What the Allies Knew

November 25, 1996

By John Keegan

LONDON -- The revelation that British cryptologists had deciphered reports of mass executions of Jews in German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union as early as June 1941 -- seven months before the Nazis instituted the Final Solution -- is being denounced as a scandal of some sort. The question is, what sort?

    "The extraordinary thing about these documents is that they contain new information about the Holocaust," said Richard Breitman, the historian at American University who acquired the documents under the Freedom of Information Act. He said that none of the information in the decoded reports was used at the Nuremberg war trials because the documents were still classified.

    "That the Allies knew all the details, this is a scandal," said Wolfgang Wippermann, a German historian. "And it's still a scandal in 1996 because disclosure of the information was necessary for research, for the courts and for the survivors."

    These statements are either wrong or misleading or both. It has long been known that the British intercepted reports of such massacres before 1942. The documents in question are transcripts of German radio transmissions deciphered at the Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park from June 1941 until Sept. 13 of that year, when Kurt Daluege, head of the German Order Police, declared that such transmissions be stopped. All this is recorded in the second volume of Britain's official history of intelligence operations, edited by F. H. Hinsley and published in 1981. Pages 669-73 contain excerpts which match exactly Mr. Breitman's"new" material.

    It is also misleading to say information on such executions was not used at Nuremberg. In his devastating summation, the British prosecutor Hartley Shawcross gave a horrifying account of a mass shooting of Jews in the Soviet Union (albeit not an incidentfrom the intercepted material).

    At least Professor Breitman himself has not called his findings a scandal. He apparently understands how important it was to the Allied victory to keep it a secret that the British had broken the German code. The point cannot be emphasized strongly enough. Using a system code-named Ultra, the experts at Bletchley Park were able to decode German radio traffic encrypted on the Enigma machine. After Pearl Harbor, word of Ultra was passed to the Americans, who in turn told the British that they had broken Japan's so-called Purple cipher.

    Both allies went to extraordinary lengths to disguise even from senior commanders the sources of intelligence. Those without a "need to know" were told that vital information had been gleaned from captured documents, double agents or prisoners. The 10,000 workers at Bletchley Park, from the Cambridge professors to the enlisted men and women, were sworn never to reveal anything, not even to one another. The secret was kept so well that it was only in 1973, when Bletchley Park's wartime role was made public, that even close friends discovered they had been fellow intimates of the Ultra system.

    The justification for such intense secrecy scarcely needs explanation. The Germans so depended on Enigma that they constantly updated it and adopted new coding procedures. For days or weeks until the British solved the new coding, Bletchley Park would "go deaf," and none of the vital things that Ultra allowed --re-routing convoys away from U-boat wolfpacks, positioning troops to combat German panzer units, choosing weak spots in German defenses for amphibious landings like D-Day -- could be done.

    It is understandable to deplore anything that was not done to halt or check the Holocaust. But the overriding necessity throughout World War II was to defeat Hitler. Ultra was not the sole cause of Hitler's failure, but it was one of the mightiest weapons on the Allied side. Anything that compromised it would in the long run have served not the cause of freedom but that of tyranny itself.

    Was the secret kept too long? Have some war criminals escaped justice because the files remained closed even after the war was won? Perhaps. But one must remember that immediately after the war Britain and America faced the growing hostility of the Soviet Union. Cipher superiority became a vital weapon of the cold war, and keeping Ultra secret from the Soviets was deemed vital. But that, of course, is another story.

    John Keegan, author of "Fields of Battle: The War for America," is the military correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph.