, HCC, Box

1386, “German WWII Police and SS Traffic.”

14 “Magic” Diplomatic Summary, 14 June 1942,

Item A.7. NARA, RG 457, Entry 9019, Box 1.

15 MND Translation, Berlin to Tokyo, 21 February

1942, SIS #30111, RG 457, HCC, Box 304.

16 German Police Decodes, 17 November 1941, No.

35, ZIP/GPD 467/30.11.41, and 20 November 1941,

ZIP/GPD 575/25.12.41, PRO HW 16/32

17 MND Translation, Vienna to Tokyo, 20 February

1942, SIS #30047, RG 457, HCC, Box 304.

18 RG 226, Entry 210, Box 386, Folder 6, “Q,” or

Intercepted Diplomatic Messages 

19 ZIP/GPCC66/3.10.42, “F,” 16649 on 1 September

and 11310 on 30 September and ZIP/GPCC82/3.12.42,

“D,” 8878 on 2 November and 9092 on 30 November.

PRO, HW 16/10

20 For a full study of this important radio message,

see Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas, “A New Document on

the Deportation and Murder of Jews during ‘Einsatz

Reinhardt’ 1942.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Vol.

15, No. 3, Winter 2001), 468-486. One item of interest

was the discrepancy in the spelling of Heydrich’s first

name. Heydrich preferred to have his first name spelled

“Reinhard,” but his official SS files and SS Service Lists

carry him as “Reinhardt” Heydrich.

21 Ibid.

22 Hinsley, Vol. 2, 673

23 Losses in the Jewish populations of minor Axis

powers varied. Bulgaria lost about 15%; Romania nearly

half; Hungary also almost half of its prewar population;

and Italy lost slightly more than a quarter of its Jews.

Source: Poliakov and Wulf, 229

24 ZIP/GPDD 259b, transmitted 7 October 1942,

PRO HW 16/21

25 ZIP/ISOSICLE 3980, 28 March 1943, Sofia to

Berlin, PRO HW 19/238

26 MND Translations, Sofia (Roux) to Vichy, 16

March 1943, SIS # 71491, RG 457, HCC, Box 356; and

Sofia (Yamaji) to Tokyo, 12 May 1943, SIS #83190.

NARA RG 457, HCC, Box 364

27 Message 4019, Sofia to Berlin, 29 March 1943,

PRO HW 19/236

28 MND Translations, Sofia (Roux) to Vichy, 27

March 1943, SIS # 78424, RG 457, HCC, Box 359; and

Sofia to Vichy, 17 March 1943, SIS #79537. NARA RG

457, HCC, Box 366.

29 See MND Translation, Budapest to Bucharest, 15

July 1944, SIS #144554. NARA RG 457, HCC, Box 440.

30 MND Translation, Budapest to Tokyo, 8 June

1943, SIS # 87928. NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 370.

31 Service 16 to Moscow, ISCOT # 1078, 4 June 1943

(translated on 19 March 1945), National Cryptologic

Museum Library.

32 Service 16 to Moscow, ISCOT # 1077, 2 June 1943

(translated on 19 March 1945), National Cryptologic

Museum Library.

33 The exploitation of this SD key, which was never

given a cover name, continued into February 1944.

34 Kappler to Berlin, 24 September 1943, decode

No. 6728. RG 226, entry 112, Box 1.

35 MND Translation, Rome (Irish Minister) to

Dublin, 6 October 1943, SIS # 123490. NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 415. It is not clear what was the nature of the

Vatican’s aid, or from where in the Vatican hierarchy (if

from there at all) this offer originated. The role of the

Vatican during this roundup has been the subject of

much controversy. A number of Catholic clergy and

institutions, as well as many individual Italians, aided

Jews by offering sanctuary or the means to escape the

Nazi dragnet. These actions appear to have happened

spontaneously, or at the least, without any explicit

instructions from the Vatican leadership. There is no evidence from the translations that any official policy of rescue originated in or was coordinated by the Papacy or its

office even though it was informed of the impending

German actions. See Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very

Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (New

York: Yale University Press, 2000), 175-201. A more

critical view of the Papacy’s role during the roundup is

offered by John Cornwell in Hitler’s Pope: The Secret
Page 112

History of Pius XII (New York: Penguin Books, 2000),

297-318. The archived decrypts and translations contain

no evidence that conclusively can resolve the controversy over the Vatican’s official policy towards the Final

Solution.

36 Kaltenbrunner to Kappler, 11 October 1943,

Decode No. 7458. NARA, RG 226, Entry 112, Box 1.

37 Kappler to Berlin, 16 October 1943, Decode No.

7668. NARA RG 226, Entry 112, Box 1.

38 Vatican to Dublin, 18 October 1943, Baker Cable

# 471, GCCS to Signal Security Agency. NSA Records

Center (NCRC) Microfilm, Box 112, Reel 5155.

39 ZIP/ISOSICLE 7754, 21 October 1943, PRO HW

19/238.

40 “Magic” Diplomatic Summary, D.S. # 592, 8

November 1943. NARA, RG457, “Magic Diplomatic

Summaries, Box 8. 

41 MND Translation, Vatican (Harada) to Tokyo, 8

February 1944, SIS #11352,. NSA RG 457, HCC, Box

400.

42 MND Translation, Berlin (Auswaertig) to

Nanking (Circular), 11 October 1943, SIS # 99145,

NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 382. 

43 ZIP/ISOSICLE 7639, Berlin to Crimea Area, 12

October 1943 and ZIP/ISOSICLE 7654 (combined with

7684), 13 October 1943, PRO HW 19/238.

44 Laqueur, 98-9.

45 MND Translation, Bern (Czech Representative)

to London (Czech Government), 26 June 1944, SIS #

160126, NARA RG 457, HCC, Box 460.

46 MND translation, Moscow (Garreau) to Algiers

(Diplofrance), 17 September 1944, H-145841, NARA, RG

457, HCC, Box 441.

47 Vichy to Lisbon, 26 May 1944, Baker Cable 2611

(1 July 1944). NCRC Microfilm, Box 112, Reel 5158;

MND translation, Vichy to Lisbon, 23 May 1944, SIS #

126576, NARA, HCC, Box 419.

48 Budapest to Bucharest, 9 June 1944, Baker Cable

2769 (19 June 1944). NCRC Microfilm, Box 112, Reel

5158; “Magic Diplomatic Summary, D.S. # 819, 22 June

1944, NARA, RG 457, Magic Diplomatic Summaries, Box

11.

49 MND Translation, Berlin to Dublin, 5 July 1944,

SIS # 133600, RG 457, HCC, Box 427; and Dublin to

Berlin, 12 September 1944, SIS # 143682. NARA RG 457,

HCC, Box 438.

50 MND Translation, Washington to Madrid, 11

October 1944, SIS #145262, NARA RG 457, HCC, Box

440. Spain was a nonbelligerent during the war and generally sympathized with the Axis, even sending a division

of “volunteers” to fight in Russia. In 1944 the Allies pressured Spain with a partial blockade of essential materials

such as gasoline and demanded, among other things, the

expulsion of all Axis espionage agents (the knowledge of

which was derived partially from decrypts of Japanese

and German diplomatic and agent communications).

After the war, in many European and American countries, there were calls for the overthrow of Franco and his

regime. Cardenas’ personal attitude towards Jews was

mixed. In November 1943 he had advised Madrid that

he would not attend a ceremony marking the 30th

anniversary of the founding of the Joint Distribution

Committee, an international Jewish relief agency. He

told Madrid that members of the Committee in Spain

had “made several verbal promises which they repeatedly refused to keep.” However, he added that aid should

be extended to Spanish Jews wishing to go to Algiers or

Palestine. “Magic Diplomatic Summary, D.S. # 606, 22

November 1943. “Magic Diplomatic Summary, Box 8.

51 MND Translation, Washington to Dublin, 18

October 1944, SIS # 127365, NARA RG 457, HCC, Box

420.

52 MND Translation, London (Czech Government)

to Stockholm (Czech Representative), 27 January 1945,

H-169498, NARA RG 457, HCC, Box 470. In late 1944,

the numbering system of the multinational diplomatic

translations was changed. The numbering sequence

remained, but all such translations now carried the prefix “H.”

Decades after the war, some individuals have speculated that the Allies could have bombed the railroads

leading to the Auschwitz complex, thereby saving thousands of Jews. A review of this argument can be found in

The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have

Attempted It? Edited by Michael J. Neufeld and Michael

Berenbaum. (New York: St. Martins’ Press, 1999).

53 MND Translations, Rio de Janerio (Exteriores)

to Lisbon, 12 March 1945, H-171950, RG 457, HCC, Box

474; Washington (Bonnet) to Paris, 15 March 1945, H172526, RG 457, HCC, Box 475; Rome to Berne, 17

March 1945, H-173117, RG 457, HCC, Box 477; and

Ankara to Berne, 17 March 1945, H-173502, RG 457,
Page 113

HCC, Box 477. Also, see Hinsley, Vol. 3, 735 fn, which

cites GPD translations 4068/10 and 4085/10 for information on rumors of movement of Jewish inmates from

concentration camps.

This “special treatment” of Jewish POWs affected

American soldiers, too. In late 1944, American POWs of

Jewish origin from the 106th Infantry Division, who

were captured during the Battle of the Bulge, were separated from their Gentile comrades and sent to Berga, a

satellite camp of Buchenwald, where they were forced to

perform slave labor. This incident was the subject of the

Public Broadcasting Corporation’s documentary by

Charles Guggenheim, “Berga: Soldiers of Another War.”

Also see Mitchell Bard’s, Forgotten Victims: The

Abandonment of Americans in Hitler’s Camps (CO:

Westview Press, 1994).

54 MND Translation, Berlin to Circular (all Stations,

Kabul recipient), 28 March 1945, H-176446, NARA RG

457, HCC, Box 481.

55 MND Translation, Vatican City (Secretary of

State) to Washington (Apostolic Delegate), 27 March

1945, T-2325, and Lausanne (Zapelli) to Vatican City

(Secretary of State), 17 April 1945, T-2574. NARA, RG

457, HCC, Box 520.

56 Lausanne (Zappelli) to Vatican (Secretary of

State), 17 April 1945, T-2574, Ibid.

57 Berlin to Dublin, 16 February 1945, H-168493,

NARA RG 457, HCC, Box 1032, “Collection of

Multinational Diplomatic Translation of White House

Interest.” Shortly after this message was translated and

disseminated, officials in the United States wanted to

release its contents to the Soviet Union. However,

Churchill, Menzies, and the Foreign Office disagreed

with the suggestion. See PRO “Signals Intelligence

passed to Prime Minister Churchill,” PRO HW 1, Box

145, Folder 3562, 2 March 1945.

58 MND Translation, Washington (Horinouchi) to

Tokyo, 17 January 1939, SIS #3494, NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 286. The text of the German response, signed

by Ernst von Weizsaecker, State Secretary in the German

Foreign Office, is contained in the telegram of 3 January

1939, from the U.S. Charge, Germany, to the State

Department. The line in the German response referred

to by the Japanese is “To date the American Embassy has

not informed the [German] Foreign Office of a single

case in which, in its opinion, such treaty rights had been

violated by German measures. If such cases should be

brought to its attention by the American Embassy, the

German Government for its part is prepared to examine

and settle them on the basis of prevailing treaty provisions.” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1939. Vol.

II, General, the British Commonwealth, 574-6.

Prior to the war, FDR had made some limited efforts

to facilitate Jewish immigration from Germany and

Austria, such as combining German and Austrian quotas. But President Roosevelt never pressed for a policy to

accept a much larger number of refugees. Most likely he

was constrained by public opinion and a Congress that

was overwhelmingly against easing immigration quotas.

See Robert Dallek, Franklin Roosevelt and American

Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1981), 166-168.

59 MND Translation, Lisbon to Tokyo, 13 February

1940, SSA #6191, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 288, and

Tokyo to Berlin, 23 July 1940, SS #9395, Box 290.

60 MND Translation, Lisbon (Yonezawa) to Tokyo,

13 February 1940, SIS #6191, Ibid.

61 MND Translation, Shanghai to Tokyo, 16 May

1942, SSA #37068, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 310. This

message estimated that there were 20,000 GermanJewish refugees in the city in early 1942.

62 See MND Translation Kaunas to Tokyo, 24

August 1940, SSA #10179. NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box

383. This case involved a Polish Jew who had applied for

an American visa through a relative in New York.

63 Sugihara was more than just sympathetic with

the plight of Polish Jews. According to an OSS/SSU

report from 1946, Sugihara was providing intelligence to

covert agents of the Polish Intelligence Service. He had

two Polish assistants in Kaunas. Sugihara forwarded the

intelligence to a Polish contact in Riga, Latvia, who, in

turn passed the information to London. An OSS report

quoted a Sipo assessment of Sugihara as “a friend of

England and Poland.” Strategic Services Unit,

Washington, D.C., X-8989, “Japanese Wartime

Collaboration with the Polish Intelligence Service.” RG

226, Entry 212, Box 6.

64 MND Translation, Ankara to Tokyo, 18 June

1943, SSA #86854, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 369.

