Read The Secrets of Station X Online
Authors: Michael Smith
The first message decyphered by the British on 24 August, the actual day that Churchill made the broadcast, found Jeckeln telling Himmler, Daluege and Heydrich that the 10th Infantry Regiment of the 1st SS Brigade had taken twenty-nine
prisoners
and shot dead sixty-five ‘Bolshevik Jews’. His
Einsatzgruppe
had ‘shot dead twelve bandits and guerrillas and seventy Jews’; 314 Battalion of the Police Regiment South had shot dead 294 Jews; 45 Battalion had shot dead sixty-one Jews and the Police Squadron (possibly members of the small police air force accompanying the police troops) had shot dead 113 Jews.
The item was the first to be decoded that day by Bletchley Park’s Military Section so it is possible that it was sent on by teleprinter to MI6 in time for Menzies to have discussed it with Churchill before the Prime Minister made his ‘crime without
a name’ broadcast. But the evidence appears to suggest that, at the very least, Churchill had not seen the full details of either of the two Jeckeln messages, because a few days later, on 27 August 1941, Bletchley Park issued the first of a special series of Most Secret reports concerning the activities of the police troops and specifically prepared for Churchill.
These reports, written out on good quality paper, had a very limited circulation. There were just two copies, one of which was kept on file at Bletchley Park, with the other going direct to Menzies, who passed it on to Churchill in his daily bundle of intelligence, singling it out in the covering letter. The way these reports were handled leaves no doubt that they were produced specifically for Churchill and at his request. They are concise and to the point and signed personally by Nigel de Grey, now head of research in Hut 3.
De Grey’s first report in this series covers Jeckeln’s message of 23 August announcing that his men operating in the Luginy area have shot dead 367 Jews. It was seen by Churchill on 28 August and the Prime Minister circled the figure 367 in red. The second on 30 August began with the words: ‘Further light on the use being made of the Police Forces in the back areas on the Russian front is shed by some of the daily reports received.’ It went on to recount the details of Jeckeln’s message of 24 August and the killing of a total of 603 Jews.
In this second report, de Grey added new information on further killings from another report to Berlin by Jeckeln, this time on 25 August, in which he reported that his men operating south of Kiev had killed 1,625 Jews. The 1st SS Brigade had taken eighty-five prisoners and shot dead 283 Jews while the Police Regiment South had shot dead 1,342 Jews. Churchill circled the latter figure, the largest figure so far for a single massacre. Also on 25 August, von dem Bach-Zelewski broke what for him appears at first sight to have been a period of silence on the killings, to say that the SS Cavalry Brigade, which was operating in the Pripet marshes, had killed ninety-two Russian soldiers and 150 Jews.
By now there were worrying signs that Churchill’s speech on a ‘crime without a name’ had led to tightened radio security measures. The cypher in use was changing twice a day, making it more difficult to break, and there were clear delays in the intelligence being decyphered. This was almost certainly why a message sent by Jeckeln on 26 August 1941 and in which he reports that his units had shot a further 1,246 Jews, was not included in the 30 August report to Churchill. It was issued separately on 1 September and seen by Churchill a day later. Again the Prime Minister circled the figure for the number of Jews shot.
The slaughter was unremitting. Jeckeln reported on 30 August that the Police Regiment South had shot dead forty-five Jews in the central Ukrainian town of Slavuta and von dem Bach-Zelewski reported that his men had shot dead eighty-four Jews in the Belorussian town of Gorodishche. A day later, on 31 August, Jeckeln reported that 911 more Jews had been shot dead in Slavuta and a further 2,200 Jews shot dead in Minkowzky. This was reported to Churchill on 6 September as ‘over 3,000 Jews shot by various units’. On 2 September, Jeckeln reported that his men had shot dead a further sixty Jews and fifteen Partisans in the Kaments-Podolsky region of the southern Ukraine. Four days later, on 6 September, they had shot dead 494 Jews and two Partisans. On 11 September, Jeckeln reported that Police Regiment South had liquidated 1,548 Jews ‘according to the usage of war’. This euphemism was commonly used. The victims were variously ‘disposed of’; ‘liquidated’; ‘executed’; ‘shot dead’; or sometimes simply ‘evacuated’. The upshot was, of course, always the same.
The next day, 12 September, the German Police changed their cypher, starting with the cyphers in use by the police troops in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. They switched from the double transposition system to a system known as Double Playfair, a fairly sophisticated substitution system, albeit one that Bletchley Park was able to break again with relative ease.
