Original subtitles

The Secret Recordings are one of the biggest intelligence

operations of the Second World War.

Using around a thousand personnel, listening in to the

conversations of German prisoners

of war, and it was incredible because the prisoners didn't

realise we were listening in to them.

For more than two years, the British intelligence eavesdropping

operation kept expanding.

The British set up additional detention facilities and wired them

with microphones everywhere as well.

Then, in 1942, there was a dramatic turning point.

The British finally gained their first victory at El Alamein in North Africa.

So even larger groups of prisoners will come through

those detention sites.

The British military uses Trent Park, a mansion in North

London, but reserved it only for

the high ranking officers of the Wehrmacht.

They were given conditions that nobody else received, and the

main goal was just to get

them to start talking.

My orders were waiting for me on arrival in London.

I was to report to the War Office where I received verbal instructions.

A car would meet me at the appointed time to take me to a

most secret installation.

I was advised at once, under the Official Secrets Act,

never to divulge our location

or talk about our work.

High ranking Germans, captured in North Africa,

were sent to England for interrogation.

They lived in pleasant surroundings

on the top floor of Trent Park.

After an extensive examination of the walls, floor,

and furniture of his room at Trent Park,

One German was heard to say to his cellmate,

there are no microphones here.

Little did they suspect that a microphone

hidden in the outside wall beneath the cell

could pick up their faintest whispers

that were then carefully recorded by our M room operators.

The commander, Thomas Kendrick,

now needs more equipment, more personnel.

He's just made ready the two extra sites

of Latimer House and Wilton Park.

The personnel is increased from 500 intelligences,

including secret listeners, to 1,000.

This is now becoming an industrial scale

intelligence gathering operation.

Not only do they have masses of soldiers

divulging stories of mass extermination.

Trent Park became the place where for the very first time

we can hear the senior officers of the Wehrmacht

speaking candidly and openly

about the exterminations of the Jews.

On June 22nd, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union

in what was, until that time,

the largest invasion in history.

Four million soldiers crossed the border.

Many of them had already been in Poland prior to this.

Others had been in the Baltic states,

and now they're all crossing the border

into the Soviet Union.

If you were going to attack the Soviet Union,

then the question was what to do with the Jews.

There were over five million Jews in the Soviet Union.

Heydrich gave an order.

And this was a written order

that came out in early July of 1941.

And part of the order said

that all Jews in state or party employment were to be killed.

The Soviet Union was a communist country.

Everybody worked for the state

or everybody worked for the party.

And so when you say all Jews in state or party employment,

you're really saying all Jews.

The decision is taken to separate the generals

away from the ordinary German soldiers.

So a Trent Park comes purely for the generals themselves.

And it took five months to wire that house

and stable block for sound before it's ready

to receive its first German prisoners of war.

This whole drama theater at Trent Park

extended to the fact that some of the generals

believed that they were being held in Windsor Castle

and they thought the king had given them this house.

And Trent Park will be run a bit like

an aristocratic gentleman's club in central London.

So the generals were given wine, nice food in the house,

and it seems quite outrageous,

but at the heart of it is one aim, and one aim only,

and that is for those generals to be so relaxed

that in their unguarded conversations,

they will give up intelligence secrets,

secrets that they would never give up.

And it worked.

So, here we are, look, we can see the house

as it was in the 20th century.

You can see obviously it's undergoing a major renovation,

converting the upper floors into luxury flats.

Those were the floors where the Germans' bedroom were.

Thank you. Wow. Oh my goodness.

You can imagine, you can imagine what went on here.

All of these rooms where the Germans spent their time

enjoying themselves, relaxing, debating arguing,

was being bugged completely everywhere

and they were totally unaware

that just a couple of feet below them there was this whole team,

24 hour a day,

seven day a week team, listening to every single word they said.

I can imagine my grandfather possibly coming through a

tunnel to get into the the M Room,

the basement rooms, with no one knowing,

and listened to the captured German generals upstairs,

laughing and joking.

All of the mass massacres and the mass graves, they described it.

They'd say, "You know, a week before I was captured,

I personally shot 300 Jews."

The recordings are exposing what is happening in the field.

And what is happening is that

Nazi Germany starts with the mass murder of the Jews

in the shooting pits.

German units are entering community after community after community,

concentrating the Jews and taking them to shooting pits.

Sometimes those pits were prepared before and sometimes the

Jews are being forced to dig their own graves.

At first the killing were being done in a chaotic disorder,

nothing is organized.

They are actually eyewitnesses to what's happened.

And in many cases, they themselves

had actually undertaken those shootings.

So they are telling these as a casual,

sort of quite detailed story,

just as they would to their mate.

That was June 22, 1941.

By the end of July, they had already murdered 70,000 people.

And by the end of the summer, by the end of August,

they already had murdered more than 200,000.