65 “Magic” Diplomatic Summary, 14 September

1942, Section A.1. NARA, RG 457, “Magic Diplomatic

Summaries, Box 2.
Page 114

66 MND Translation, Ankara to Tokyo, 3 March

1944, SIS #112744, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 399.

67 Jerusalem to Riyadh, 23 February 1944. Baker

Cable 1691, GCCS to SSA, 4 March 1944. NCRC

Microfilm. Box 112, reel 5157.

68 Washington to Baghdad, 11 February 1944.

Baker Cable 1450, GCCS (Randolph) to SSD (G-2), 14

February 1944. NCRC Microfilm, Box 112, reel 5157.

69 MND Translation, Washington (Bonnet) to Paris

(Diplomatie), 6 April 1945, H-176818, NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 481. During the San Francisco Conference that

created the United Nations, the Signal Security Agency

laid on additional intercept coverage of communications

supporting the various national delegations. For more

on this, see Stephen Schlesinger, “Cryptanalysis for

Peacetime: Codebreaking and the Birth and Structure of

the United Nations.” Cryptologia Vol. 19, No. 3 (July

1995), 217-234.

70 Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton. Vichy

France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 29.

71 Ibid., 30-32; Eugen Weber. The Hollow Years:

France in the 1930s (New York: W.W. Norton &

Company, 1994), 101-110.

72 Marrus and Paxton, 36

73 For example, see “Vichy Codes,” 13 July 1944,

NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 59, Folder 1490 and “Army

Translations of Decodes of French (Vichy) Cipher

Messages, 1941-43,” 4 June 1941, RG 457, HCC, Box

830, Folder 2415.

74 MND Translation, Vichy to Brassaterre

(Circular), 27 November 1940, SSIS #24673, NARA, RG

457, HCC, Box 300.

75 Ibid.

76 Vichy to Tokyo, 20 October 1942, Japanese Naval

Attaché msg (SRNA) Nr-295-6 RG457, E8013 Box 1.

MND Translation, Saigon to Vichy, 1 August 1942, SIS

#54807, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 332.

77 MND Translation, Havana to Vichy, 26 March

1942, SIS # 32962, RG 457, HCC, Box 306, and Magic

Diplomatic Summary, 11 April 1942, RG 457, Entry

9006, Box 1.

78 “Magic” Diplomatic Summary, 15 August 1942,

D.4. NARA, RG 457, Magic Diplomatic Summaries,

Box 1.

79 Marrus and Paxton, 232

80 MND Translation, Vichy to Washington, 30

September 1942, SIS #51208, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box

328.

81 MND Translation, Vichy to Washington, 9 June

1942, SIS #48570, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 324.

82 MND Translations, Washington to Vichy, 12

October 1942, SIS #53265, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box

330; and Vichy to Washington, 30 October 1942, SIS

#54269, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 332.

83 MND Translations: Washington (Henry Haye) to

Vichy, 3 July 1942, SSA #40795, NARA, RG 457, HCC,

Box 314; Washington (Henry Haye) to Vichy, 24 March

1942, SSA 32801, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 306; and

Washington (Henry Haye) to Vichy, 30 October 1942,

SSA #54317 NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 332.

84 MND Translation, Buenos Aires (Latournelle) to

Vichy, 12 September 1942, SSA #49376, NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 325.

85 MND Translation, Rio de Janerio (St. Quentin) to

Vichy, 5 September 1942, SIS #53628, NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 331.

86 MND Translation, Vichy to Ottawa, 15 September

1942, SIS #49790, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 326.

87 MND Translation, Washington to Vichy, 31

October 1942, SIS #54154, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box

331.

88 MND Translation, Vichy to Washington, 6

November 1942, SIS #54845, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box

332.

89 MND Translations, Vichy (Reyes) to Mexico City,

12 August 1942, SIS #44826, RG 457, HCC, Box 320, and

Vichy (Bosques) to Mexico City (Office of Foreign

Relations), 23 September 1942, SIS #51152, RG 457,

HCC, Box 328.

90 Q Translation, 12 October 1942, NARA, RG 226,

Entry 210, Box 402, File 11734, “Intercepts of Foreign

Diplomatic Messages.” 

91 Ibid., also Washington (Henri Haye) to Vichy, 5

August 1942, SIS #44111, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 319. 

92 MND Translation, Washington (Henry Haye) to

Vichy, 13 September 1942, SIS #48810, NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 325.

93 MND Translation, Vichy to Ciudad Trujillo, 6

September 1942, SIS #49158, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box

325.
Page 115

94 MND Translation, Washington (Henry Haye) to

Vichy, 16 October 1942, SIS #53004, NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 330. Also see Marrus and Paxton, 266-68.

95 MND Translation, Washington (Henry HayePicot) to Vichy, 30 October 1942, SIS #54170, NARA, RG

457, HCC, Box 331.

96 Marrus and Paxton, 268.

97 German Clandestine Message ( SRI), Tangier to

Berlin, 10 February 1943, CG3-2008. NARA, RG 457,

Entry 9022, German Intelligence/Clandestine Agents

Messages. It is estimated that some 14-15,000 Jews were

interned in 6 camps in Morocco and Algiers.

98 Marrus and Paxton, 191-2.

99 Ibid., 194-5

100 MND Translation, Vichy to Tokyo, 1 July 1943,

SIS #89663, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 372; and DNB

Propaganda Broadcast to Vichy, 4 January 1943, SIS

#63664. NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 344.

101 MND Translations: Mission Francaise

(Hoppenot) to High Commissioner, Algiers, 21 March

1943, SIS #75893, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 356; and 23

March 1943, SIS #76229, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 356. 

102 MND Translation, Hanoi (Matsumoto) to

Tokyo, 30 January 1945, H-165861, NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 466.

103 Laqueur, 138-142; Hilberg, 823-4

104 Raul Hilberg, 803.

105 “Magic” Diplomatic Summary, D.S. #560, 7

October 1943. NARA, RG 457, Magic Diplomatic

Summaries, Box 7.

106 In October 1942, Japanese diplomats in

Budapest reported that Hungarian prime minister

Miklos Kallay had spoken twice on the need for Hungary

to concentrate on the war and intensifying its antiJewish policy. However, the Japanese noted that many

Hungarians considered Romania as Hungary’s primary

enemy. See MND Translation, Budapest to Tokyo, 30

October 1942, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 332.

107 MND Translation, Budapest (Taraoka) to Tokyo,

1 April 1944, H-131364, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 425.

108 MND Translation, Budapest to Tokyo, via

Berlin (Oshima), 7 July 1944, H-127152, NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 420.

109 MND Translation, Budapest to Ankara, 26

June 1944, H-157807, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 456.

110 MND Translations: Budapest to Tokyo, 1 April

1944, H-131363, Geneva to Vatican City, 15 July 1944, H131282. NARA, RG457, HCC, Box 425.

111 MND Translations: Budapest to Berne, 12 July

1944, H-133584, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 427; and

Budapest to Bucharest, 15 July 1944, H-144554, NARA,

RG 457, HCC, Box 440.

112 PEARL/ZIP/AT 1194/ 14 August 1944, PRO, HW

16/70.

113 Multinational Diplomatic Message Summaries

(SMM), Budapest to Bern, 11 August 1944, 8218. NARA,

RG 457, HCC, Boxes 882-891.

114 MND Translation, Bern (Politisches) to

Budapest, 11 September 1944, H-144451, NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 440. See Hilberg, 859. The Papal Nuncio to

Budapest handed out 20,000 passports, but these went

to “baptized” Jews. Eventually, between 15,000 to

16,000 exit permits to Palestine were granted by the

Reich and the Hungarian regime.

115 MND Translations: Budapest to Berne,

23 September 1944, H-145264 and Budapest

(Schweizerische Gesandtschaft) to Bern, 12 October

1944, H-146293. NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 440.

116 Wilhelm Flicke, War Secrets of the Ether. (Fort

George G. Meade, MD: Office of Training, 1959), 224-5.

Flicke claims that the Germans had been exploiting

Hungarian diplomatic messages since 1943. 

117 “Disposition of Hungarian Gold,” Circle Report,

RG 226, Entry 210, Box 144, “Classified Sources and

Methods.” 

118 Hilberg, 856

119 “Magic Diplomatic Summary, D.S. #943, 24

October 1944, NARA, RG 457, Magic Diplomatic

Summary, Box 13. 

120 “Magic Diplomatic Summary, D.S. #952, 2

November 1944. NARA, RG 457, magic Diplomatic

Summaries, Box 14.

121 MND Translation, Budapest to Lisbon

(Branquinho), 24 October 1944, H-147668, NARA, RG

457, HCC, Box 444.

122 MND Translation, Mexico City to London, 2

October 1944, H-146223, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 440.

123 Scattered pieces of signals intelligence during

the war indicate that the Wallenberg family was involved

in some efforts to broker separate peace initiatives

among the combatants. A Venona translation from 13
Page 116

April 1942 (the final version of the translation issued in

May 1976) states that either Jacob or his brother Marcus

had met with a British correspondent who had suggested that the Swede “get into touch with English financiers

on the question of concluding an Anglo-German peace

based on a return to the position up to 1939.” According

to the Soviet agent, Wallenberg declined the offer and

asked it be made directly to the British diplomatic mission in Stockholm. Venona Translation 3/MBF/T2201,

6/5/76. In March 1944, Japanese diplomats in

Stockholm reported that the “persons most instrumental

in arranging the contacts between the Finns and

Russians were the Wallenbergs.” MND Translation,

Stockholm to Tokyo, SSA #115968, 10 March 1944.

NARA, RG 457, HCC, box 402.

124 MND Translation, Budapest to Lisbon, 23

October 1944, H-147752. NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 444

125 MND Translation, Vatican (Portuguese Charge

d’Affaires) to Lisbon, 1 December 1944, H-158058.

NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 456.

126 MND Translation, Budapest to Lisbon, 23

October 1944, H-147752. NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 444.

127 “Cryptanalytic Short Titles.” 19440201. NARA,

RG 457, HCC, box 941, File 2740; Alvarez, 176; “List of

Cryptanalytic Short Titles,” 1 February 1946. Army

Security Agency. NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 935, Folder

“Short Titles.”

128 MND Translation, Washington to Madrid, 20

October 1944, H-146824. NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 442. 

129 MND Translations: Budapest to Lisbon, 23

October 1944, H-147752, NARA, RG 457, HCDC, Box

444; Bern (Politique) to Budapest, 7 November 1944, H153452, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 451; and Budapest to

Madrid, 14 November 1944, H-154424, NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 452.

130 MND Translation, Budapest to Lisbon, 17

October 1944, H-146360. NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 442.

131 MND Translations: Budapest to Madrid, 15

November 1944, H-154425, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box

452; and Budapest to Madrid, 16 November 1944, H153555. NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 451.

132 “Magic Diplomatic Summary,” D.S. 970, 20

November 1944. NARA, RG 457, Magic Diplomatic

Summaries, Box 14.

133 MND Translation, Budapest (Schweizerische

Gesandtschaft) to Bern, 23 November 1944, H-153272.

NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 451.

134 MND Translation (Boston), Unknown

(Veesenmayer) to Berlin, 30 December 1944, T-1810.

NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 519.

135 For an overview of the origins of Japanese attitudes and many beliefs about Jews, see David Kranzler,

Jews, Nazis, and the Japanese: The Jewish Refugee

Community of Shanghai, 1938-1945 (Hoboken, NJ:

KTAV Publishing House, 1988, second edition), 177-209.

136 Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of

Modern Japan (New York: Perennial Books, 2001),

280-1.

137 Japanese Diplomatic Translations, Paris

(Sugimura) to Tokyo, 2 November 1937, SIS # 813.

NARA, RG 457, Red Machine Translations, Box 1. 

138 Japanese Diplomatic Translations, Paris

(Sugimura) to Tokyo, 5 October 1937, SIS #80, NARA,

RG 457, Red Machine Translations, Box 1.

139 MND Translation, Berlin (Oshima) to Tokyo, 16

January 1939, SIS #3504, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box

286.

140 MND Translation, Washington (Horinouchi) to

Tokyo, 17 January 1939, SIS #3608, NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 286.

141 MND Translation, Tokyo (Nomura) to

Washington, 20 October 1939, SIS #5099, NARA, RG

457, HCC, Box 287.

142 MND Translation, Tokyo (Nomura) to

Washington, 18 October 1939, SIS #5064, NARA, RG

457, HCC, Box 287.

143 MND Translation, Tokyo (Nomura) to

Washington, 16 November 1939, SIS #5294, NARA, RG

457, HCC, Box 287.

144 MND Translations: Washington (Horinouchi) to

Tokyo, 24 November 1939, SIS #5330, NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 287; and Tokyo (Nomura) to Washington, 10

January 1940, SIS #5801. NARA. RG 457, HCC, Box

287.

145 MND Translation, New York to Tokyo, 18

February 1939, SIS #3710 and New York (Wakasugi) to

Tokyo, 10 February 1939, SIS #3644. NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 286.

146 MND Translation, Tokyo to Berlin, 12 December

1941, SIS #26279, RG 457, HCC, Box 301; and Magic
Page 117

Diplomatic Summary, 11 May 1942, RG 457, Entry 9006,

Box 1.

