‘Holocaust Codes’ pits British codebreaker against SS leader in battle for secrecy
Author Christian Jennings delivers jarring account of Allied codebreaker who deciphered Holocaust’s evolution from open-air massacres to purpose-built death camps
Reporter at The Times of Israel
Popular culture has Allied codebreaking of the Third Reich’s communications largely tied to decrypting naval and military transmissions. In German-occupied Poland, however, codebreaking also involved a cat-and-mouse game between a leading Holocaust perpetrator and a Bletchley Park codebreaker determined to decipher SS and German police messages.
In “The Holocaust Codes: The Untold Story of Decrypting the Final Solution,” author Christian Jennings documents how signals intelligence helped Nazi Germany obscure information about the “Final Solution.” The abilities of Allied codebreaking were regularly frustrated by the Germans’ penchant for secrecy, including the choice to transmit no information at all.
“Codebreaking at Bletchley Park was not just about U-Boats, the dispositions of Axis naval forces and Luftwaffe operations, but about the terrifying internal mechanisms of genocide,” Jennings told The Times of Israel.
Published on August 1, “The Holocaust Codes” is the first book to focus on attempts by codebreaker Nigel de Grey and his colleagues to crack the communications of SS Major Hermann Höfle, encrypted on Enigma and other devices. The Austrian-born Höfle served as operations manager for “Operation Reinhard” — the creation of purpose-built death camps in Poland to murder the Jews in the so-called General Government area.
In the Warsaw Ghetto — Europe’s largest — Höfle ordered the head of the German-controlled Jewish Council to begin selecting people for “resettlement.” (Most ghetto inmates were murdered in the death camps of Treblinka and Majdanek.)
In his diary, Jewish Council chairman Adam Czerniaków recorded his encounter with Höfle.
“Sturmbannführer Höfle (who is in charge of the evacuation) asked me into his office and informed me that for the time being my wife was free, but if the deportation were impeded in any way, she would be the first one to be shot as a hostage,” wrote Czerniaków.
One day after his encounter with Höfle, Czerniaków took his own life.
In addition to implementing the genocide of Polish Jews, Höfle was tasked with ensuring secrecy was maintained throughout the process.
“Höfle wanted to empty the Warsaw ghetto of its Jews, and also try to control the flow of information both within and without the ghetto about the mass executions carried out by Einsatzkommandos the previous year, and the gassing operations at the five Reinhard camps which were beginning,” wrote Jennings.
In particular, the SS major was troubled by the ease with which Jews could report on mass murder “aktions” through underground newspapers or illegally manufactured citizen’s band radio sets, wrote Jennings.
In July of 1941, Bletchley Park’s de Grey presented to UK prime minister Winston Churchill the first deciphered transmissions on Germany’s policy of “resettling” minority populations. It would take more time — and additional code-breaking — for deciphered information on the Jewish genocide, specifically, to reach the Allies.
‘A doppelganger’
There are three key reasons why Höfle’s name is not better known, “despite the enormity of his crimes and his focal role in the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ in Poland,” Jennings said.
First, said Jennings, “Höfle obliged his staff and subordinates to sign a secrecy document, which forbade them from passing on any information in any way — including photography, in writing, by radio messages — about what was happening in the three main extermination camps. Höfle observed this secrecy himself as much as possible,” said Jennings.
Höfle’s victim group was a second reason why there are so few traces of him in survivor accounts or historian-penned monographs.
“The Jewish and Polish people he dealt with, in the Warsaw ghetto or on ‘Operation Reinhard,’ were almost all killed,” said Jennings.
A third reason behind Hoefle’s relative obscurity is that he had a doppelganger, Jennings explained.
“Höfle had a doppelganger, another SS officer with the same Christian and surname, who was executed in 1947 by the Czechs for war-crimes committed in Slovakia in 1944,” said Jennings.
“So when, after the war, the Allies and Russians were compiling war crimes cases and files, SS Major Hermann Julius Höfle, the former Austrian mechanic who had worked in Poland, was easily mistaken for SS General Hermann Höfle, who had served in Slovakia,” Jennings said.
After years of living under false names, Höfle was arrested by Austrian authorities in 1961. He hanged himself in jail the following year while awaiting trial.
As adroit as Höfle was at keeping the “Final Solution” shrouded in secrecy, he made what Jennings called “a historic slip-up” by issuing one particular encrypted telegram.
The telegram was sent by Höfle from his Lublin headquarters to Adolf Eichmann in Berlin, as well as to SS leaders in Krakow, during the first weeks of 1943. Höfle reported that 1,274,166 Jews had been murdered in the “Operation Reinhard” death camps.
As documented by Jennings, “The Höfle Telegram” was discovered in the British National Archives in 2000, more than half a century after the information was transmitted from Lublin. The archives describe it as “arguably the most important find in the history of the Holocaust this century.”
From the perspective of Jennings, “The bare, simple lines of text and figures, with the initials ‘B,’ ‘T’ and ‘S’ for Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor, illustrate very powerfully the contents of its message, the numbers of dead. The dry, mechanical and ultra-concise language in the signal almost stresses the one word that is terrifyingly absent. Humans. These were people, not just numbers,” said Jennings.
Höfle wasn’t the only SS leader obsessed with secrecy. But his personal example encouraged lower-ranking perpetrators to keep details of the “Final Solution” to themselves, as he intended.
“Encrypted radio communications to and from ‘Operation Reinhard’ in Lublin about the operations of the four camps, plus Chelmno, were, we have seen, practically non-existent,” wrote Jennings.
Research on “The Holocaust Codes” involved interviews and archive investigations in at least eight principal countries and six languages, Jennings said. The author is planning a follow-up project on the same subject, he told The Times of Israel.
“I feel strongly there is yet another big, central story of codebreaking and the ‘Final Solution’ out there. I can see the shadows in the fog, of what the British, Russians and Americans really knew, what the Germans desperately tried to conceal — and nearly succeeded — and what the world will hopefully find out in the sequel to this book,” said Jennings.
The Holocaust Codes: The Untold Story of Decrypting the Final Solution by Christian Jennings
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