Today we know that over two million Jews were killed in the shooting pits.

It's a very primitive manner of killing, but still the

cost is very heavy, very, very heavy.

September of 1941, the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, whole Jewish

families went for relocation.

And this is really the background of the Babi Yar massacre,

where over 33,000 Jews were killed

outside of Kiev in virtually a single day.

There was a general called Heinrich Kittel and he was the commander

of an area where the annihilation took place.

And he gives descriptions, truly horrific ones,

about how they picked up a Jewish baby

and grabbed him by the neck and put one shot in his neck

so he can kill him instantly, not use two shots.

And when I was reading this, I was thinking to myself,

what am I reading?

This was something that was unimaginable

to the human mind and for my own capacity.

And it was a truly horrific and gruesome experience

to see how easily he spoke about what he saw and experienced.

This is just pure evil.

And Churchill himself said that these recordings

provide such a valuable insight

into the minds of the Nazi killing machine.

In December 1941, a great shift happened in the war.

Japan attacks the United States in Pearl Harbor, and a few days

later the United States enters the war.

As a result, Nazi Germany declares war on the United States.

Many scholars claim that Hitler's decision to mass murder all

of European Jews is closely

connected to America entering the war.

Now back in January 30, 1939, Hitler delivered an important

speech, and in that speech he

said that if the world jury will once again drag the whole

world to a world war, it will

not end with the misery of millions, but will end with the

annihilation of the Bolshevik Judaism.

Now Hitler says, "This is my prophecy."

Now it became a world war with the United States joining

the war, and now we have to fulfill this prophecy,

all the Jews must be killed.

Within two weeks of Pearl Harbor,

American intelligence officers start arriving in the UK

and they become an integral part of Kendrick's operations.

Once American intelligence was part of this whole operation,

they received copies of all of the transcripts

of those bugged conversations.

So everything that the British knew,

the American intelligence services knew

at exactly the same time.

And that applies also to the Holocaust,

to the mass killing of Jews across Europe.

They knew about the final solution.

There was the excuse of superior orders.

"I received orders and I had to follow them.

Otherwise, they would be punishing me."

When in fact, what we know is that there was not even a single case

of someone who's declined to participate in the murder,

who said, "I can't do this," who was punished.

Quite the contrary. People like that could still

get promoted and did

and they could get more senior positions and they did.

So that whole thing was simply a lie about superior orders.

And this reflects the fact that they

had a choice and they could

have declined to participate. They chose to commit the murder.

As a historian reading some of this material

for the very first time, not only is it shocking,

but it's the level of detail that these prisoners give.

In some cases, they're very casual and quite flippant.

Boastful, quite proud of what they've done.

It's the explanation step by step,

such that you can actually visualize that scene.

You know, I find it hard to talk about actually.

Forcing the Jews to undress had many different aspects.

First of all, it made the shooting of them much easier for

the German soldiers.

It's much easier to kill somebody when he doesn't look human,

he's just a mass of naked bodies.

But above that, it also had a terrifying effect on

the Jews themselves.

Because what can somebody do when he's all naked?

This has a paralyzing effect, and when people were naked,

not knowing what is happening with their loved ones,

usually, as human beings, they could do nothing.

As Kendrick's operation is scaled up,

so increases the accounts and the discussions,

unguarded conversations about the killing of Jews.

They're given precise numbers

of how many Jews are killed and exactly where.

And this gets passed at one point to the foreign office.

And the foreign office write back to Kendrick

and say, we want you to find out exactly where are those mass graves

because when those areas are liberated,

this is going to need to be substantiated

and used as evidence for the war crimes.

What we see is that the occupied east

for the SS, for the police, for the Wehrmacht

becomes an area, a zone of exception

where they can do things,

where they can act in ways that they would never be able

to act in Germany proper.

And one of the horrific things that we see from the generals

is this reference to sexual violence at the actual

killing sites themselves.

Rape was a very big part of this

that's only being discovered in recent years.

The German policemen would rape Jewish women and then kill them

the next day, so that there would be no accuser.

Many of these men also used alcohol for facilitating acts of violence.

So, for example, it's New Year's Eve, 1942.

It's in occupied Poland, and there's a group of SS men

who are celebrating, like many people will do

on New Year's Eve, by drinking and bringing in the new year.

However, what do these drunken SS men decide

that they want to do after midnight to start the new year?

Well, the answer to that comes from a victim testimony.

"They came into the ghetto," she said,

"And they went on a killing spree as a kind of sport."

Victory in Tunisia.

Royal Air Force has indeed set new standards of cooperation

and it has affected the total elimination

of the Luftwaffe from North Africa before

the end of the fighting on the ground.

The biggest bags of prisoners begin to come in 1943.