147 MND Translation, Sofia to Tokyo, 28 January

1942, SIS #29056, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 303.

148 MND Translations: Tokyo to Hanoi (Circular to

all stations), 13 March 1942, SIS #31162 and 31209.

NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 305.

149 For incidents against Jews in Shanghai, see

Kranzler, 493-501. For the listings of internment camp

populations by nationality, see Japanese Army

Translations, Singapore to Saigon, J-102875F-J, 3

September 1945 and Sapong to Saigon, J-104386A-6, 2

September 1945, RG 457, Entry 9032, Boxes 1269 and

1271.

150 MND Translation, Tokyo (Vollhardt) to Berlin,

29 January 1943, SIS #63844, RG 457, HCC, Box 344.

151 MND Translations: Tokyo to Saigon, 17

December 1942, SIS #62124 NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box

342; and Tokyo to Nanking (Circular), 7 January 1943,

SIS #61872, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 342 .

152 MND Translation, Tokyo to Saigon, 17

December 1942, SIS #62124 NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box

342.

153 MND Translation, Shanghai to Peking, 24 May

1943, SIS #83737 NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 365.

154 “Magic” Diplomatic Summary, D.S. 768, 2 May

1944. NARA, RG 457, Magic Diplomatic Summaries, Box

11.

155 Tuka was Slovak Premier Volpetch Tuka.

General Bonnard probably was Abel Bonnard, the Vichy

minister of education. The interior minister of Hungary

was Andor Jaross, who was executed as a war criminal in

1946. The Grand Mufti (jurist) of Jerusalem was Amin

al-Husayni, who had fled to Germany in 1939 and made

anti-Jewish and anti-British speeches for the Nazis during the war. Al-Husayni also was involved in several

projects by the SS to raise Moslem units in Bosnia.

156 MND Translation, Berlin to Tokyo, 22 June

1944, SIS #129788, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 424.

157 MND Translations, Tokyo to Berlin, 1 July 1944,

SIS #129535, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 424; and Tokyo

to Berlin, 5 July 1944, SIS #129925. NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 424.

158 MND Translations, Shanghai to Hsinking and

Harbin, 24 November 1943, SIS #106323, NARA, RG

457, HCC, Box 39; and Shanghai to Hsinking, 12 October

1943, SIS #98986. NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 382.

159 MND Translation, Shanghai (Fontanel) to Bern

(Politique), 30 September 1944, SIS 146354, NARA, RG

457, HCC, Box 442.

160 MND Translation, Bern to Shanghai, 2 October

1944, SIS #143831, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 439. See

also New York Times, “U.S. Lets Jewish Unit Repay

Shanghai Loan,” 4 October 1943.

161 MND Translations Shanghai to Berne, 3

December 1943, SIS #104073, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box

391; Berne (Jardin) to Shanghai (French Consul), 18 July

1944, SIS #132299, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 426; and

Berne (Verge) to Shanghai (French Consulate), 1

December 1944, H-154218, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box

451.

162 MND Translation, Shanghai to Tokyo, 1 August

1945, H-199657, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Boxes 514.

Japanese Army translation, J88496A-D, G-J (Also

notated SRR 117407-9), 27 July 1945, NARA, RG 457,

Entry 9005.

163 MND Translation, Harbin to Tokyo, 21 October

1944, H-150832, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 448;

Japanese Naval Attaché (SRNA), Bern to Tokyo, 31 July

1945, #50801, RG 457, Entry 9013, Box 7.

164 MND Translation, Harbin to Tokyo, 6 March

1945, H-175408, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 481.

165 U.S. and Allied Efforts to Recover and Restore

Gold and Other Assets Stolen or Hidden by Germany

During World War II, A Preliminary Study. Prepared

by William Slany, May 1997. Also, the Appendix to U.S.

and Allied Efforts to Recover and Restore Gold and

Other Assets Stolen or Hidden by Germany During

World War II. Finding Aid to Records at the National

Archives at College Park. Prepared by Dr. Greg Bradsher,

NARA, College Park, MD. May 1997. And the

Supplement to the Preliminary Study: U.S. and Allied

Wartime and Postwar Relations and Negotiations With

Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey on

Looted Gold and German External Assets and U.S.

Concerns About the Fate of the Wartime Ustasha

Treasury. Prepared by William Slany. June 1998.

166 For more on Project Safehaven, see Donald

Steury, “The OSS and Project SAFEHAVEN,” Studies in

Intelligence (Unclassified Edition, Summer 2000, No.9),

35-50.
Page 118

167 Preliminary Study, 66. Figures are given in 1945

values. Current values are determined at a factor of

approximately 9.74: 5.6 billion dollars and 3.9 billion

dollars, respectively.

168 As an example, in late November 1944, the secretary general of the Bank of Portugal allowed for the

sale of Swiss francs for escudos by the German

Reichsbank. MND Translation, Lisbon (Dietmar) to

Berlin, 22 November 1944, T-1625, NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 519.

169 MND Translation, Stockholm (via Berlin/

Oshima) to Tokyo, 21 March 1945, H-175763, NARA, RG

457, HCC, Box 481. 

170 MND Translations, Lisbon (Morishima) to

Tokyo, 6 January 1943, SIS #62000, NARA, RG 457,

HCC, Box 342; and Berlin (Yamamoto) to Tokyo

(Totsukami), 1 September 1944, SIS #142491. NARA,

RG 457, HCC, Box 437. An interesting but relatively

unknown factor in determining the amount of gold in

Swiss banks may have been the Japanese penchant for

paying for purchases in Europe in gold. How much gold

they transported to Europe is unknown. However, a

Japanese diplomatic message from Tokyo to Berlin

refers to an informal decision to send two tons of gold to

Europe for purchases of war material. MND Translation,

Tokyo to Berlin, 28 February 1944, SIS #112177, NARA,

RG 457, HCC, Box 399. 

171 The Peterson Code used by the Reichsbank probably was the 3rd edition published in 1929. The 4th edition was published after World War II. See Peterson

International Code – Signal PETCO (New York:

Peterson Cipher Code Company, 1929). A copy is available in the library of the National Cryptologic Museum,

Fort George G. Meade, MD.

172 European Axis Signal Intelligence in World War

II as Revealed by “TICOM” Investigations and by Other

Prisoner of War Interrogations and Captured Material,

Principally German. WDGAS-14, Chief Army Security

Agency, 1 May 1946. Volume 7 – Goering’s Research

Bureau. 59, 74-5, Volume 6 – The Foreign Office

Cryptanalytic Section. 33

173 Blue Intelligence Summary No. 45, 19 June 1945,

page 3, RG 457, HCC, Box 192; 

174 For an idea of the spectrum of topics in the

cables that the Germans might have seen, refer to

Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS),

Diplomatic Papers, 1943. Vol. I, General (Washington:

United States Government Printing Office, 1963), 824-

908 and Foreign Relations of the United States,

Diplomatic Papers, Vol. IV, Europe (Washington:

United States Government Printing Office, 1966), 706-

800.

175 For example, see VN 1831/7.44, issued 27 July

1944 about Jews in Romania; VN 372/8.44, 4 August

1944 about Hungarian Jews; and VN 1837/4.44, 28 April

1944, about the arrival in Istanbul of a Bulgarian ship

with Jewish refuges for Palestine. All from RG 457, Entry

HCC, Box 205 “German Decrypts of U.S. Diplomatic

Messages.” 

176 See VN 1888/3.1944, 24 April 1944,

“Wirkungen des Luftbombardments auf den

Reichsbank-Notenumlauf,” (“Effects of the Aerial

Bombing on the Circulation of the Reichsbank’s Bank

Notes.”) RG 457, HCC, Box 206; and VN 615/10.44, 15

October 1944, RG 457, HCC, Box 208.

177 Preliminary Report, 18.

178 MND Translation, Bern (Kase) to Tokyo, H145035, 11 October 1944, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 440.

179 MND Translation, Bern (Kase) to Tokyo, H144958, 10 October 1944. NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 440.

The substance of this statement appeared in a cable from

the Yokohama Specie Bank representative in Berlin,

Kojiro Kitamura. The Yokohama Specie Bank was

Japan’s official overseas government bank. 

180 “Magic” Diplomatic Summary, D.S. # 940, 20

October 1944. NARA, RG 457, Magic Diplomatic

Summaries, Box 13.

181 MND Translation, Bern (Kase) to Tokyo, H158281, 16 December 1944. NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box

457.

182 MND Translation, Bern (Kase) to Tokyo, H158409, 22 December 1944. NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box

457. The 100 million Swiss francs were equivalent to

about $24 million in 1945.

183 MND translation, Boston, Bern (Koecher) to

Berlin, 13 December 1944, T-1626, NARA, RG 457, HCC,

Box 519.

184 Preliminary Report, 31.

185 Preliminary Report, 71. The involvement of

Currie and White in the negotiations is significant for

another reason: both men were longtime agents for the

Soviet secret police organization, the NKVD. In the U.S.
Page 119

Army translations of the NKVD messages from 1943 to

1946, known as Venona and issued by the Army Security

Agency, both men figure prominently. Currie, known as

PAZh (Page) and White, whose cover names were

YuRIST (Jurist) and changed later to LAJER (Lawyer),

had been Soviet agents since the 1930s. They had been

identified as Soviet agents in Venona translations and by

other agents turned witnesses or informants for the FBI

and Justice Department. From the Venona translations,

both were known to pass intelligence to their handlers,

notably the Silvermaster network. White also was known

to exert substantial influence on Treasury Secretary

Henry Morgenthau. Another Soviet agent was V. Frank

Coe, cover name PIK (Pick), a Treasury official who had

been involved in the Safehaven program. It is not certain

if the actions by Currie, White, or Coe during the negotiations with the Swiss were in any way affected by their

role as Soviet agents. Nor is it known if they reported to

Moscow about the U.S. government’s efforts to restrict

Swiss-German financial activity. For further information

on the roles of these three men, see Allan Weinstein and

Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood (New York:

Random House, 1999), 157-169.

The Soviets had other sources reporting about the

German assets in Switzerland. Venona translation No.

205 from 21 June 1945, Washington to Moscow, contained the contents of an Office of Strategic Services

report to a U.S. Treasury representative in England. The

report listed a number of Germans who were involved in

assisting the transfer of Nazi funds to unspecified foreign

banks. 

Soviet goals probably did not differ much from those

of the other Allies when it came to limiting Nazi economic activity in Switzerland. Moscow would have been

interested in seeing Swiss trade with the Germans end

thereby reducing the effectiveness of the German military facing them in Eastern Europe. Preliminary Report,

33.

186 MND Translation, Bern (Kase) to Tokyo, 29

January 1945, H-164327, NARA RG 457, HCC, Box 465;

and Bern (Politique) to Washington, 27 January 1945,

H-165648. NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 466.

187 MND Translation, Bern via Berlin (Kase) to

Tokyo, 6 February 1945, H-166117, NARA, RG 457, HCC,

Box 466. In the postwar period, the Allied Gold

Commission met with a number of nations that had been

neutral during the war, but had traded with Germany. A

summary of these meetings can be found in U.S. and

Allied Wartime and Postwar Relations and

Negotiations With Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Sweden,

and Turkey on Looted Gold and German External

Assets and U.S. Concerns About the Fate of the Wartime

Ustasha Treasury. Supplement to Preliminary Study on

U.S. and Allied Efforts to recover and Restore Gold and

Other Assets Stolen or Hidden by Germany During

World War II. Coordinated by Stuart Eizenstat, Under

Secretary of State for Economic, Business, and

Agricultural Affairs. Prepared by William Slany,

Historian, Department of State. June 1998.

188 Ibid, MND Translation.

189 MND Translation, Berlin to Tokyo, 19 February

1945, H-168142, NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 469.

190 Preliminary Study, 35.

191 Translation, Bern (Schnurre) to Berlin, February

1945, Boston Series, T-2624. NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box

521

192 Ibid.

193 Ministry of Economic Warfare Translations, CS

58695, Parts I and II, and CS 58638, Part II, NARA, RG

226, Entry 19, Box 143, XL 10464.

194 MND Translation, Bern to Berlin (Auswaertig),

6 April 1945, H-215456. Mandatory Declassification

Review #42560 (National Security Agency), 12 March

2003.

195 “Magic Diplomatic Summary, D.S. #1120, 19

April 1945. NARA, RG 457, Magic Diplomatic

Summaries, Box 16. 

196 The Allies were convinced that the Germans had

hidden stolen assets in places other than Merkers. An

Operation Sparkler was a plan to locate and seize these

cahes. In September 1946, a series of raids were conducted, but the results were meager. Thanks to Miriam

Kleiman at NARA for this source. RG-319, Records of the

Army Staff, Vols 1- 7. MND Translation, Washington

to Bern, H-215680, 27 November 1945 and Washington

to Bern, 26 November 1945, H-218258. NARA, RG 457,

“Swiss Gold,” Box 1. 