Also on 12 September, Churchill saw his final report on the killing of Jews during this initial period. There were very clear decryption difficulties with this report. It was only shown to Churchill on 12 September, although it dated back to 27 August, when Jeckeln reported that the 1st SS Brigade had killed sixteen Jews and Partisans; Police Regiment South had shot dead 914 Jews; and the ‘Special Handling Staff with 320 Police Battalion had shot dead 4,200 Jews. At the bottom of the report, de Grey noted: ‘The fact that the Police are killing all Jews that fall into their hands should by now be sufficiently appreciated. It is not therefore proposed to continue reporting these butcheries specially, unless so requested.’
But the messages dried up anyway. A few weeks after Churchill’s speech, Daluege warned his commanders that the British might be listening and told them to send details of all future ‘executions’ to Berlin by courier.
The killings that followed the invasion of the Soviet Union are now recognised as the beginning of the Holocaust. It has been claimed that Churchill covered up the evidence from Bletchley Park of the Holocaust killings. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He not only broadcast to the world, denouncing the German mass murders as a ‘crime without a name’, he had Foreign Office lawyers collect evidence of the killings for use in future war trials.
One of those involved in decyphering the plethora of messages coming out of eastern Europe was Charles Cunningham who had been called up into the Army as a private.
I had read classics, Latin and Greek, at Glasgow. By way of ancillary to that I had taken a short course in German mainly because many of the best texts and commentaries on the Latin and Greek classics are in German. As a result of that very
minimal
knowledge the Army posted me to Bletchley Park. On my first day there, I saluted this captain and he turned to me and said: ‘Excuse me’ – which is not the language normally used
by captains to privates – ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘What is that noise?’ To which I replied: ‘That is the air raid siren, sir.’ That gives you some kind of an impression of what kind of place Bletchley was; mad people on all sides.
Cunningham was immediately promoted to lance-corporal and put to work on police communications. ‘I was a
cryptanalyst
working on what was called German police but in fact it included all the security services,’ Cunningham said. ‘They used a lovely hand cypher system, which was called Double Playfair, named after a British admiral in the mid-nineteenth century who devised it.’
Admiral Playfair’s system required the message that was to be encyphered to be split into bigrams so the sentence ‘Report to headquarters at once’ would be rendered:
RE PO RT TO HE AD QU AR TE RS AT ON CE
The cypher was built in a five by five square around a keyword. If we were to take ‘Phoenix’ as the key word, it would be written into the square with the remaining letters of the alphabet filling the rest of the square, omitting J which when encyphering was always taken to be I. A Playfair cypher using Phoenix as the keyword would therefore appear thus:
| | P | H | O | E | N |
| | I | X | A | B | C |
| | D | F | G | K | L |
| | M | Q | R | S | T |
| | U | V | W | Y | Z |
Each bigram of the divided message is then replaced by a pair of letters from within the square according to pre-set rules. If the letters appear at a diagonal to each other they are replaced by the letters at the other point of a rectangle so formed. In the case of our message, the first bigram RE becomes OS. Bigrams
with letters in the same horizontal or vertical line are replaced by the next letter on, making the second bigram of the above message PO become HE. Letters at the end of the line jump to the next one. So the third bigram RT would be rendered SU. The entire encyphered message would then be written in five letter groups, in this case using four randomly chosen fillers at the end:
OSHES UNRON GIVMG WNSST RCEIN BCVYU
The Germans, having broken this cypher early on in the First World War, decided to adapt it for their own use. They
introduced
a second square from which the second letter of each bigram was selected and dispensed with the keyword, placing the letters in random order. This complication obviously made it much more difficult to crack. But since the Germans spelt everything, including numbers, out in full, the codebreakers often got plenty of depth. The German fondness for proforma traffic in which everything always stayed in its set place also helped to ensure that the Double Playfair system, used as a medium-grade cypher not just by the German police but also by the Army and air force, was regularly broken.
Proforma messages inevitably required each part of the message to be preceded by a sequential number, the first part being 1, the second 2, and so on. Since these had to be spelt out, EINS, the German word for one, was immediately recoverable and easy cribs were available for the rest of the message. The fact that, when spelt out, the German numbers one to twelve contain all but eight of the letters in the Double Playfair squares made proforma traffic relatively easy to break. But while the actual process of breaking the police cypher was an enjoyable and intensely rewarding task for the codebreakers, the results of their labour were often horrific.
‘When you’re an individual cryptanalyst just working on the intercepts of the day before, you don’t have any real overall picture,’ said Cunningham.
