Guide to Western Intelligence During the Holocaust
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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 2004 Table of Contents 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 . .29 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 Hungarys Jews, 1944 . .99 E. Japan and the Jews in the Far East . .97 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 Page iii 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 applicants 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 Page iv This book is dedicated to those cursed with the memory of this horror and to those who assumed the burden of its remembrance. Page v Preface that were then available to the public. For the There is no river but memory longest period, one element that was largely miss- Raise up, raise up a pillar of ing in the historical accounts was the records of our tears. the various Western intelligence agencies, such as Leaving Sodom by Ann Lauinger the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Britains M.I.6. Also absent was the intelli- Surely, the grimmest part of the Second gence gathered by the wartime Allied communi- World War was the Holocaust (or Shoah). This cations intelligence (COMINT) agencies, most entailed the systematic and wholesale destruction notably the British Government Code and Cypher of European Jewry and other groups such as School (GC&CS), the U.S. Navys OP-20-G, and Slavs, Poles, and Romany (Gypsies), among oth- the U.S. Armys Signals Intelligence Service (SIS). ers, which the Nazis had deemed inferior and The revelations in the mid-1970s of the Allied then slated for destruction because of race, blood, code-breaking successes the deep and persis- or disability. In fact, one of the major war aims of tent exploitation of Axis codes, ciphers, and Nazi Germany was the extermination of global communications, popularly referred to as Ultra Jewry. During the war years, Europes landscape only whetted the appetite of Holocaust was scarred by the presence of concentration, researchers. Once it was known that Allied code- labor, and death camps. Einsatzgruppen (opera- breakers had pierced the Reichs deepest secrets, tions groups), and numerous German Police the question posed was how much more informa- units roamed the western Soviet Union in the tion would be available for researchers? wake of the Wehrmacht, slaughtering Jews, Slavs, and Bolsheviks. Collaborationist regimes of Beginning in the mid-1970s, scholars of the nations allied to or conquered by the Axis powers Holocaust who had wanted to utilize the archived cooperated with the Nazi security forces in extin- material of the wartime code-breaking agencies guishing national or resident refugee Jewish pop- focused their research on the then available ulations. The darkness that overwhelmed Nazi- records at the United States National Archives occupied Europe and threatened other nations in and Records Administration (NARA) and the the world was only slightly lessened by individual United Kingdoms Public Record Office (renamed acts of courageous opposition and the example of the National Archives in 2003). During the first the nation of Denmark, which smuggled virtually few years after the Ultra revelations, these scho- its entire Jewish population to safety in Sweden. lars discovered little significant information By the end of the war, it has been estimated that about the Holocaust in the wartime records of the Europes Jewish population had been reduced to British GC&CS and the American SIS. These somewhere between a third to a quarter of its records, by the way, were stored in the record 1939 level.1 groups of their modern successor agencies. The records of the SIS were to be found in Record In the years following the war, a number of Group (RG) 457, the records of the National histories, memoirs, and specialized studies about Security Agency (NSA). The GC&CS records were the Holocaust were published. These works were placed in Group HW, the records of the based on a variety of private and official sources Government Communications Headquarters Page 1 (GCHQ). The actual number of records in either ers in the western Soviet Union. The history also group was not large by any measure; nor were referred to intercepted messages from the SS con- they particularly revealing. For example, in cerning the slave labor populations at a number NARA by 1990, there were about 150 translations of concentration camps.4 Ironically, the actual of intercepted wartime Japanese, German, and records used to write the history still were not Vichy diplomatic messages that referred to the accessible by the public. Holocaust, while at the PRO there may have been fewer.2 Considering the nature and scope of the In a way these scholars were correct in their Holocaust every country in Europe and many of observations. Even by the late 1980s, the British their colonial holdings were affected in some and Americans still had much World War II cryp- fashion by what the Nazis were doing the num- tologic material to release. It was not until a ber of publicly available records seemed meager. number of further significant releases of wartime records of the Signal Intelligence Service and the At the same time, the records that were avail- Government Code and Cypher School through able seemed to have large gaps in the subject mat- the decade of the 1990s that the amount of ter that they covered. Topics of enormous impor- COMINT material available to researchers of the tance to understanding the Holocaust, such as the Holocaust dramatically increased.5 By early depredations of the police and SS units in Russia, 2004, at NARA, over 600 translations and the operations of the death camps, and the decrypts of various intercepted messages about roundup of the Hungarian Jews, barely were the Holocaust could be found in the record mentioned in the extant material. Especially groups of the National Security Agency. These when compared to the large body of records from included some decrypts of German Police mes- these and other events during the Holocaust, that sages that reported the massacres of Jews and there were so few items from communications other groups. Others are messages from mostly intelligence sources in the British and American diplomatic sources that bear witness to such archives during the 1970s seemed to invite disbe- events as the roundup of Jews in Hungary and lief, ridicule, or suspicion. other countries in occupied Europe. At the PRO, the complete set of German Police and SS Researchers also could construe the absence decrypts were available to be reviewed by the of significant archival holdings of the wartime public.6 records of the Allied code-breaking agencies to mean that further, still unreleased, caches of Even with the releases of the 1990s, the U.S. records existed. These absent records were government still held back significant collections believed to be in either one of two forms: finished of U.S. government records about the Holocaust. intelligence in the form of reports still classified But the remaining wartime records, and those and therefore withheld from the public, or there from the postwar period that relate to the existed troves of raw, or undecrypted, Axis mes- Holocaust and to Nazi and other Axis power war sages at these agencies. Exacerbating the situa- crimes will soon be declassified and released tion was the publication, during the decade of the thanks to the efforts of the United States 1980s, of the official multivolume History of Interagency Working Group on Nazi War Crimes British Intelligence in the Second World War.3 (IWG).