Page 121

In the preface to this Guide, we asked two major

questions: What did the Allied communications

intelligence agencies learn about the Holocaust and

when was this intelligence known? In the preceding

chapters, we have described briefly the operations

of the communications intelligence system of the

GC&CS and the SIS. We have described the available archival collections at NARA, the PRO, and

other places. Finally, we surveyed some of the hundreds of reports produced by the cryptologic agencies that bear on the history of the Holocaust. Using

this information, we should be able to answer both

questions. At the same time, we can add some

observations about other aspects of the archival

records, specifically their limitations, how they

came to be organized as they did, and their potential uses for today’s scholars and researchers.

There are two points that need to be understood

that relate to these two questions before we consider them. First, because the United States came into

the European war only after December 1941, much

of the following discussion applies to the activities

and personnel of the GC&CS. The SIS did not establish a COMINT mission for the European Theater

that was fully separate from the British. The SIS

collaborated with the British on many European

Axis military cryptologic efforts, but in generally

subsidiary or complementary roles. After the agreements of 1943, the Americans relied on the British

for much COMINT about Europe.1

The SIS did not

receive any German Police decrypts or SS messages

until after the BRUSA exchange. At that point in the

war, the intelligence about the Holocaust gleaned

from those sources was meager because of specific

German security measures implemented gradually

(but never completely effective) from late 1941 into

1943. The SIS developed some information about

the Holocaust from its own intercept, mostly

derived from the messages of the diplomatic missions of several countries. But this intelligence generally consisted of eyewitness reporting of events by

diplomats on the scene or information they gathered from interviews or other sources.

Secondly, it is important also to remember that

the GC&CS developed only one source of intelligence – communications intelligence – during the

war. What the GC&CS gathered from its intercepts

and the subsequent decrypts was forwarded up and

across the echelons of the British intelligence,

defense, and security establishments. The British

(and the Americans) utilized many other sources of

intelligence besides what they pulled from Axis signals. These included classic espionage agent

sources, aerial photography, collection of intelligence by technical means such as radar, captured

equipments and papers, reports from diplomatic

missions, debriefs of prisoners, defectors, and

refugees, and monitoring of foreign radio broadcasts. During the war, the Western Allies used intelligence from all these sources to formulate campaign and battle plans, political and diplomatic

strategies, and to follow the course of the war in

other theaters such as the Russian front. In some

military campaigns, such as in North Africa, Ultra

was the more decisive source of intelligence. Yet

in others it was less critical to outcomes of the

Battle for Britain in 1940 and the U-boat campaign.

We need to keep in mind this mix of intelligence

sources and the contribution of each to the Western

Allied knowledge of the Holocaust. There were

other sources of intelligence about what the Nazis

were doing and some of these proved to be superior to COMINT.

Chapter 5

Some Observations about Western Communications Intelligence

and the Holocaust
Page 122

What Was Known from Western COMINT

The archived wartime records of the British and

American cryptologic agencies hold a number of

translations and decryptions that bear on the history of the Holocaust. Due to limited research, only

an approximate estimate can be made, and that

ranges from 700 to 900 individual translations and

decrypts. The information in them covers the entire

period and scope of the Nazi effort to eliminate

Europe of its Jews and other “undesirable” groups.

Yet, while numerous and diverse, when taken

together these records do not constitute a complete

narrative about the event. For many of the individual dramas of the Holocaust, such as the roundup

of Jews in the Netherlands, the escape of the

Danish Jews, and the deportation of foreign Jews

from France, the information from COMINT

records is fragmentary or episodic at best.

A large number of the intercepts were originated by the Nazi organizations that were directly

responsible for carrying out the Final Solution.

These organizations included the various formations and commands of the German Police, the elements of the SS charged with running the various

camps and supervising the roundup of Jews in

occupied countries, and the SD, which actively

worked along with the police and SS. The messages

sent by these organizations form a contemporary

chronicle of their activities. Other intercepts such

as the diplomatic messages of Vichy France and the

Sztojay and Szalasi regimes in Hungary contain the

grotesque official rationales for the depredations

inflicted on their victims. These particular intercepted messages stand as first-person indictments

of those who committed the war crimes and those

who aided the criminals.

Still, despite the incriminating information

from the SIGINT, the information in the police and

SS decrypts does not provide historians with a complete picture of the extent and nature of the Nazi

program to eliminate Jews from Europe. For example, the arithmetic sum of information from the

decrypts, measured in terms of reported deaths and

general actions such as “liquidated inhabitants,”

although a grim accounting, did not give anything

near the total deaths that the police units and einsatzgruppen caused. This was partly due to the

Aerial photograph of gas chambers and prisoner barracks at the Auschwitz I complex

taken on 4 April 1944

(Source: Studies in Intelligence. Special Unclassified Edition, Fall 2000. Page 93)
Page 123

Western inability to intercept and decrypt every

message sent by the police or SS units. As such,

much of the intercept came from the police and SS

units operating with the German Army Groups

Center and South. Very little was intercepted and

decrypted from the police units operating in the

Baltic area of operations.2 Also, the security measure slowly implemented by the Police command

eventually closed this pipeline of information.

The decrypts from the concentration and death

camps that the British analysts reviewed have

similar problems. These particular reports were

periodic accounts, usually in the form of a monthly

summary, of the day-to-day available slave labor

population at a particular camp. Often, a camp’s

population report was broken down further by

nationality or ethnic group. In some cases, the

report was further refined with a statement of the

totals from the beginning and end of each day.

Absent from these reports was information about

those groups who arrived at the camps and immediately were sent to the gas chambers. Why this latter information about the gassings was withheld

from the camp reports is not clear. Quite possibly,

the SS hierarchy wanted to maintain as much secrecy as possible about the extent of the Final Solution.

Later German security precautions only added to

the silence. The result was that analysts at GC&CS,

using only SS and police decrypts, could not provide explicit intelligence about the mass extermination activities at Auschwitz/Birkenau and other

such camps.3

Another large collection of intercepts consists of

multinational diplomatic messages. Most of the

intercepts were of messages from European diplomats stationed in various capitals who reported

occasionally about the plight of the Jews. As mentioned earlier, the priority to collect these types of

messages was never high, except for those from

Japanese diplomats in Berlin and Rome. Reports

by diplomats occasionally carried information

about the roundup of Jews in a particular country.

Only during the roundups and deportations in

Vichy France in the summer and fall of 1942 and in

Hungary during the late spring and fall of 1944 did

the diplomatic traffic report in any depth about

what was happening. In the latter case of Hungary,

Allied and neutral interest in events there initially

may have been related to the secret maneuvers by

Budapest to abandon the Axis and sue for peace. 

Still, the records of the diplomatic eyewitnesses

or those who reported what had been discovered

from their own inquiries, such as many of the intercepted diplomatic reports in essence were, provided a dramatic element to the narrative of the grim

events that happened throughout Europe.

Diplomats from neutral countries filed most of

these reports. In many cables, their objectivity as

observers often was challenged by the tragic and

horrible nature of the events they reported. This is

poignantly illustrated in the traffic sent by the

Portuguese ambassador in Budapest. Other messages are a chronology of failed or futile efforts by

neutral diplomats to organize or effect the rescue of

some of the victims.

When the COMINT Agencies Knew about the

Holocaust

For decades, an important issue for historians

of the Holocaust has been to establish the point in

time during the war when sufficient information

from all sources reached the Allies that disclosed

the full nature and extent of the German plans to

eliminate the Jews. The critical time period encompasses the beginning of the massacres in the western Soviet Union, that is mid-1941, and runs to the

middle or end of 1942 when the complex of death

camps reached nearly full operation. But it is difficult to provide a simple answer to the second question of when the COMINT agencies knew about the

Holocaust during this period. This is because any

answer anticipates that, from such a date when signals intelligence was known about the massacres in

Russia or the operations of the death camps, the

Western cryptologic agencies could have discerned

the full intent of the Nazi policy of extermination,

the full extent of which became known as the Final

Solution.
Page 124

On the surface, the timeliness of communications intelligence – especially the German Police

messages that were intercepted and decrypted

shortly after the invasion of the Soviet Union began,

and the SS concentration camp radio reports from

as early as mid-1942 – suggests that this intelligence source could have warned of what would

eventually befall Europe’s Jews. However, there

were two major obstacles that prevented communications intelligence from being the single “warning”

factor.

The first obstacle was that the usefulness of the

intercepted police and SS messages was undercut

by two fundamental shortcomings in the nature of

the intelligence itself. The most important of these

was that these messages were intercepted after the

programs of massacres and death camps had

begun. The police actions in the western USSR had

begun prior the intercept of the earliest police radio

traffic about the massacres in the Soviet Union. The

first intercept that mentioned any of the massacres

probably was the 18 July 1941 radio message from

the Police Regiment Center that reported the execution of 1,153 Jewish “plunderers” near the town

of Slonim in Belorussia.4 This was nearly a month

after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Even

more importantly, Nazi policy for the elimination of

all undesired racial types during the invasion of the

Soviet Union had been established back in March

1941. At that time, Hitler, in a meeting with military

leaders, had established that the invasion would be

a war of extermination. The arrangements to implement this policy were made in the next two months

between the army and the SS.5 But nothing of this

planning appeared in the intercept.

The SS messages about the concentration

camps suffered from the same time lag. The messages sent by the concentration camp SS commanders and encrypted in the SS Enigma machine,

were not intercepted and decrypted until early June

1942. This date was well after the death camp

at Chelmo, Poland, had started operation in

December 1941. It also was months after the beginning of operations of the Birkenau complex at

Auschwitz in March 1942.6 The intercepts about the

concentration and death camps also came well after

the important conference at Wannsee in January

1942, which considered extending the Final

Solution to all of occupied Europe.

The second shortcoming of the intercepts was

that they contained fragmentary or unclear information that could be ambiguous to analysts who

reviewed it. Therefore, the COMINT could be subject to differing interpretations regarding the full

intent of the Nazi activities reported in the intercepted messages. The analysts that studied the

communications intelligence could and did miss or

misinterpret the significance of the information in

them. Axis decrypts were filled with abbreviations,

acronyms, and terms that the Allied intelligence

analysts first had to understand. We can add to this

mix of problems the Nazi policy of disguising references to various phases and activities of the Final

Solution. Sometimes this program effectively

obscured the information in the intercepts to the

point where its importance went unrecognized. A

good example of this was the German Police message of 11 January 1943 that listed the number of

Jews and others gassed at four death camps in the

previous year. The decrypted message referred to

an “Einsatz Reinhardt” followed by a set of numbers for the last two weeks of 1942 and for the entire

year. British codebreakers appear to have not recognized the reference and that the message was, in

fact, a report on the number of victims gassed in

the four death camps located in the General

Government (southeastern Occupied Poland).

The second obstacle to effective use of Western

COMINT was how the intelligence was received

and assimilated by the analysts and officers at

Bletchley Park and the rest of British intelligence

structure who were familiar with the reports about

the massacres, deportations, and concentration

camps. Although historians are wary of making

generalizations about the inner thoughts and attitudes of a population in any period, some observations about the historical context of European antiSemitism could be useful if we are to understand, in
Page 125

any small way, how intelligence about the massacres and camps was received at the GC&CS.

The first thing to consider is that what the Nazis

were doing was outside of the historical experience

and imagination of most Europeans. Certainly the

historical landscape of European anti-Semitism

had been one marked with almost nineteen hundred years of unremitting ugliness – the pogroms,

massacres, deportations, banishments, ghettoization, extortion, blood-laws, and auto-da-fes. But

even this common heritage of brutality could hardly prepare people for what the Nazis planned and

were working to fulfill: an effort to eliminate from

Europe (and later, the world) all vestiges of Jewry.

Not only were Jews targets, but also many other

segments of the European population were to be

eliminated – mentally and physically handicapped

persons, Slavs, Poles, Romany, etc. This larger aim,

too, was beyond the historical experience of

Europe. And for the Nazis to carry out this plan

meant that the old techniques of murder and starvation were not adequate. Hence the Nazis

employed mass industrial techniques of slaughter

to achieve what they wanted. Realizing that what

the Nazis did was so horribly unique, could it be

expected realistically that the analysts at Bletchley

Park and elsewhere could have determined the

totality of the Nazi plan, and the means to achieve

it, based on the fragmentary evidence at hand from

the intercepts? And could they have grasped the

implications that the massacres in Russia and the

camps were some of the means to achieve a Europe

that was Judenfrei?

A second consideration is that, while many people may have received the news of the massacres

and camps with horror, the truth is that much of the

world’s population, including many in the major

Allied powers of the United States and Great

Britain, held, to some degree, anti-Semitic sentiments. This observation may be unsavory to modern ears; it is, unfortunately, a historical fact. We

have seen some allusions to it in the preceding

pages of this guide. Most notably, there was the difficulty experienced by the United States when it

came to saving some 5,000 Jewish orphans in

France (See page 92). This was, in part, caused by

the refusal by some in Congress to accept more

Jews. Both President Roosevelt and Prime Minister

Churchill were often hampered in their limited

efforts to alleviate some of the suffering by the general anti-Semitic sentiment in both nations.7 Just

how many British signals intelligence analysts,

either individually or as a group, held this attitude

is unknown.8 And how much it affected their reactions to the intelligence is likewise unknown. But it

must be considered in any discussion about how

the COMINT was received.

Whatever their beliefs or intentions, many people in the West, and some of them were in a position to know otherwise, simply could not comprehend or refused to believe the evidence of what was

occurring in Nazi-occupied Europe.9 For example,

the famous American historian, Arthur Schlesinger

Jr., then an analyst in the Research and Analysis

Branch of the OSS, remarked that, in the summer of

1944, even with the flood of reports about concentration camps, what was happening was interpreted as an “incremental increase in persecution

rather than...extermination.” 10 And in December of

1944, John McCloy, the assistant secretary of war

and a regular recipient of Ultra intelligence, asked

Leon Kubotinski of the World Jewish Congress,

“We are alone. Tell me the truth. Do you really

believe all those horrible things happened?”11

The little evidence that historians of cryptology

have to work with suggests that within the ranks

and leadership of the GC&CS, there was a division

of opinion about what the police decrypts augured

regarding the extent and nature of what was happening to the Jews and other groups throughout

Europe. Two examples illustrate this split. In

September 1941, an intelligence analyst from

Bletchley Park had attached this grim comment to

a Police decrypt about massacres in Russia: “The

tone of this message suggests that the word has

gone out that a decrease in the population of Russia

would be welcomed in high quarters and that the

leaders of the three sectors [The commanders of the
Page 126

police units assigned to the three German Army

Groups invading the Soviet Union] stand somewhat

in competition with each other as to their ‘score’.”

This comment reportedly caused the War Office to

respond with a sharp retort that this interpretation

was based on a minimum of evidence.12

On the other hand, on 11 September 1941 Nigel

de Grey, the deputy director of the GC&CS, noted

on a series of early decrypts of German radio

reports of massacres by many police battalions and

the SS Cavalry Regiment that, “The fact that the

Police are killing all Jews that fall into their hands

should now be sufficiently well appreciated. It is not

therefore proposed to continue reporting these

butcheries unless so requested.”13 De Grey’s comment could represent either his inability to appreciate the implications of the massacres, or his willingness to ignore what the Nazis were doing.

Whatever his reason, even someone as highly

placed in British intelligence as de Grey, exposed as

he was to the daily decrypts detailing the many

massacres and other atrocities occurring in the

western USSR, would not draw attention to the

continuing slaughter in the western USSR.

In either case of the Police massacres in Russia

and the operations of the death camps, COMINT

could not provide a timely warning of the totality of

the tragedies that eventually were to fall on

Europe’s Jews, Slavs, Poles, and others. This is not

to say that the intercepts were useless. In the case of

the police massacres, at the very least, the decrypts

did alert the British to what was happening in the

occupied Soviet Union. As for the concentration

and death camps, information about them from

intercepts was available only some time after the

camps had begun operation. In this case, information from other sources, such as the revelations of

Jan Karski, and that gathered by the American

diplomats in Switzerland may have proved more

useful in alerting the West to the extent of the horrors occurring in the camps.14

Despite what was known, Allied communications intelligence, by itself, could not have provided

an early warning to Allied leaders regarding the

nature and scope of the Holocaust.

Some Further Observations Regarding

the Available Archival Records

There are limited COMINT agency records

about the Holocaust.

Early in this Guide, we referred to a popular

misconception that the Allies intercepted all, or

nearly all, Axis communications during the Second

World War. This notion probably arose and gained

popular credence because of a number of presentations by journalists, television reporters, and popular writers about the cryptanalytic successes against

various Axis cipher machines, such as Purple and

Enigma, and numerous manual codes and ciphers

such as Japanese naval operational code JN-25.

Whatever the authors of these presentations about

Allied code-breaking successes intended, and whatever was inferred by their audiences, what subsequently developed was a lively image of “sweeping”

or “vacuuming” the radio airwaves of all Axis messages. To continue the image, the Allies would then

decrypt all of these intercepted messages.

The reality, as has been presented in this Guide,

was much different. The COMINT system, from

intercept to dissemination of the intelligence, more

closely resembled a process that, in most cases,

intercepted varying portions of Axis and neutral

communications, and then slowly winnowed out

the chaff of unusable or unimportant messages.

Against the many thousands of Axis radio transmitters, or terminals, that operated on a daily basis, the

Allies had a much smaller number of intercept positions at monitoring stations located around the

world. They could copy only a limited number of

messages. What terminals they covered, in turn,

were determined by priorities that were meant to

meet the strategic, theater, or operational requirements of the various allied commands. Of those

messages sent by the Axis terminals that were

copied, a number might have contained too many

errors in the transmission by the Axis radioman, or
Page 127

in the transcription by the Allied monitor, which

would have rendered them useless for decryption

or translation. Of the copy that was usable, a portion may have contained messages encrypted in

systems that could not be exploited by Allied cryptanalysts. Many messages that were successfully

decrypted did not contain information that was

immediately important or useful for Allied intelligence analysts. Only that information that met the

priorities set by the command structure would be

processed and disseminated to the appropriate

recipients. Although no general set of statistics

exists, as we have seen, some accounting of translations as a percent of the total intercept range from

about five to fifteen percent, though targets of higher priority, such as U-boat communications, had a

much higher success rate.

Of course, this explanation applies only to the

radio and cable communications that the Allies

were able to intercept. A large portion of German

internal communications, and those sent to nearby

neutrals and conquered nations or regions, was

conducted on landline or submarine cable telephone and telegraph systems, which Allied monitors were unable to access. Collecting messages

sent over cable required physical access to a terminal or cable through which the messages traveled.

The actual acquisition of the messages required

either the placement of a tap on the wire in a secret

or secure overseas location, or the subversion,

bribery, or the blackmail of employees of neutral or

enemy national post, telephone and telegraph

agencies. However, while Axis cables sent within

occupied and neutral Europe were accessible by

means of covert operations, protecting the tap from

discovery and getting the information from them in

a timely manner would have been extremely difficult and dangerous.

Another constraining factor was the prioritized

requirements system established by intelligence

commands. It hardly would be a surprise to say that

COMINT priorities weighed most heavily towards

purely military communications. Military communications, especially those by Axis air force and

naval forces, most likely would not contain much

information on the Holocaust. Wehrmacht communications from the Russian front might have

contained some items on massacres, but probably

not consistent. German Police and SS communications, which proved to be the major source on the

worst depredations of the Holocaust, originally

were collected as a supplement to intelligence on

the military and civilian domestic situation in

Germany.15 Yet, even these communications terminals were not the highest Allied priority.

Nonmilitary communications, principally

diplomatic and commercial, which might carry

some information about the roundups, concentration camps, or looting were assigned to a secondary

priority. Then, not all diplomatic terminals were of

equal importance. The American ability to exploit

fully Japan’s high-level diplomatic communications encrypted with Purple perforce made that

country’s messages a priority object of Allied intercept. Japan’s terminals in the major Axis and neutral capitals were preeminent targets. Japanese

communications to other countries rated much

lower in importance. While the diplomatic traffic of

neutrals generally rated lower in the priority for

intercept.

Axis military and diplomatic terminals were

emphasized when it came to tasking the COMINT

system. This was because of the paramount importance of intelligence from these sources to the successful prosecution of the war. Information about

the Holocaust came mostly from lower priority terminals: German Police and neutral diplomatic terminals. To raise the priority for these would have

detracted from the primary Allied strategic effort to

defeat the Axis, especially Germany. Intelligence

elements, including communications intelligence,

were tasked to acquire that information necessary

to achieve this aim.

A final delimiter to information about the

Holocaust was the policy adopted by the Nazis to

control the spread of information about the plans

and operations carried out to meet the goal of elim-
Page 128

inating all Jews and other undesirables from

Europe. While the SS and other Nazis would tout

their successes in eliminating Jews and others, they

did not always record them. This attitude can be

illustrated by the remark by Reichsfuehrer SS

Heinrich Himmler’s comment at a speech to SS

notables in which he stated that the Final Solution

was “a glorious page in our history, never written

(niemals geschriebenes), and perhaps never to be

written.”16 Aside from some intercept of police, SS,

and SD radio messages, and occasional references

to Allied publicity about the massacres, deportations, and the concentration camps, there is little

other official German radio communications relating to killing operations or other activities relating

to the Holocaust. This is partly attributable to the

Nazi hierarchy’s relatively effective policy limiting

official references the actual operations to exterminate the Jews. This policy precluded detailed public

discussion or announcements.

Nazi officials also developed a vocabulary of

evasion, utilizing obscure bureaucratic language

and euphemisms when referring to the Nazi objectives and actual techniques employed by the police,

SS, SD, and others. In one directive from Martin

Borman, even the expression “final solution”

(Endloesung) was disallowed from correspondence. Of course the premier example of this policy

of official obscurity was the January 1943 message

about the results of Operation Reinhard. It

appeared to be an innocuous message with numbers, dates and an unclear context. Analysts at the

time missed its significance.

If the official policy was not always followed,

and it was hardly a “masterpiece of deception” as

claimed by German general Alfred Jodl, it did have

the effect of restricting discussion and correspondence about the Holocaust.17 It should also be

pointed out that the radio reports by the German

police about the massacres in Russia and the SS status reports from the concentration, labor, and

death camps eventually were discontinued because

of doubts by the German Police and SS high commands about the security of these communications. 

In light of the above factors – technical limitations, German deception, and Allied military priorities – it is unlikely that Western communications

intelligence could have produced more intelligence

during the war than it ultimately did.

There are significant differences between the

Archival record holdings of the cryptologic

agencies of the United States and Great

Britain.

Although the differences in the size and content

of the records of the American and British cryptologic agencies should not be a surprise, it was only

recently that historians understood why. There are

two reasons for this gap. The first is the simple fact

that the United States entered the war some twenty-six months after it had begun in Europe. During

that period, the British had developed an extensive

cryptologic effort that encompassed the European

Theater. American expertise and capability still

were sparse when it came to Axis communications

in Europe, even after some staff technical

exchanges with British cryptologists in 1940 and

1941. Instead, American cryptologists, because of

then current military situation and a decade of prewar expertise, had taken responsibility for communications intelligence in the Pacific Theater of operations. This dominance became more pronounced

when the sole British code-breaking site in

Singapore redeployed to Ceylon and then further

west to British East Africa in 1942. Eventually,

American cryptologists arrived in Britain and were

integrated as individuals or as units into the GC&CS

operations, but they remained subordinate to the

British.

The second reason for the difference probably

stems from a misunderstanding of the nature and

timing of the official British-American exchange

program known as the BRUSA Agreement of

June/July 1943. Prior to the agreement, there were

separate and limited, reciprocal interchanges

between the GC&CS and the SIS and OP-20-G.18

The June 1943 agreement covered exchange of

technical communications intelligence and opera-
Page 129

tional intelligence information between GC&CS

and the U.S. War Department, as represented by

Special Branch and Signal Security Service. (The

U.S. Navy would sign a separate, more limited,

agreement. It was known as the Extension

Agreement and applied to a 1942 exchange

arrangement known as the Holden Agreement.)

The BRUSA applied to the military sphere only;

diplomatic affairs were not included and were

arranged in a separate agreement between the

Americans at Arlington Hall Station (AHS) and the

GC&CS diplomatic section at Berkeley Street,

London.19

Also, it needs to be recalled that the U.S. Office

of Strategic Services had its own exchange agreement with British intelligence, specifically with its

counterintelligence and counterespionage units,

M.I. 5 and Section V. of M.I. 6. These exchanges

included communications intelligence material

that was not given to the American cryptologic elements. These arrangements account for the significant but limited numbers of British decrypts and

translations that can be found in OSS records.

Also, and more importantly in regards to

archival records holdings, the trade in intelligence

that followed the agreements was not retroactive.

Only current technical and operational intelligence

was passed between London and Washington;

though there may have been some limited transfer

of dated technical cryptographic and cryptanalytic

material used for training purposes. This explains,

for example, why there were no copies of German

Police decrypts (except for a few training samples

sent to Arlington Hall later in the war) in the

wartime files of the Signals Intelligence Service.

Before the agreements in 1943, this source largely

had dried up when the police and SS stopped using

radio for transmitting reports about massacres in

Russia and the situation in various concentration

camps and, instead, passed this information by

courier or cable.

The intelligence that was exchanged between

the COMINT agencies did not include all of the

actual Axis or neutral decrypts or translations. The

logistics of such a transfer of information would

have been too daunting. The amount of paper traffic would have swamped communications lines

between the two capitals. Transmission rates, even

of teletypewriters (50-100 words a minute), would

have been inadequate. Physically transporting the

material across the Atlantic was not a solution: the

amount of intelligence generated would have militated against a reasonable or timely review. The

digests, summaries, and relatively limited number

of translations of the significant intelligence that

were transmitted back and forth between the two

capitals were considered sufficient.20 This solution

probably suited the needs of the leadership in

Washington, DC. The most important American

customers of British Ultra information were the

military commands located in England, such as

the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary

Forces (SHAEF) under General Eisenhower, the

Allied naval and air authorities, and those in the

North African and Italian fronts.

