Brits secretly taped German general POWs
Below is a rare picture of Hitler briefing his top brass. For years they claimed to know nothing about the Holocaust. But now extraordinary secret recordings - made by the British - explode that myth for ever ...There is much more and some of it is pretty graphic. I am sure Ahmadinejad would have a mixture of reactions ranging from disbelief to envy. I am also sure the ACLU would have been horrified to know that our ally was recording the conversations of prisoners. I hope we are doing this at Gitmo.
During the latter half of World War II, the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) undertook a massive clandestine operation of which the full, extraordinary details are only now coming to light.
Between 1942 and 1945, a section of SIS - known as MI19 - secretly recorded no fewer than 64,427 conversations between captured German generals and other senior officers, all without their knowledge or even suspicion. The 167 most significant of these are about to be published for the first time.
Together, they provide us with a goldmine of information about what the German High Command privately thought of the war, Adolf Hitler, the Nazis and each other.
They also explode the post-war claim of the Wehrmacht that they did not know what the SS were doing to the Jews, Slavs, mentally disabled and others among what they termed "untermensch" (sub-humans).
The Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) was based in Trent Park, a magnificent estate once owned by the Sassoon family, near Cockfosters in North London. It was here that German senior officers were brought for internment once they were captured.
Then a huge top-secret operation swung into play, involving several hundred recording technicians, stenographers, transcribers and interpreters, not to mention stool-pigeons and agents provocateurs whose job it was to stimulate conversations between German generals, brigadiers and colonels.
A number of ruses were employed to encourage the Germans to speak to one another in one of the 12 rooms in the common areas of the house that were wired for sound. Luftwaffe commanders were mixed with Wehrmacht generals; newspapers and radios were used to pass on snippets of news from the front. Occasionally, Lord Aberfaldy - a CSDIC agent posing as a welfare officer -would simply bring up subjects that might provoke debate once he had left the room.
The astonishing success of the operation can be measured in the sheer number - and the extreme candour - of the conversations that ensued. To read the transcripts today is to be reminded of some of the worst horrors of World War II.
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Even General Dietrich von Choltitz - who has had the reputation of being a "good" German ever since he refused to carry out Hitler's orders to destroy Paris - is implicated by these transcripts of killing Jews in the Crimea in 1941 and 1942.
None of the generals had the slightest idea that they were being listened to. And it is only now that we can read verbatim what they actually said to one another, giving us an intimate glimpse into the mind of the German High Command as it dawned on them that they were likely to lose the war.
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wow. I can't believe it took so long to be made public. I'll put up a link to this tomorrow if my brain and arm are working.
ReplyDeleteAmazing. What dedication. And when you think of all the Brits involved but no one seems to have talked...
[walks away, muttering to self...]
I read a book some years ago called The Good Old Days it was a compilation of first hand resources, mostly diaries and letters home, from soldiers and civilian Germans who were directly involved with the holocaust. It gives an inside view of that evil world and exposes its banal and lethal logic. Stuff like this is difficult to view but essential to understanding and responding to evil. I have a recent Post http://breathofthebeast.blogspot.com/2007/06/blind-and-merciless-sky-above.html which muses about what they were all thinking.
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