New Book "The Holocaust: A New History"

[J. Duncan]

New book by Laurence Rees of BBC documentary fame titled "The Holocaust: A New History" is a really good read.
I just finished it and I must say it's one of the best I've read recently. Rees is a gripping writer and I think he has surpassed his friend and mentor Sir Ian Kershaw. The book is full of overlooked insights from that period and contains many previously unpublished testimonies from his many interviews of 25 years - victim, perpetrator, and bystander. There are many referenced quotes from Hitler's speeches and many snippets from Goebbel's Diaries that illustrate how deep into it they all were. He also found a document, a letter written by Hermann Hoeffle attesting to the numbers killed in various camps up to 1943 - 1, 277, 000. Your local library should have it and I recommend reading it. Rees has written some very impressive books over the years "The Nazis", "War of the Century: When Hitler Fought Stalin", "Auschwitz: A New History", "Horror in the East: Japan and War Crimes" , and "The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler". He produced many good documentaries based on his books.

[Sergey Romanov]

> He also found a document, a letter written by Hermann Hoeffle attesting to the numbers killed in various camps up to 1943 - 1, 277, 000.

That's misinformation. This very well-known document was found and published by other people years ago.

http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/content/15/3/468.full.pdf

[J. Duncan]

True - bad choice of words on my part as it's the first time I heard of it and I misread what he said. I thought he had found it but that's not the case. He doesn't say he found it (my mistake) - he says that it was "discovered in 2000 in the Public Records Office in London" and goes on to discuss it. I guess he viewed it himself as his source note says simply PROHW so he didn't take it from another book. He didn't misinform - I did. Not sure what the "HW" is -Public Records Office HW". What is HW?

[J. Duncan]

I read the document you posted. Fascinating. Rees only spends a few paragraphs on it so this was very informative.
Thanks.

[Sid Guttridge]

This leads to an interesting question.

Presumably not all (or even most?) intercepts were decrypted by the British.

What happened to all the intercepts that were never decrypted? Is there an archive out there somewhere awaiting the attention of modern cryptographers?

Cheers,

Sid.

[steve248]

I suppose it behoves me as co-author of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies article quoted above, to answer the questions raised, also above.

PRO = Public Record Office, since re-named The National Archives (Kew, UK).
HW = the record group/class list at Kew; a whole series of correspondence from/about Bletchley Park coding and thousands upon thousands of decrypted radio messages; mainly German, but also French, Russian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croat, Spanish etc all translated into English.
HW 16 is the main series of decrypted "German Police Decodes". And the message from Hoefle on which the article in H&GS is the subject can be found everywhere on the internet under "Hoefle Telegram" - also on this Forum as I have posted about it before.
For accuracy, the reference is HW 16/23 (message itself in GPDD 355a, dated 15 Jan 1943).
HW 19, is mainly Abwehr and SD messages.

What happened to the intercepted messages not decrypted. Those few that survived are from 1945 and many modern attempts at decrypting these can be found at
http://cryptocellar.org/Enigma/

[The Black Rabbit of Inlé]

Could you please tell us what happened to the encrypted intercepts, both the decoded and undecoded ones, that were at BP? I did look at the link you provided but didn't see anything that mentioned this matter.

[steve248]

The decrypted/decoded German radio messages are at UK National Archives. There are no messages in code awaiting decryption.
Details as quoted above - all the HW record groups concern Bletchley Park product.
I made an error in my earlier post. HW 16 messages are all in German, they were not translated into English.
But the messages in HW 19 are all in English and there are no German originals.

The few coded messages originally at Bletchley Park were made available (I have no information on how this process took place) to others at a time I also do now know. However, the number of messages involved can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand, two hands at the most.

The Walter Huppenkothen message is an example of these coded messages decrypted postwar by others, see this:
http://cryptocellar.org/Flossenbuerg/Huppenkothen.html

If you follow the links at the bottom, you can see how they decoded.
I know that cryptocellar do look for these kind of coded messages to decrypt but limited by what is available.

[The Black Rabbit of Inlé]

Hinsely et al. wrote in vol. 2, p.669, that BP never broke an Enigma key called TGD, which was regarded as "the key of the Gestapo".

Any idea what may have become of those undeciphered intercepts? Surely they weren't destroyed.

What about the countless thousands of intercepts that were decoded [the decodes now of course being in Kew], what happened to the original encrypted messages that would have been recorded on paper after being intercepted, were they....burnt....as the poetically licensed film The Imitation Game suggests?

[steve248]

I believe that only myself followed sometime afterwards by David Irving, have gone through page after tedious page, possibly 30,000 pages, of German Police Decodes (in HW 16 files) and the Abwehr/RSHA VI (SD) messages in HW 19 files).
1. There are messages to/from RSHA Berlin, various Gestapo, Kripo and SD offices. Most of them are not interesting and possibly less than a 1000 messages in total.
2. There messages from the Einsatzgruppen in Russia, a hundred maybe, they are only of very mundane matters and do not mention executions; one is about picking up potatoes for Einsatzgruppe D in Simferopol. The message says no more than that so unlikely to have a hidden meaning.
3. All the executions mentioned in the decyphered radio traffic comes from the various Police Battalions and more or less stops after Daluege's radio message to them in September 1941 advising them not to mention figures in future radio traffic. "The enemy might be listening" as it indeed it was.
4. Hinsley and other cryptographers since have stated they were unable to break RSHA and Sipo codes. The ones available among the HW 16 files were probably sent using Police cyphers rather than RSHA or Sipo codes.
5. Come 1945 radio messages among Sipo/Kripo/SD offices increased; teleprinter lines were constantly down due to air raid damage; therefore radio communication became the fall-back system and it all depended on what coding system could be used in offices with a radio transmitter.
There is a very limited amount of the original coded message on paper at the Bletch;ey Park Trust who look after the BP site as a museum. There is none, as far as I am aware, among the BP files at Kew (HW series). So they may have well have been burned to keep the place warm.

[steve248]

Perhaps I should have added that I have written three further articles using the decrypted German radio messages.
"Adolf Eichmann: New information from British Signals Intelligence" in David Bankier (ed.), "Secret Intelligence and the Holocaust" publ. Enigma Books/New York and Yad Vashem/Jerusalem, 2006.
"Der britische Nachrichtendienst: Entschlüsselte Funkmeldungen aus dem Generalgouvernment" in Bogdan Musial (ed.), "'Aktion Reinhardt.' Der Völkermord an den Juden im Generalgouvernment 1941-1944", publ. Fibre Verlag, Oslnabrück,2004.
In 2011 I presented a paper "'We don't know what we have'; British Intelligence and decoded radio messages about Sonderkommando 1005, 1942-1944" at a joint Yahad-in-Unum/USHMM symposium in Paris; my paper subsequently became "an occasional research paper" at USHMM.
I think those three papers plus "Hoefle Telegram" article practically exhaust the Sipo-SD material re the Holocaust among the decodes.
Who knows, when I have more time, maybe will I go through them again. Or someone else can.

[smetanin albert]

Hello,

What is this book -

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Walter-Huppenk ... B007N3WS3Y