There also was a security angle that limited the

American and British exchange. Ever since the

British codebreakers had first contemplated meeting their American opposites in 1941, some officials

in the London security establishments had fretted

over the history of loose control of security information in Washington. The British concerns

stemmed partly from the poor American control

procedures, and a genuine fear of a press and society unhampered by any Official Secrets Act.21 At the

same time, the British concern reveals just how

much they appreciated the slender nature of their

Ultra triumph. For the first few years of the war, the

basis for their mastery over some of the Enigmas

rested on cribs (plaintext assumed to be present in

an encrypted message), individual German radio

operator insecurities, and captured key and Enigma

machines.22 Only slowly did the British cryptologic

establishment let the Americans in on their cryptanalytic success against Enigma. Although this

sharing began in early 1941, it was not until later

agreements in 1942 and 1943 that exchanges of
Page 130

technical and operational intelligence was

exchanged on a regular basis.

The result is that the current archival records of

the British and American COMINT organizations

reflect the division and emphasis of efforts between

both countries that was established by the July

1943 Britain-United States Agreement. The British

records are European-oriented and go back to 1939.

American records reflect the emphasis on the

Pacific campaign and, except for U-boat campaign

and worldwide diplomatic intercept, are bereft of

most German military and other service translations.

The Western communications intelligence

agencies collected many more intercepts than

they finally processed during the war.

It must be remembered that the primary purpose of the Allied intelligence agencies, including

the COMINT organizations, was the collection, processing, and dissemination of information supporting the prosecution of the war against the Axis powers. As such, the processing and retention of information based on communications intelligence was

contingent upon the strategic exigencies of the

moment. As we have seen, intercepted messages

that were not processed or used, either because of

technical reasons, or overtaken by events as the

operational situation changed, were rarely (if ever)

retained for future processing. As was mentioned

above, as much as 85 to 90 percent of all messages

collected by the Allied COMINT agencies were not

processed to the point of formal dissemination.

This does not exclude the possibility that some

intelligence was disseminated in an informal fashion. There likely were instances of hurriedly translated intercept during a fast-moving military situation that was passed along verbally or by phone.

And some intercept was processed partly, perhaps

only decrypted, but not translated or disseminated

in the form of a serialized formal report or translation. In this latter category there are the police

decrypts produced by GC&CS that remain in the

original German language form. But the decrypts

were retained and the information in them was disseminated to the British leadership in the form of

briefings and reports.

After the war, the U.S. Army and Navy cryptologic agencies destroyed virtually all of the

unprocessed intercept. With victory over the Axis,

there was no operational rationale for retaining it.

Only two types of “raw” traffic, intercepts that had

not been decrypted or analyzed, were retained after

the war. The first consisted of a small set of samples

of various wartime targets for training purposes.

The second set of retained intercept was that relevant to postwar activities. This latter intercept

included the U.S. Navy’s decryption and translation

of Japanese naval messages related to the prewar

period, especially those directly concerned with the

attack on Pearl Harbor; Soviet espionage messages

decrypted by the Army Security Agency, known

under the project name of Venona; and German

military attaché and diplomatic messages between

Berlin and Tokyo. These latter messages contained

information about subjects of continuing intelligence interest: wartime Axis technical material and

equipment exchange and intelligence that Germany

and Japan shared on the Soviet Union. The latter

was important in the context of the growing postwar concerns about Soviet intentions and capabilities.

The finished reports that were retained by the

COMINT agencies consisted, in the main, of the

serialized intelligence product series produced during the war: the numerous series of translations,

decrypts, summaries, or reports derived from targeted Axis and neutral military, naval, commercial,

security, diplomatic communications. The other

material retained was made up of technical reports

about cryptologic techniques, equipment, and procedures. It is these collections, stored and available

in the Public Record Office and the National

Archives, which constitute the records of Allied

communications intelligence from the war.

Concurrent with the postwar destruction of

unprocessed intercept was the closure of many
Page 131

offices that had been responsible for producing the

intelligence material. These closures were part of

the drastic, general postwar reduction in the

American and British military and intelligence

establishments.23 The administrative records and

intelligence reports of the various wartime cryptologic work centers were retained by their successor

agencies. The papers would not be transferred to

their respective national archives for public use

until decades later.

In the postwar period, GC&CS, the Army

Security Agency (the postwar successor to SIS), and

OP-20-G would write in-house histories of their

activities during the war. These general works varied in size and scope. The GC&CS histories were

very detailed and extended over three dozen volumes. The ASA also produced a multivolume history of the SIS activities, though nowhere as extensive

as the British work. Also, a number of short histories of the cryptologic tactical units were written.

Some special problem target studies also were published in the years after the war. It was not until the

1980s that these numerous histories were released

to the public, but only very slowly, and many of

them contained redacted text.24

There are pertinent uses for the available

records from the COMINT agencies related to

the Holocaust.

Of the perhaps few million translations and

decrypts published by the Allied cryptologic agencies during the war, those containing information

pertinent to the Holocaust currently number

between 700 and 900.25 Even in the collection

of the thousands of German Police decrypts that

resides in the PRO, only a limited number of them

actually carry information about Holocaust-related

atrocities. Most of the Police messages cover

administrative, order of battle, logistical, or transportation subjects or are concerned with the security situation behind German lines in Russia. In the

larger context of the history of the Holocaust, when

one considers the enormous amount of public and

private records available from all other sources, the

COMINT contribution is quite small. Aside from

this paucity of records, the information they contain for the most part is not new. Yet, there are

some startling finds such as the German police

message that contains the number of Jews exterminated in the General Government in 1942 during

Operation Reinhard, and details of the operations

in Auschwitz contained in the Vrba-Wetzler report

in mid-1944. Still, the records have two particular

uses for today’s researchers and historians.

First of all, in some cases, the COMINT translations are the only extant and contemporary record

of some aspects of the Holocaust. In particular, the

GC&CS decrypts of the German police, SS, and SD

messages are the only existing records of the daily

operations of these organizations, since the

Germans destroyed most of the original orders,

reports and other correspondence. Even as episodic and fragmentary as the police and SS decrypts

are, they constitute an important part of the record

of the roundup of Jews in Rome and the massacres

on the Russian front, and the operations of the concentration and death camps. In other cases, such as

the roundup of Jews in Vichy France in 1942 and in

Hungary in 1944, the communications intelligence

information supplements well the already extensive

sources. But, just as important as the translations

and decrypts are as a source, like most other

COMINT, these records constitute a contemporary

record of events. These messages were written as an

activity occurred or were composed shortly after

while the information was fresh. It is the immediacy of these decrypts and translations that is particularly useful to scholars reconstructing events.

Second, many of the COMINT reports and

translations, especially diplomatic messages, point

to possible new sources of information or to aspects

of the Holocaust that have been overlooked or minimized in conventional narratives. These translations also suggest new avenues of research that consider the attitudes, reactions, or activities of countries not normally associated directly with the

Holocaust. In the first instance, in particular, during the roundup of Hungary’s Jews, the reports
Page 132

filed by neutral diplomats stationed in Budapest

usually not associated with large-scale, international relief work such as Mexico, Portugal, Spain and

Eire appear to contain much information about the

course of the SS dragnet and the measures taken to

rescue Jews. The relative handful of intercepted

messages from these countries indicates that their

diplomats made significant attempts to help the

endangered Jews. If nothing else, these diplomats

were fairly reliable reporters of events during the

several months of the Hungarian tragedy. These

diplomatic intercepts suggest that the foreign ministry archives of those countries may contain more

pertinent information than hitherto considered in

conventional historical narratives about the

Holocaust. Also, other countries with Jewish

nationals caught up in Hungary made efforts to rescue their countrymen. Romania, which lost part of

Transylvania to Hungary, was concerned over Jews

from that region seized by Hungarian authorities.26

The COMINT records also indicate that the

waves from the storm of the European Holocaust

had reached the shores of Latin America. The reaction by Latin American countries to events in

Europe varied. For example, a Vichy diplomatic

cable of 24 September 1942 reported on a newly

passed Bolivian legislation that further restricted

immigration by Jews, Asians, and Africans, and

limited the number of Jews allowed to own or work

in commercial ventures.27 Other diplomatic

reports, whether from neutral Latin American

countries, or those sympathetic to the Axis like

Argentina and Chile, or minor Allied combatants

such as Mexico and Brazil, carry references to the

Holocaust. Some countries, such as Brazil, were

concerned for Jewish nationals who were caught up

in the Nazi extermination machine.28

Notes

1 The Achievements of the Signal Security Agency in

World War II (Washington, D.C: Assistant Chief of

Staff, G-2, 1946), 31.

2 Phillips, 234-6; Michael Smith, (Bletchley Park

and the Holocaust. Intelligence and National Security

(Volume 19, No. 2, Summer 2004), 266-7.

3 Breitman, 114-5.

4 ZIP/G.P.D. 292R/18.7.41, NARA, RG 457, HCC,

Box 1386.

5 Christopher R. Browning. The Origins of The

Final Solution (Lincoln: The University of Nebraska

Press; Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004), 213-224. Also,

Weinberg, 190-2. For a somewhat detailed description of

the military-SS meetings that followed, see Breitman,

36-42.

6 As reported in Breitman, 114, German Police

Decode, 5 June 1942, items 5 and 6, PRO HW 16/19,

7 See Laqueur, 91-93, for a survey of British popular

attitudes and Dallek, 166-8, for problems that President

Roosevelt faced with American reactions to any effort to

help Jews. For more on American general attitudes

towards Jews and reactions to news of the Holocaust, see

David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear. The American

People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1999), 410-415, and William

O’Neill, Democracy at War: America’s Fight at Home

and Abroad in WWII (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1999), 226-229.

8 The question of anti-Semitic attitudes surfaced

occasionally within the confines of GC&CS and SIS personnel. Three of the major leaders of SIS, William

Friedman, Abraham Sinkov, and Solomon Kullback,

were Jewish. This fact was noted in passing by GC&CS

participants in early discussions with SIS in 1940-42, but

appears not to have made any difference in the close

cooperation of the two agencies. PRO, HW 1/2, 10 March

1941 “Signals Intelligence passed to Prime Minister

Churchill including Enigma messages.” And HW 14/62,

26 December 1942, “GC&CS – Directorate, Policy

Papers.”

9 See Laqueur, 93-100 and 159-170, for examples of

reaction in Washington and among worldwide Jewish

groups. 

10 Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “The London Operation:

Recollections of a Historian.” George Chalou, Editor,

The Secrets War: The Office of Strategic Services in

World War II (Washington D.C.: Government Printing

Office, 1992), 66-7.

11 Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the

Making of the American Establishment (New York:

Simon and Schuster, 1992), 206.
Page 133

12 As reported by Michael Smith, Station X: The

Codebreakers of Bletchley Park (London: Channel 4

Books, 1998), 72-4.

13 De G[rey] , 11 September 1941, PRO HW 1/62.

14 Laqueur, 62-4, 109-11, 119-120 .

15 Hinsley, 670-1; Phillips, 5-12.

16 NARA, RG 238, Nuremberg International

Military Tribunal records. Document PS 1919,

Prosecution Exhibit USA 190, p. 64-66. From NARA,

Holocaust, the Documentary Evidence (Washington,

DC: NARA, 1993), 35.

17 John Lukacs. The Hitler of History (New York:

Vintage Press, 1998), 193.

18 For background to these exchanges, see Bradley

F. Smith, The Ultra-Magic Deals, 40-129.

19 Benson, 108-121.

20 Bradley F. Smith, The Ultra-Magic Deals, 163-4;

Benson, 111-114; See NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box1026,

File 3284, “American Embassy, London, Messages to

Military Intelligence Division,” May 1943; Box 1119,

Folder 2600, “Colonel McCormack’s Trip to London,

May-June 1943,” June 1943. This restriction makes

more sense when considering the context of the tide of

intelligence reports from all sources. A January 1945 listing of sources of reports by the library section of Special

Branch runs 42 pages and contains over 850 titles. See

“Sources and Titles of Records Received in Document

Section of the I&L Branch, SPSIR-7.” 19 February 1945.

NARA, RG 457, HCC, Box 1432, Folder “Sources of Titles

of Reports.”

21 Bradley F. Smith, 58-63 and 176-180; F. Hinsley,

British Intelligence in the Second World War, Its

Influence on Strategy and Operations (London: Her

Majesty’s Stationery office, 1984), Vol. III, Part I, 52.

22 F. H. Hinsley, et alia. British Intelligence in the

Second World War, Its Influence on Strategy and

Operations, Volume I (London: Her Majesty’s

Stationery Office, 1979), 336-7, 391; The matter of the

“completeness” of sharing COMINT occurred again from

late 1942 into early 1943, when the SIS and GC&CS

clashed over access to Enigma traffic and Alan Turing’s

participation in the Bell Laboratory development of a

voice scrambler device. See Robert L. Benson, A History

of Communications Intelligence during World War II:

Policy and Administration (Fort George G. Meade, MD:

Center for Cryptologic History, National Security

Agency, 1997), 97-108.