The German defeat in Tunisia, the surrender of an entire army there,

brought thousands of German prisoners into British and American custody.

In the Tunisian collapse, 26 German and Italian generals were captured.

Here are some of the high priests of Prussianism assembling at an

airport for deportation to England.

Now we have high value prisoners of war.

We have Hitler's top commanders, and they're placed in Trent Park.

In order to make the generals more comfortable,

they made sure that they dined well.

So they took them to restaurants in London.

They also gave them tours.

Remember, London and Britain is at war,

and they have food rations.

But they are eatting like kings.

They were taken for a nice, posh lunch in central London,

next to the Savoy Hotel.

British Prime Minister is furious.

So Kendrick's called to a meeting the following day,

and he's told, "No more pampering of the generals."

It was Churchill's words, "No more pampering."

Well, we weren't getting the intelligence

through those hidden microphones,

so Kendrick takes no notice of Churchill.

He was singly focused on that one aim

to gain war winning intelligence from Hitler's top commanders.

As the war progressed, the greatly expanded CSDICs required a

corresponding increase in bilingual M Room staff.

It became my responsibility to recruit personnel from a source that had

not yet been tapped.

German Jewish refugees in the Pioneer Corps.

Sons of bankers, lawyers,

doctors, and other professions, well educated,

hounded from their country in the 1930s.

These young men had found sanctuary in England.

I held interviews throughout 1943,

and had to make difficult decisions

when too many candidates presented themselves.

I remember my grandfather being a large character,

very warm, very friendly.

One would never have known his job.

My grandfather was called Ernst Lederer,

and he grew up in a spa town in Czechoslovakia

called Teplitz.

They had the wherewithal to get themselves out

of Czechoslovakia before it was impossible to

remain living there if you were Jewish.

What no one knew at the same time is MI9,

Department of British Intelligence,

located Big Bubba and then this is the

secret part that nobody knew till very recently,

I didn't know till a few years ago, that he was recruited.

He would then be taken to Trent Park, he would then be shown

the M Room, the downstairs part

of Trent Park, and how to record and what to listen out for.

And all this information, all of it, would be analysed and used.

So this was Kendrick's office.

Kendrick's was in there with a spymaster

who was in control of the whole operation.

And he could come out of his office

and come down this little staircase,

which nobody else on this floor would have known about.

That takes you down to that whole secret area.

Just be very careful as you come down.

This is the M Room.

This is where it actually happened.

It is so dark and damp, like a cave.

Just up there, you can see wires.

Oh my God.

the special wires for the listening devices,

and they would have come from all over the house.

There would have been desks, telephones,

recording machines, and they would have sat here

for a whole shift.

Here, they were listening to hear what had happened

from the perpetrators.

They were hearing it directly.

They were the first people to note it down

and to imagine maybe my own family is in that situation.

I mean, thinking of my grandfather,

knowing that his family were in Auschwitz,

he would be here,

listening to people literally a few feet away

at any time describing horrendous acts of killing.

These were the men ultimately responsible,

underneath Adolf Hitler,

for the ethnic cleansing and for the Shoah.

They were in charge.

They were ordering hundreds of other Germans

to pull their triggers.

Just the reality of it.

I think every so often, it's just the reality hits you.

And, you know, it's the lovely grandfather that I remember

having to experience that.

Yeah, witness it.

Yeah, very difficult.

And nobody knew.

Nothing was mentioned.

Yeah.

The problem with mass shootings was this.

One, you really couldn't keep them secret.

The Germans tried to keep them secret,

but locals always knew about them.

The other problem that was discovered later

was the psychological toll

that it took on some of the German policemen.

Don't get me wrong,

some of them enjoyed doing what they were doing,

but there were others who really did develop

psychological trauma, who drank very heavily,

who woke up in the middle of the night screaming.

It's interesting that the Germans felt no pity whatsoever

for the Jews they were killing.

It's interesting that the pity that they felt was actually for

the well being of the shooters

and would they be able to live normal lives afterwards.

But there you have it. A new method of mass killing was needed.

Something more efficient.

And what the Germans eventually hit on was this.

Rather than take the killers to the Jews,

wouldn't it be more efficient to take the Jews to the killers?

Within the German leadership,

they began talking about additional methods of murder.

One idea that they had was to develop some form of gassing.

And the first gassing idea was to turn

to automobile companies that would make trucks

and ask them to develop a truck

in which they could channel the exhaust from the truck

into the rear compartment.

In that way, they could asphyxiate

all the people in the back of the truck within a few minutes.

By November 1st, 1941,

they began constructing the Chelmno death camp

near the village of Chelmno.

I can still visualize myself in the archives.

It's the graphic detail that I found so horrifying.

They don't just say, you know, we killed Jews, we started to

bundle them into the gas trucks.

We said to them, first of all, they're being transferred

somewhere else, and you get a visual of them being led to the van,

to them going into the van,

and then of course, you know, they die a horrible death.

For me, that's one of the most shocking parts

of these conversations.

Then they began thinking about other forms of gassing.

They realized that gassing is much cheaper than bullets,

and it also doesn't make noise like a bullet.

But they needed to think bigger because in the gas vans,

they could maybe kill 70 or 80 people at a time.

They now needed to think about much larger scale killing.

From the German point of view,

and we know it from the recording

as well as from any other documents,

the Germans did not want to talk

about the mass murder of the Jews.

They wanted to keep it as a secret.

In one of Himmler's most famous speeches,

he talked about murdering of the Jews

as this glorious page in the history

that was not written and that will never be written.

On the one hand, he's very proud of it.

On the other hand, he wants to conceal it.

The mass murder of the Jews

is something people should not be talking about.

A Jew who escaped told what was going on.

A Pole who escaped would also tell what was going on,

but is this possible?

Who could believe such things?

And here we have the Germans telling us in real time,

"Yes, we did it."

Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka are killing sites.

All the Jews brought to those places are being killed immediately.

We know stories about selections.

This did not happen in those places.

All Jews who were brought to those places, they could be

young and strong, were killed immediately.

In early September 1941, they carried out the first gassing

gassing experiment with Zyklon B.

By mid October, they already had a blueprint for the first gas

chamber at Auschwitz using Zyklon B.

And at the same time, they began clearing out the

area for Birkenau, Auschwitz II,

which was to become the main murder center of Auschwitz.

What to do with the Jews from Western Europe?

What to do with the Jews in France, the Jews in the

Netherlands, the Jews in Belgium?

For that matter, the Jews that were left in Germany?

There, Auschwitz was the solution.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising broke out on the 19th of April, 1943.

From a ghetto that once had about half a million Jews,

remained only about 50,000.

What the Germans wanted to do

is to take from this group the working Jews,

send them to the working camps

and murder all the others in Treblinka.

The Jewish response is very simple,

disobeying the German orders.

Alongside the armed resistance,

there are tens of thousands of Jews

who are just staying in their hiding place,

clinging to them.

And this too is very much apparent in their recordings.

From the German point of view, deporting the remaining Jews

from the Warsaw Ghetto should have been something very simple,

only a few days.

But when it takes so much time, when the fighting continues,

when people are still hiding in those places,

and all of this is happening within a European capital,

so many people are seeing it, it takes so much time,

this is a huge problem for the Germans.

And one can hear that from the recordings as well.

When we, as historians, try to understand what did the

Allies know about the mass murder

of the Jews, we always had many different sources written by

the Germans or by the Allies.

But now we have those recordings.

Those recordings are important because they were done at the time.

And they record what those Germans were talking among themselves,

not knowing that others are listening to it.

And this shows us not only what the Germans were talking

about, but also what the Allies

knew about the mass murder of the Jews.

We also know that Churchill saw some of this

and that Churchill circled the totals of Jewish dead.

And we also know that the British

did analysis of these things and determined that the Germans

were murdering every Jew that fell into their hands

in the Soviet Union.

By 1943, some of those prisoners are now talking about

the killing of Jews, yes, in tens of thousands,

but now millions.

The recordings, essentially, lay out the indictment

of the Wehrmacht, the German army.

We have the senior officers and generals

commanding those very places where the Holocaust took place,

and they have done nothing to prevent it.

If anything, their problem was always on technical issues

and not the moral one.

From this perspective, there is no longer any difference

between the SS and the Wehrmacht.

We cannot say, o, the SS were a fanatical clique,

a small clique that committed the crimes,

because the overwhelming majority of the prisoners were Wehrmacht soldiers,

and roughly 18 million soldiers served in the army.

And if you think for yourself for a moment and you say,

"Oh, my neighbor, Fritz and Heinz, they could have

never done such a thing,"

the harsh reality is, yes, they also murdered Jews.

The secret listeners were asked to keep all the acetate disks

of the conversations of atrocities,

anything relating to concentration camps,

anything relating to testimony about the killing of Jews.

And Kendrick had said to them,

"We're going to keep these, we're not going to record over them."

So all along, Kendrick and the secret listeners

and his intelligence staff always believed

that this evidence would be vital

to bring those Nazi perpetrators to justice.

I assume that as Big Bubba was listening to all this information

and spending his shifts there, that the power of it and the impact of it,

I assume that he would be thinking, this can't go unnoticed.

This is key information.

One, it can't be true, but it is true, and this information will

bring people to justice.

In June 1944, the Allies invaded Normandy,

and the last phase of the war began.

After D Day, after June 1944, we are capturing, in the weeks

after that, all, and I mean all,

of Hitler's top commanders, and they end up at Kendrick's three sites.