You only see the bits of paper in front of you and try to break the cypher and having broken it you pass it on to someone else who does the decoding. The business of the cryptanalyst is simply to get the key. When he’s done that, he goes on to another batch. But there was concern over the concentration camps, which was of course a very inadequate term, and one was aware in the case of stuff coming from these camps that very nasty things indeed were going on. They were run by the SS and they made regular returns of the intake and what the output was and you can guess what the intake was and what the output was. You soon got to have a fairly good idea of what you were dealing with. The ironic thing was that these terrible returns, sort of day-to-day status reports, were stereotyped and that is a very good way of getting into that kind of cypher. They provided an excellent crib, which I always thought of as a distinctly unfortunate thing but I suppose it is a kind of way of turning evil into good.
The SS decrypts also revealed the existence of a special SS
battalion
which, under the guidance of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, was plundering works of art and sending them back to Berlin. The battalion was attached to Army groups in all the countries invaded by Germany and in Russia made a particular target of the palaces of the former Tsar in Leningrad, suggesting that it may have been behind the disappearance of the legendary Amber Room, a gold and amber encrusted hall in the Winter Palace. The decrypts showed the battalion
becoming
involved in a wrangle between von Ribbentrop and Alfred Rosenberg, Minister for Occupied Territories, over what should happen to various works of art looted from Russian palaces, museums and monasteries, most of which made their way into the villas of leading Nazi party bosses.
C
hurchill’s obsession with the increasing amount of high-grade intelligence the codebreakers were producing hidden away at a secret location in the heart of the British countryside meant it was inevitable that he should want to visit Bletchley Park in person to see them at work. He arrived on the morning of 6 September 1941, his visit kept secret from the bulk of the codebreakers.
The decrypts delivered by Menzies had most recently included the reports on the German killings of the Jews on the Eastern Front and the preparations by German U-Boats to attack Allied shipping in the Atlantic, while Hut 6, having proved its worth in the Balkans, with its warnings over the invasion of Russia and as the place where Enigma was being broken most regularly, was one of the highlights of Churchill’s visit.
‘Travis took him on a tour of the many Bletchley Park
activities
,’ Welchman recalled.
The tour was to include a visit to my office and I had been told to prepare a speech of a certain length, say ten minutes. When the party turned up, a bit behind schedule, Travis whispered, somewhat loudly, ‘Five minutes, Welchman.’ I started with my prepared opening gambit, which was ‘I would like to make three points,’ and then proceeded to make the first two points more hurriedly than I had planned. Travis then said, ‘That’s enough, Welchman,’ whereupon Winston, who was enjoying himself, gave me a grand schoolboy wink and said, ‘I think there was a third point, Welchman.’
Welchman took the Prime Minister on a tour of Hut 6,
introducing
him to John Herivel as the man responsible for
beginning
the continuous break into the vitally important
Red
key. ‘Churchill didn’t say anything,’ Herivel recalled.
He just gave me a deep penetrating look, not a very friendly look, rather a scowl, and then he went on. Later that day, we were told the Prime Minister wanted to see us. There was a little pile of material which the builders had conveniently left near the end of Hut 6 and Churchill stood up on it and in just a few words, with deep emotion, he said how grateful he was to us for all the good work we were doing in the war effort. So that was our finest hour.
Churchill would later laud the codebreakers as ‘the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled’ but was reputedly so startled by the eccentricity of some of the codebreakers that he turned to Menzies, who was visiting with him, and said: ‘I know I told you to leave no stone unturned to get staff, but I didn’t expect you to take me literally.’
Malcolm Kennedy recorded the visit in his diary entry for 6 September 1941.
The PM paid us a surprise visit this morning and after
inspecting
some of the work of BP gave a short talk thanking us for what we have done and stressing the great value of our work. Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, paid a similar visit of thanks at the time of the ‘
Bismarck
’ show. Very decent of these old boys to come down in person to thank us when they
themselves
must be terribly loaded down with their own work and vast responsibilities. Instructions issued to keep Churchill’s visit a secret, but all Bletchley seems to know about it.
Only a few of the codebreakers were able to hear what Churchill said but there was an immense feeling of pride that the Prime
Minister had visited them and disappointment among those, like Anne Lavell, who were not there to hear him speak. ‘I was terribly cross,’ she said. ‘I was on four to midnight shift that day and when I came up the place was buzzing like an ant-heap, and I’d missed it all, he’d been and gone.’
Churchill’s visit was timely given Denniston’s inability to get anyone in Whitehall to provide the new recruits and the
equipment
the codebreakers needed. He was doing what he could but since so few people were allowed to know the
Ultra
secret Denniston was unable to make clear the importance of the work being done at Bletchley Park. He was seen in Whitehall as the head of an obscure Foreign Office department that could not possibly be allowed to compete with the needs of the forces who were fighting the war and he did not wield the necessary power or weight of personality to force the issue. The requests for more resources were getting nowhere.
It was clear to the leading members of Hut 6 and Hut 8 that Denniston’s old-fashioned approach, while perfectly well suited to keeping the varied, often difficult characters who inhabited the inter-war GC&CS happy, was not adequate to running the increasingly mechanised Bletchley Park codebreaking operation. The German military operations in North Africa, the Mediterranean, the Balkans and on the Eastern Front were now generating a massive amount of work for the codebreakers. There was far too much to do and too few people, and
equipment
, particularly Bombes and radio sets, to do it.
Welchman, Milner-Barry, Turing and Alexander, ‘the wicked uncles’ as they were known among their junior staff, decided to go straight to the top. On 21 October, 1941, they wrote a letter to Churchill reminding him of his visit and his praise for their work.
We think, however, that you should know that this work is being held up, and in some cases not being done at all,
principally
because we cannot get sufficient staff to deal with it.
Our reason for writing to you direct is that for months we have done everything that we possibly can through the normal channels and that we despair of any early improvement
without
your intervention.
They emphasised that they had written the letter entirely on their own initiative and were careful to stress that the
problem
lay with the Foreign Office and the service ministries who seemed not to understand ‘the importance of what is done here or the urgent necessity of dealing promptly with our requests. No doubt in the long run these particular requirements will be met, but meanwhile still more precious months will have been wasted. If we are to do our job as well as it could and should be done, it is absolutely vital that our wants, small as they are, should be promptly attended to.’
Fearing that if the letter were sent through Denniston or Menzies it would never reach Churchill, they decided that Milner-Barry should go to Downing St himself to deliver it. He would later remember his own ‘incredulity at hearing my own voice say “10, Downing Street” to a taxi driver at Blackfriars and arriving unopposed – the first and no doubt the last time that I shall find myself inside those doors.’ While he was unopposed in his attempt to get to Number 10, it was a different matter once he was inside. Brigadier George Harvie-Watt, Churchill’s principal private secretary, insisted that no one saw the Prime Minister without an appointment and demanded more details of this matter of supposed great national importance. Milner-Barry, who had not thought to bring any official identification with him, was equally insistent that he could not discuss it with anyone who was not authorised to know about it. Eventually,
Harvie-Watt
agreed to pass the letter on to Churchill, whose immediate response was a minute to General ‘Pug’ Ismay, his chief military assistant. ‘Make sure they have all they want extreme priority and report to me that this has been done,’ Churchill wrote, scrawling across the minute the ominous warning: ‘Action this day.’
From that point on, resources began to flow into Bletchley Park. A comprehensive building programme was put in place in anticipation of a staff of around 3,000 – at the time, with the number of staff still some way short of 1,000, a highly
optimistic
figure. The first priority was a canteen to replace the old dining hall in the mansion which was now far too small, leading to long queues at mealtimes. There were also to be a number of custom-built brick blocks to house the necessary expansion. The Ministry of Labour was ordered to hold a meeting with Denniston and Menzies at which the needs of the
codebreakers
were to be considered favourably. The service chiefs were instructed to provide more clever young men and to enlarge the Y services immediately to provide the coverage that Welchman, Milner-Barry, Turing and Alexander demanded. Expensive new orders for many more bigger Bombes – the Jumbos – were placed with the British Tabulating Machine Company and the Royal Navy agreed to supply additional Wrens to operate them.
Tiltman set up a training school for cryptanalysts in order to give the new entrants a basic grounding in codebreaking. It was called the Inter-Service Special Intelligence School and was housed briefly in an RAF depot in Buckingham before moving into the gas company showrooms in Ardour House, Albany Rd, Bedford, where it swiftly became known to locals as ‘the Spy School’.
The military resorted to unusual methods to bring in the right type of recruit to Bletchley Park. Stanley Sedgewick’s job as a managing clerk with a firm of city accountants was
classified
as a reserved occupation which meant that call-up was deferred for six months at a time. Every day, he travelled into London by train. ‘I became quite good at solving the crossword puzzles appearing in the
Daily Telegraph
,’ Sedgewick said.
Towards the end of 1941, the appearance of a crossword
marking
a milestone in the history of the
Telegraph
inspired several
letters from readers claiming they had never missed them, or never failed to solve them, or never took more than so many minutes to solve them.
A Mr Gavin, Chairman of the Eccentrics Club, wrote saying he would donate £100 to the Minesweepers Fund if it could be demonstrated under controlled conditions that anyone could solve the
Daily Telegraph
puzzle in less than twelve minutes. This prompted the editor to invite readers wishing to take up this challenge to present themselves at the newspaper’s offices in Fleet St on a Saturday afternoon. I went along to find about thirty other would-be fast
solvers
. We sat at individual tables in front of a platform of invigilators including the editor, Mr Gavin, and a
timekeeper
. The editor then selected a sealed envelope out of a stack of seven, each containing the puzzles due to appear the following week.
Four of those present completed the puzzle correctly in 7 minutes 57.5 seconds; 9 minutes 3.5 seconds; 9 minutes 52.5 seconds; and 10 minutes 38.5 seconds. I was one word short when the twelve-minute bell rang, which was disappointing as I had completed that day’s puzzle in the train to Waterloo in under twelve minutes. We were then given tea in the chairman’s dining-room and dispersed with the memory of a pleasant way of spending a Saturday afternoon. Imagine my surprise when several weeks later I received a letter marked ‘Confidential’ inviting me, as a consequence of taking part in ‘the
Daily Telegraph
Crossword Time Test’, to make an appointment to see Colonel Nicholls of the General Staff who ‘would very much like to see you on a matter of national importance’.
Colonel Freddie Nicholls was in fact the head of MI8, the military intelligence department concerned with Bletchley Park and the Army’s radio interception or ‘Y’ Service. ‘I arranged to attend at Devonshire House in Piccadilly, the headquarters
of MI8, and found myself among a few others who had been contacted in the same circumstances,’ Sedgewick said.
I think I was told, though not so primitively, that chaps with twisted brains like mine might be suitable for a particular type of work as a contribution to the war effort. Thus it was that I reported to ‘the Spy School’ at 1, Albany Rd, Bedford. On completion of the course I received a letter offering me an appointment as a ‘Temporary Junior Assistant’ at the Government Communications Centre and started at BP.
Sedgewick worked in Hut 10, Josh Cooper’s Air Section, on German weather codes. ‘The results were used – usually currently – to permit weather forecasts to be made for operational use by Bomber Command,’ Sedgewick said. He was unaware until long after the end of the war that they were also used as crucial cribs for the Naval Enigma.
The Y service was to be gradually expanded by around 1,000 wireless sets and, since these were to be manned twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, more than 4,000 operators. As a result of Chatham’s vulnerability to German air raids, new Army stations had been built at Harpenden, in Hertfordshire, and at Beaumanor, near Loughborough in Leicestershire, where from October 1941 – when the Army operators from Chatham moved there – most of the Enigma traffic was taken. The RAF intercept site at Chicksands Priory was now expanding rapidly and a new General Post Office (GPO) site to augment the work of Sandridge was opened in a rambling eighteenth-century rectory at Whitchurch in Shropshire.
There were also a number of Y Service interception stations abroad in Palestine, Egypt, Malta, Gibraltar, India and South Africa as well as the Far East Combined Bureau, based in Singapore until the Japanese invasion when it moved to Ceylon. There were now 155 radio sets concentrating solely on different types of Enigma traffic, 132 of them in the UK and the others at
various points around the world with all the material pouring into Hut 6 Registry by teleprinter.
By the end of the war the Y Service had grown to an
astonishing
size. ‘The Y Service was an amazing organisation,’ said Joan Nicholls.
It began with a few people before the war and ended up with thousands of us. Wherever the Germans were we were
listening
. Berlin, Essen, anywhere in Germany, anywhere in Russia, all over the continent, Holland and so on. At Beaumanor there were 900 female ATS intercept operators and 300
civilian
intercept operators, the men, so there were 1,200 of us manning four set-rooms twenty-four hours a day and that was only one station.
Hundreds of Wrens were drafted into Bletchley, not just to look after the new Bombes, but also to work in a number of other codebreaking and intelligence roles. They were allocated their own trade, ‘Special Duties X’, and a new Bombe outstation was opened up at Gayhurst Manor, north of Bletchley. The increase in numbers of people arriving put strain on the
administration
, which had to find billets for them all. ‘Many more service people came in, many more Wrens,’ said Mavis Lever, one of the civilian codebreakers. ‘The more people came, the further you had to go out to villages, right over beyond Woburn and into Bedfordshire and around Buckinghamshire and a vast system of taking people in and out and so on, whereas before we were all very locally billeted.’