23 Smith, Ultra-Magic Deals, 221.

24 For example, The 37-volume Government Code &

Cypher School Histories of World War II, the Military,

Air, and Naval sets are located in Series HW 11 at the

Public Records Office. Available at either U.S. National

Archives, RG 457, HCC or the library of the National

Cryptologic Museum are such examples of these histories as: SRH-001, Historical Background of the Signal

Security Agency (3 Vols.), (Washington, DC: Army

Security Agency, April 1946); SRH-279, OP-20-G File,

Communications Intelligence Organization, 1942-1946

(Washington, DC: National Security Agency, 1984);

SRH-135, History of the Second Signal Service

Battalion, 1939-1945 (Fort George G. Meade: NSA/CSS,

1981); SRH-042, Signals Intelligence Service Staff, HQ,

Third U.S. Army, Third Army Radio Intelligence

History in Campaign of Western Europe (Washington,

DC: Army Security Agency, October 1945) .

25 Interestingly, scholars of wartime cryptologic history can only estimate the total number of translations

and decrypts produced by the United States and the

United Kingdom. One of the reasons was the tendency of

Allied cryptologists to combine more than one decrypt

into a translation or a summary (or “compilation” as the

British called it). Another problem was that some translation series were started and then stopped without publication, or were merged into another series. In some

cases, decrypts were produced, but not published except

for fragments of information, which were put into

reports. Also, in some target problems, such as diplomatic intercept, there was substantial duplication in

records because of the wartime exchange system.

Finally, the job of tabulating these totals would require,

in some cases, a manual count – a daunting project, to

say the least.

In view of the above, the best estimate possible at

this point is that the U.S. and U.K., at a minimum, produced over 4.5 million translations and decrypts. The

U.S. produced about 800,000 (+/- 50,000), while the

U.K. put out about 3.7 million translations and decrypts.

In arriving at these estimates, I wish to thank Ralph

Erskine for his advice on the British figures.
Page 134

26 MND Translation, Bern (Anastasiu) to Bucharest,

12 December 1944, H-157300, NARA, RG 457 NSA/CSS,

HCC, Box 456.

27 MND Translation, La Paz (Mory) to Vichy, 24

September 1942, SIS # 50917, NARA, RG 457 NSA/CSS,

HCC, Box 328.

28 MND Translation, Rio de Janeiro (Exteriores) to

Lisbon, 12 March 1945, H-171950, RG 457 NSA/CSS,

HCC, Box 474.
Page 135

Site Designator, “MS” 

Vint Hill Farms, VA (USA)1

Two Rock Ranch, Pentaluma, CA (USA) 2

Miami, FL (USA)3

Asmara, Ethiopia (USA)4

Territory of Hawaii (USA)5

Amchitka, AK (USA)6

Wireless Experimental Center, 

New Delhi, India (USA element)8, also 94

Bellmore, NY (USA)9

Santa Rosa, CA (USA)10

Radio Corporation of America 12

Fort Sam Houston, TX (USA)17

United Kingdom sources 92 (Includes Beaumanor)

Commonwealth sources (Canada - Examination

Unit, National Research Council)94; also, “E”

Cable Censor (United States Navy)59

Federal Communications Commission 81

Cheltenham, MD (USN)56 also “M” 

Bainbridge Island, WA (USN) 54; also, “S”

Chatham, MA (USN)“C”’

Jupiter, FL (USN)55; also, “J”

Washington, D.C. (USN)“N” (“NEGAT”)

Winter Harbor, ME (USN)“W”

USN stations also carry their own designator. The “MS” system was unique to the Signals Intelligence

Service and was a way to designate all of the so-called “sources of traffic” that included U.S. civilian agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, commercial sources (Radio Corporation of

America), and British and Commonwealth sites. – See NARA, RG 457, HCC, “Sources and Types of Traffic,”

9 November 1943, Box 936, NR 2694.

Appendix 1

Selected Allied Monitoring Stations (MS) and Designators

(USA=United States Army, USN= United States Navy)

Page 137

Appendix 2

Annotated Sample of Diplomatic Translation 

and German Police Decrypt
Page 138
Page 139

1. Intercepted cable version of report on conditions in Auschwitz by Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler

report to Czechoslovak intelligence, June 1944. (6 pages)

2. German Foreign Office message to Buenos Aires stating the status of the pension of the retired

headmaster Karl Laudien depends upon the “unequivocal separation” from his Jewish wife. (1 page)

3. Intercepted 20 October 1944 Spanish diplomatic cable from the ambassador to Washington,

Cardenas de Silva, to Madrid that reports request for Spanish delegation in Budapest to intervene on

behalf of the endangered Jews, as well as the notice of Swedish plans to help, including the dispatch of

Raoul Wallenberg. (1 page)

4. German VN (Verlaessliche Nachrichten – “Trustworthy Report”), which is a translation of an

intercepted U.S. State Department cable from Bern, Switzerland, to Washington, D.C., reporting on the

status of efforts to help Jewish internees by Sweden and the International Red Cross. (2 pages)

5. Boston-series translation of a message from Budapest reporting the results of Adolf Eichmann’s

special action group in removing Jews from Hungary. (1 page)

6. Vichy Premier Pierre Laval’s statement of September 30, 1942, “With Respect to the Treatment

of the Jews in Unoccupied France.” (3 pages)

Appendix 3

Attached Documents
Page 140

Intercepted cable version of report on conditions in Auschwitz by Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler report to

Czechoslovak intelligence, June 1944 (1 of 6 pages)
Page 141

Intercepted cable version of report on conditions in Auschwitz by Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler report to

Czechoslovak intelligence, June 1944 (2 of 6 pages)
Page 142

Intercepted cable version of report on conditions in Auschwitz by Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler report to

Czechoslovak intelligence, June 1944 (3 of 6 pages)
Page 143

Intercepted cable version of report on conditions in Auschwitz by Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler report to

Czechoslovak intelligence, June 1944 (4 of 6 pages)
Page 144

Intercepted cable version of report on conditions in Auschwitz by Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler report to

Czechoslovak intelligence, June 1944 (5 of 6 pages)
Page 145

Intercepted cable version of report on conditions in Auschwitz by Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler report to

Czechoslovak intelligence, June 1944 (6 of 6 pages)
Page 146

German Foreign Office message to Buenos Aires stating the status of the pension of the retired headmaster Karl

Laudien depends upon the “unequivocal separation” from his Jewish wife. (1 page)
Page 147

Intercepted 20 October 1944 Spanish diplomatic cable from the ambassador to Washington,

Cardenas de Silva, to Madrid that reports request for Spanish delegation in Budapest to intervene

on behalf of the endangered Jews, as well as the notice of Swedish plans to help, including dispatch

of Raoul Wallenberg
Page 148

German VN (Verlaessliche Nachrichten – “Trustworthy Report”), which is a translation of an intercepted U.S. State

Department cable from Bern, Switzerland, to Washington, D.C., reporting on the status of efforts to help Jewish

internees by Sweden and the International Red Cross (1 of 2 pages)
Page 149

German VN (Verlaessliche Nachrichten – “Trustworthy Report”), which is a translation of an intercepted U.S. State

Department cable from Bern, Switzerland, to Washington, D.C., reporting on the status of efforts to help Jewish

internees by Sweden and the International Red Cross (2 of 2 pages)
Page 150

Boston-series translation of a message from Budapest reporting the results of the Adolf Eichmann’s special action

group in removing Jews from Hungary (1 page)
Page 151

Vichy premier Pierre Laval’s statement of September 30, 1942, “With Respect to the Treatment of the Jews in

Unoccupied France” (1 of 3 pages)
Page 152

Vichy premier Pierre Laval’s statement of September 30, 1942, “With Respect to the Treatment of the Jews in

Unoccupied France” (2 of 3 pages)
Page 153

Vichy premier Pierre Laval’s statement of September 30, 1942, “With Respect to the Treatment of the Jews in

Unoccupied France” 3 of 3 pages)

Page 155

Allied Communications Intelligence

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Calvocoressi, Peter. Top Secret Ultra. New

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Hinsley, F. H. et alia. British Intelligence in the

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Page 159

Abwehr – German military intelligence

AHS – Arlington Hall Station

“BJ” – “blue jacket” or “Black Jumbo,” terms

for diplomatic translations done by the GC&CS

BPIE – Bletchley Park Intelligence Exchange

BRUSA – Britain/United States of America

C/A – Cryptanalysis

CI – code instruction

Cipher - A method of concealing plaintext by

transposing letters or numbers or by substituting

other letters or numbers according to a key

Code - A method of concealing a message text

in which arbitrary groups of letters, numbers, or

other symbols replace words, phrases, letters, or

numbers for the purposes of concealment or brevity.

COMINT – communications intelligence

COMINTERN – communist international

CSS – Chief, Secret Service (Director, MI-6)

D/F – direction finding

Einsatzgruppen – “Action groups” consisting

of SS, SD, and other security elements that were

established to massacre Jews, partisans, and communist officials in the wake of the German armies

during the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

Enigma – German high-level cipher machine

FCC – Federal Communications Commission

GC&CS – Government Code and Cypher

School

GCHQ – Government Communications

Headquarters (Successor organization to GC&CS)

Gestapo – Geheime Staats Polizei (Secret State

Police)

GPCC – German Police Concentration Camp

[communications]

GPD – German Police Decrypts

HCC – Historical Cryptographic Collection, RG

457

Hut (3/4/6/8) – Buildings in the Bletchley

Park complex in which the various operational

activities, such as decryption and translation, of the

GC&CS were conducted

ISCOT – Intelligence Source Scott

ISK – Intelligence Source [Dillwyn] Knox.

Abwehr machine ciphers.

ISOCICLE – SD ciphers

ISOS – Intelligence Source Oliver Strachey.

Abwehr manual ciphers.

JIC – Joint Intelligence Committee

Kripo - Kriminal polizei (Criminal Police)

MAGIC – Cover name for translations from

Japanese diplomatic messages

MASK – Cover name for translations of

COMINTERN messages by GC&CS

Glossary of Terms, Abbreviations, and Acronyms
Page 160

MEW – Ministry of Economic Warfare (Great

Britain)

M.I.5 – British Security Service (or Security

Service)

M.I.6 – British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS,

or Secret Service)

MIS – Military Intelligence Service, G-2 of the

U.S. War Department

MS – Monitoring Station (usually followed by a

one- or two-digit designation)

MSS – Most Secret Source, a caveat for intelligence derived from high-level cryptanalysis

NARA – National Archives and Records

Administration

NGO – nongovernmental organization

NSA/CSS – National Security Agency/Central

Security Service

OKW-Chi – Oberkommando der Wehrmacht/

Chiffrierungabteilung

OP-20-G – Designator for the U.S. Navy’s

cryptologic organization. It was an element of

under the Director for Naval Communications. 

Orpo – Ordnungspolizei (Order Police)

OSS – Office of Strategic Services

OTP – one-time pad

OWI – Office of Wartime Information (U.S.)

PRO – Public Record Office/National Archives

Purple – U.S. designator for Japanese diplomatic cipher machine “B”

“Q” – designator for GC&CS diplomatic translations

RSHA – Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich

Security Main Office)

RSS – Radio Security Service

SB – Special Branch, G-2, War Department

Schupo – Schutz Polizei (Civil Police)

SCU – Special Communications Unit

SD – Sichersheitsdienst (Security Service)

Sipo – Sichersheits Polizei (Security Police)

SIS – U.S. Army Signals Intelligence Service

SIS – Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6, UK)

SLU – Special Liaison Unit (UK)

SS – Schutzstaffel

SSO – Special Security Officer (U.S.)

T/A – Traffic analysis

Ultra – cover name for intelligence derived

from high-level cryptanalysis

Venona – The cover name given the project by

the U.S. Army (and continued by the Armed Forces

Security Agency and its successor, the National

Security Agency) to exploit the encoded messages

of the various Soviet intelligence services, the

NKVD and GRU, that contained information from

the various intelligence agents and networks operating within the United States.

