Wartime Codebreakers Missed Clues to Holocaust

Coded Nazi messages intercepted by Britain could have exposed the scope of the Holocaust years before the liberation of the death camps, but Allied codebreakers failed to fully understand the information they had, according to United States government analysis of intelligence from the era.

In what is being likened to the intelligence failures before the September 11 attacks, German military and police communications from as early as 1941 provided lurid but fragmentary accounts of the massacres and deportations, and later even statistics on the numbers killed in concentration camps.

According to the report titled Eavesdropping on Hell, by Robert Hanyok, a historian with the National Security Agency's centre for cryptologic history, British and US efforts to sort evidence were hampered by case backlogs and a shortage of translators, as well as the two allies' reluctance to share information about German communications.

According to a summary of the report in the New York Times, one of the most harrowing messages codebreakers overlooked was intercepted on January 11 1943 and detailed the 1,274,166 Jews killed under Operation Reinhard at four death camps - Lublin, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka - during 1942.

The report notes: "The message itself contained only the identifying letters for the death camps followed by the numerical totals."

The only clue that they were death camps was the reference to Operation Reinhard, a tribute to the SS general Reinhard Heydrich, who had been charged with organising the Nazis' plan to eliminate Europe's Jews. But that was probably "unknown at the time" to the British codebreakers, the report says.

However, British analysts must have considered the message important, because it was classified "Most Secret" and marked: "To be kept under lock and key. Never to be removed from the office."

The report also suggests that anti-semitism may have created an atmosphere that affected how the intelligence was handled.

"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," the report says.

"Just how much British signals intelligence analysts, either individually or as a group, held this attitude is unknown. And how much it affected their reactions to the intelligence is likewise unknown. But it must be considered in any discussion about how Comint [communications intelligence] was received."

One particularly chilling memorandum, written by a British official on September 11 1941, refers to German massacres in the Soviet Union and concludes: "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."

Mr Hanyok attributed the British official's response to "either his inability to appreciate the implications of the massacres, or his willingness to ignore what the Nazis were doing".

The one area where the report does absolve the Allied codebreakers from blame is for not having obtained evidence of the Nazis' genocidal plans before the war. The author observes: "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 ...

"Orders to carry out these operations were not communicated in a means such as radio that could be intercepted by Allied monitoring stations."

Historians quoted by the New York Times were divided on whether the missed intelligence could have made a difference. Peter Black, a senior historian at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, told the newspaper: "Even in the unlikely event that the decipherers and translators had figured out what this all meant, there was nothing the Allies could have done militarily."

"If they announced it, would it have saved lives?" asked Aaron Breitbart, a senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles. "I think so, because there would have been greater pressure to bomb Auschwitz in 1944, at least the rail lines on bridges.

"But saving Jews was not a priority. Jewish leaders were told that the best way to stop the Holocaust was to defeat Germany."