Y-Service – term used by British to categorize

intercept and related activities.
Page 161

A

Anti-Semitism 

General attitude, history of, Japanese attitude – 4, 11, 89, 100, 101, 124, 125

Arlington Hall Station – 27, 36, 84, 129, 159

B-III – 38, 40

Army Security Agency – 53, 116, 118, 130, 131, 133

ATIS (Allied Translator and Interpreter Section) – 41

Auschwitz-Birkenau

Construction, SS reports, Vrba-Wetzler report – 13, 19, 155

B

Bank for International Settlements – 107, 108, 110

Benson, Robert L. – 7, 16, 19, 74, 133

“BJ’s” (blue jackets/Black Jumbos) – 69

Black Code – 7

Bletchley Park – 5, 15, 23, 27, 29, 34, 36, 38, 39, 40, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 57, 69, 124, 125, 133, 155,

159

Bertrand, Gustave – 14, 15, 18, 36, 55

Bloom, Congressman Sol (D-NY) – 85

Bolivia – 132

Boston reports (OSS) – 106

Brazil – 85, 91, 92, 132

Breitman, Richard – 8, 16, 18, 19, 50, 73, 74, 110, 111, 132, 155

Bretton Woods – 107

British Security Coordination (BSC) – 31, 38, 67

BRUSA (Britain-United States COMINT Agreement 1943) – 27, 50

Budapest 

Roundup of Jews, political climate – 20, 42, 56, 70, 82, 84, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 111, 112, 115, 116,

123, 132, 139, 147, 150

Buchenwald – 60, 69, 74, 113, 156

Bulgaria – 13, 70, 76, 81, 107, 111, 118

C

Cable traffic – 11, 30, 31, 65, 68

Calvocoressi, Peter – 155

Censorship – 30, 31, 54, 67, 68, 73

Churchill, Winston

Attitude towards Ultra, speech denouncing Police atrocities – 16, 79

Commercial traffic and codes

Bentley Code, Peterson Code – 106, 118

Index
Page 162

Communications – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34,

35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73,

75, 76, 77, 78, 89, 93, 94, 98, 106, 108, 112, 114, 121, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 

135, 155, 159

Communications intelligence (COMINT); general description, effectiveness – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 21, 23, 

24, 25, 29, 43, 44, 45, 47, 51, 52, 53, 54, 57, 62, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78,

89, 93, 94, 98, 106, 108, 112, 114, 121, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 159, 162

Cryptanalysis, Allied, description of – 5, 6, 15, 25, 38, 39, 40, 50, 54, 57, 67, 73, 75, 106, 114, 159, 160

Currie, Laughlin – 108, 109, 110, 118, 119

D

Daluege, Kurt – 49, 51, 80

De Grey, Nigel – 126

De Silva, Cardenas – 85, 139, 147

Denmark – 1, 83

Deportation of Jews

France, Hungary, Greece, Bulgaria, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia – 82, 92, 96, 97

Dickstein, Congressman Samuel (D-NY) – 92

Dissemination of COMINT

British methods, American methods, concern over security – 4, 22, 27, 44, 48, 49, 126, 130

Dominican Republic – 93

Dulles, Allen – 106

E

Eichmann, Adolph 

Hungary operation – 12, 19, 95, 97, 99, 139, 156

Eire (Republic of Ireland)

Reports on roundup of Jews in Rome – 67, 70, 83, 131

Einsatzgruppen

description – 1, 12, 13, 15, 77, 83, 118, 122, 156, 159

Enigma

Versions, effectiveness of Allied cryptanalysis – 4, 5, 6, 14, 15, 18, 21, 24, 28, 36, 39, 40, 46, 48, 50,

53, 54, 56, 69, 70, 71, 78, 80, 82, 124, 126, 129, 132, 133, 159

Examination Unit (Canada) – 32, 92

F

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – 32, 67, 73, 135, 159

“Final Solution”

decision, deception about – 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 76, 78, 112, 122, 123, 124, 128, 132, 155, 156

FLORADORA – 39, 63

Foreign workers

Status of Polish workers in France, Germany at end of war – 14

France – 12, 13, 14, 15, 21, 25, 36, 39, 53, 56, 63, 67, 77, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96,

97, 103, 104, 108, 109, 112, 114, 122, 123, 125, 131, 139, 151, 152, 153, 156

French Indochina – 103

French North Africa – 36, 93
Page 163

G

George Wood (see Boston Series) – 65, 73, 119, 106

German COMINT 

intercept and cryptanalysis of U.S. diplomatic communications, Hungarian

communications; code-breaking organizations – 2, 4, 6, 9. 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 26, 27, 

28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50

German Police Decrypts (GPD)

Description, graphic example – 4, 15, 44, 47, 49, 52, 59, 61, 62, 68, 69, 78, 121, 129, 131, 159

Germany

Attitude towards Jews, war aims, prewar policy towards Jews; diplomatic messages;

policy of deception and denial – 1, 4, 7, 11, 12, 14, 29, 34, 36, 44, 48, 51, 55, 63, 64, 65, 71, 72, 73, 

76,78, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 89, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 99, 100, 101, 105, 108, 109, 110, 113, 117,

119, 124, 127, 130, 157

Gestapo – 12, 39, 82, 110, 159

Goering, Hermann – 12, 13, 76, 95, 106, 118

Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) – 1, 2, 57, 159

H

Haye, Henry – 69, 90, 92, 93, 114, 115

Havana, Cuba – 90, 114

Hermann Goering Werke – 95

Heydrich, Reinhard – 12, 13, 76, 80, 90, 111

Himmler, Heinrich – 46, 51, 61, 76, 80, 82, 97, 128

Hinsley, F.H. – 9, 15, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 74, 111, 113, 118, 133, 155

Holocaust

general history – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 24, 36, 42, 46, 47, 48, 53, 57, 58, 61,

63, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 83, 86, 87, 94, 98, 102, 104, 110, 111, 121, 122, 

123, 126, 127, 128, 131, 132, 133, 155, 156, 157

Holocaust denial – 16

Hull, Cordell – 46, 88, 93

Hungary

Roundup of Jews – 2, 28, 44, 45, 75, 81, 82, 84, 85, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 103, 107, 111, 115, 117,

122, 123, 131, 132, 139, 150, 156

I

Ickes, Harold – 86

Intercept (collection of messages)

Description of system – 2, 4, 5, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33,

34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 46, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71,

72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 90, 92, 93, 94, 97, 98, 101, 104, 106, 107, 

109, 110, 111, 114, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 132, 133, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143,

144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 160

International Red Cross – 15, 28, 63, 85, 94, 97, 103, 139, 148, 149

ISCOT – 71, 72, 74, 111, 159

ISK – 69, 70, 159
Page 164

Italy

Roundup of Jews – 3, 7, 40, 44, 46, 65, 70, 81, 82, 83, 85, 95, 109, 111

J

Japan

Historical attitude towards Jews – 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 18, 19, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 34, 35, 40,

41, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 53, 55, 56, 61, 62, 63, 64, 73, 75, 76, 78, 81, 82, 83, 86, 87, 88, 90,

94, 95, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 112, 113, 114, 121, 122, 123, 124,

125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 132, 133, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 160

Jewish Agency for Palestine – 62, 85, 88

JIC (Joint Intelligence Committee) – 43, 49, 50, 55, 57, 159

K

Kallay, Miklos – 95, 115

Karski, Jan – 48, 58, 126

Kase, Shunichi – 106, 107, 108, 109, 118, 119

Kaunas, Lithuania – 76, 78, 87, 113

Kitamura, Kojiro – 107, 110

Knox, Dillwyn – 47, 70, 159

Kolbe, Fritz (see Boston Reports) – 65, 106

Kollontay, Alexandra – 85

Kozaczuk, Wladyslaw – 14, 15, 18

Kubotinski, Leon – 85, 125

L

Laqueur, Walter – 15, 54, 58, 112, 115, 132, 133, 155

Latin America, reaction to Holocaust – 25, 26, 27, 38, 87, 89, 91, 92, 132

Laval, Pierre – 90, 91, 93, 139, 151, 152, 153

M

“Magic” Diplomatic Summary – 44, 45, 46, 47, 53, 55, 57, 59, 63, 66, 73, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117,

118, 119, 153, 155, 159

Majdanek – 84

MASK translation – 73

Merkers mine – 110

Mexico

Concern over Bejar – 92, 98, 114, 115, 132

Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW) – 44, 71, 105, 110, 119, 160

Monitoring Station (MS) – 5, 25, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 42, 75, 106, 126, 135, 160

N

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) – 1, 2, 3, 9, 16, 17, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57,

58, 61, 62, 65, 66. 68, 69, 72, 73, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 132, 133, 134, 

135, 160

National Cryptologic Museum

Library, collections – 61, 71, 111, 133
Page 165

“Nazi Gold” – 64

Netherlands – 21, 30, 53, 81, 82, 99, 103, 122, 162

Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) – 86

NKVD – 16, 72, 118, 160

O

Office of Strategic Services (OSS)

X-2; R&A Branch – 32 33, 45, 47, 54, 61, 66, 67, 73, 84, 97, 107, 113, 117, 125, 129, 160

One-time pad (OTP) – 1, 31, 61, 66, 73, 119, 129, 132, 160

OP-20-G (U.S. Navy) – 1, 4, 26, 27, 32, 36, 42, 53, 54, 56, 67, 73, 128, 131, 133, 160

Oshima, Hiroshi Baron

Attitude to individual Jews, comments on anti-Jewish forum – 29, 53, 55, 100, 103, 115, 118

P

Palestine – 32, 62, 68, 85, 97, 112, 115, 118;

Jewish immigration – 5, 70, 86-88; Jewish forces – 88; Arab reaction – 88; terrorist incidents –

88; U.S. support – 88

P.C. Bruno – 36

P.C. Cadix – 36, 37

Petain, General Philippe – 89, 90, 92, 93

Poland – 12-15, 18, 21, 70, 74, 78, 82, 84-5, 95, 97, 103, 113, 124

Poles and Polish Jews in France – 92; German policy in occupied – 76, 81

Portugal

Transit for refugees, concern over workers, reports from Budapest – 25, 96, 104, 105, 107, 109, 118,

119, 132

Priority (of Intercept) – 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 34, 40, 55, 62, 81, 123, 127

Prisoners of War,

treatment of Russian, Jewish, Axis – 65, 76, 83, 103

Public Record Office (PRO) – 1, 4, 7, 8, 17, 61, 62, 67, 68, 71, 130, 160

Puhl, Emil – 106, 107, 108, 110

Purple – 6, 18, 21, 24, 25, 26, 29, 36, 39, 45, 46, 53, 56, 126, 127, 160

Q

R

Radio Security Service (RSS) – 32, 67, 68, 82, 160

Reichsbank – 46, 70, 97, 106, 107, 108, 110, 118

Ribbentrop, Joachim von – 29, 85, 86

Romania – 81, 82, 84, 85, 95, 96, 107, 111, 115, 118, 132

Roosevelt, Franklin D. – 46, 47, 48, 57, 58, 66, 86, 87, 88, 102, 105, 108, 113, 125, 132

Refugees – 46, 65, 86, 87, 89, 90, 97, 102, 103, 107, 113, 121

S

Sassoon, Sir Victor – 101

Schutz Staffel (SS) – 12, 26, 110, 160

Shanghai
Page 166

Refugees; conditions and relief efforts – 87, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 113, 116, 117, 157

Sichersheits Dienst (SD) – 12, 26, 29, 62, 67, 70, 74, 77, 82, 83, 111, 122, 128, 131, 159, 160

Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) – 2, 22, 25, 32, 47, 53

Signal Security Service (SSS) – 25, 53, 54, 129

Sobibor – 74, 79

Spain – 25, 63, 64, 85, 96, 104, 105, 107, 109, 112, 117, 119, 132

Special Liaison Unit (SLU) – 14, 45, 48, 57, 160

Special Security Officer (SSO) – 45, 57, 160

“Stateless” Jews – 100, 102, 104

Statutes des Juifs – 90, 94

Steengracht, Adolf von – 99

Stephenson, Sir William – 67

Stettinius, Edward – 88

Stucki, Walter – 109

Sugihara, Chione – 87, 113, 156

“Summaries” Multinational Diplomatic (SMM) – 64, 115

Sweden

Trading with Germany – 1, 25, 83, 85, 96, 97, 104, 105, 117, 119, 139, 149, 149

Swiss National Bank – 104, 107, 108, 110

Switzerland – 9, 25, 84-5, 96-7, 99

Trading with Germany – 70, 104-110, 119, 126, 139, 148-9; roles as neutral, diplomatic 

communications targeted by Western COMINT – 28, 39, 56, 62-3, 65

reaction to Currie mission – 108-9

Szalasi, Ferenc – 98, 99, 122

T

Tangier – 93, 97, 115

Translations

Process; training; sources – 2, 9, 15, 17, 18, 19, 24, 27, 28, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 54, 55, 56,

58, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 86, 98, 101, 105, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115,

116, 117, 118, 119, 122, 127, 129, 103, 131, 133, 159, 160

Treblinka – 74, 79, 156

Turkey – 25, 42, 46, 85, 92, 95, 105, 117, 119

U

Ultra – 1, 4, 5, 10, 14, 15, 17, 18, 21, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 73, 121, 125, 129,

133, 155, 160

Ultra Secret, The – 5, 14, 17, 18, 58

United Nations Conference – 88

United States Coast Guard (USCG) – 27, 32, 67

V

Valeri, Cardinal Valerio – 92, 93

Vanden Heuvel, William – 16, 19

Vatican

Cryptography
Page 167

roundup of Rome’s Jews

intervention on behalf of – 9, 25, 26, 39, 56, 65, 70, 73, 82, 85, 96, 98, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116

VENONA – 6, 16, 69, 71, 72, 74, 115, 116, 118, 119, 130, 160

Vichy – 2, 5, 9, 17, 19, 25, 34, 36, 39, 42, 55, 63-4, 67, 73-75, 103-4, 109, 111-114, 122-3, 131-2, 134, 139, 

151-2, 156

Policy towards Jews, 89-94; reaction from Pope – 92-3; Jewish children – 93

Vladivostok – 87

VN (Verlaessliche nachtrichten) – 107, 139, 165, 148, 149

Vrba-Wetzler Report – 83, 84, 131, 161

W

Wallenberg family 

Role in secret peace initiatives, fn, – 72, 115

Wallenberg, Raoul

Efforts at rescue – 98, 99, 115, 116, 139, 147, 156

Wannsee Conference – 12, 76, 102, 124

Weber, Ernst – 18, 108, 109, 114

Welles, Sumner – 93

White, Harry Dexter – 108

Wise, Stephen – 47

World Jewish Congress – 85, 92, 125