Original subtitles

When I was a child and I came home from school one day,

all the children had been talking

about what their father had done in the war.

And I said to him, "Gug," that was our nickname for him,

"Gug, what did you do in the war?"

And this gentle, sweet man looked at me,

leant forward and opened his eyes and he said "I was a spy."

And we fell about laughing because the idea that

my father could be a spy,

but in fact he was telling the truth.

We did not know what he did in the Second World War.

So here is my father sitting in a basement and just

on the floor directly above him are

military officers talking about a range of things.

He'd had to listen to conversations between officers who were

strongly pro Hitler, pro Nazi,

boasting to each other about the atrocities they've committed.

This was something they were proud of, killing this many

hundreds of Jews in one day,

and then the other one would top it by saying, "Oh, but I killed

this many more on that day."

He was bearing witness to what they were talking about in the

hope that one day they would have to account for their crimes.

For about 70 years, my father did not speak of this.

One day, when I was at my parents' house with my husband,

the phone goes, and my father picks it up,

and my husband only hears, "I don't know what you're talking about,"

quite angrily and puts the phone down.

We'd never heard him be rude on the phone.

Anyway, the phone goes again and we now know this was Dr Helen Fry.

She wanted to talk to him about his secret listening experience.

As far as my father was concerned, the Official Secrets Act still held.

He wasn't going to talk about it. He was going to deny he even did it.

My husband was so taken aback. He looked at my father. My father said

to him, "Well, it was something that happened a very long time ago

and I'm not going to talk about it,"

and stormed out of the room.

Little known to me then, behind the scenes,

Fritz Lustig, Jewish secret listener, called him

and said to him, "Eric, we can talk about this now

because the files have been declassified."

And I think that was liberating for them

because now they could finally tell their stories.

Finally, he started to talk about it.

And I will always be grateful to Helen Fry

for prizing open the oyster that was my father,

so that we learnt about this.

The sad reality is that the Allies knew.

They knew about the ongoing extermination on a horrific scale.

And they knew about it since the later stages of 1942.

And I have no satisfying explanation as to why they've done

nothing in this regard.

The reason why they didn't do anything is the difficulty of

doing certain things.

In terms of military action to stop the killing, this really

was not possible in 1942, 1943.

There was options to provide refuge.

Jewish refugees were trying to get out of Europe.

There could have been some sort of capacity to take Jewish

refugees, but there were certain

ideas about British anti Semitism and the way news about Jews

could stimulate potentially domestic anti Semitism.

It doesn't interest anybody, not in Great Britain

and not in the United States.

There is, of course, anti Semitism within the state

administrative, but the Allies fail

to understand that Nazi Germany treat Jews different than any

other civilian population under its occupation.

From the Allies' point of view, the Jews' situation will

improve as soon as the war will end.

They simply didn't grasp that all those people were

being killed because they were Jews.

Or perhaps they didn't really want to grasp that.

And they certainly didn't translate that into action.

It's not that they didn't care about the Jews.

It's that they didn't care enough.

As the war is drawing to a close, the conversations shift

amongst those generals from talking

about exactly what was committed and how many tens of thousands

of Jews they'd killed to,

"Are we going to be done for war crimes?

Are we complicit in this?"

So the conversations shift to trying to cover their tracks.

They're going to try and come up with a cunning plan to vouch

for each other as having been innocent.

The irony of that of course is that this plot

has all been overheard by

the microphones embedded in the light fittings and the

walls and the plant pots.

Gradually Nazi Germany is under more and more attacks

and it just goes and shrinks.

There is the landing in Sicily, and the Germans are being

pushed through Italy.

At the same time, the Red Army is continuing to advance.

In June 1944, several million soldiers landed in Normandy.

And the Germans by this time could not fight on two fronts

anymore, and so they began to retreat

As a result, the Allies captured enormous numbers

of Wehrmacht soldiers and generals.

And they end up at Kendrick's three sites.

Trent Park becomes purely for the generals themselves.

The other two sites, Wilton Park and Latimer House, were in

Buckinghamshire, so about 20 miles outside London.

And Latimer House in Wilton Park would go on to process

over 10,000 lower ranked prisoners of war.

By the time we get to D Day we are capturing so many of

Hitler's top commanders, his generals, senior officers and

of course later even a couple of field marshals, that Trent Park is full.

This whole operation is ramped up even

further after D Day, after June 1944.

Activities at the CSDIC's came under greater pressure as prisoners by the

hundreds and then thousands were captured after D Day.

A rapid weeding out process was followed

by intensive interrogation

of those with strategic, engineering,

and scientific information.

The first general to come through Trent Park was General Crewell.

He was a diehard Nazi,

followed shortly by General Fontoma,

who was captured in North Africa,

and he was an anti Nazi.

They're the sort of famous generals captured

in the North African campaign,

along with General von Arnim in May 1943.

And General von Arnim would sort of assume leadership

of the camp, of the generals, for the rest of the war.

A second plane brought in more of Hitler's supermen,

another batch of generals.

Von Arnim reaches his destination according to plan.

And also we captured generals like General Ramke.

September 1944, captured in his bunker at Brest, northern France.

He was in charge of the whole of the sea defences along the

French coast for Adolf Hitler.

We captured the commander of Paris, a thoroughly despicable

Nazi, General Von Choltitz.

And eventually, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt,

one of the highest commanders you could possibly

capture in wartime, and they all come through these secret sites.

You have the pro Nazis and you have the anti Nazis,

and through those two groups, the British managed to learn a lot

about the mindset of the high ranking German officer.

And you have the most extraordinary arguments, which gives

British intelligence and insight

into cracks in the Nazi regime.

Some of these recordings are remarkably frank.

They reveal how they think that Hitler is running the war wrong.

So they're not necessarily opposed to the

crimes of the Nazi state.

They think it's just being done in a wrong way.

So you're getting real insights here into all aspects of

the German war effort.

German officers are trying to work out how they feel about these crimes.

And most importantly, how were they going to represent these crimes?

More and more atrocities committed by Nazi Germany are starting to be known.

It starts first of all with the shooting pits.

Later with Majdanek, the first extermination camp being liberated,

and it gets to a peak on

January 1945 with the liberation of Auschwitz,

an unprecedented extermination facility.

In April of 1945, the Allies began liberating the

concentration camps in the West,

which were overflowing with prisoners, which were horror shows.

Dachau was a horror show.

Bergen Belsen was a horror show.

Thousands died after the liberation.

It puts the British in a very serious dilemma,

a humane and moral one.

They're asking themselves, "What are we going to do with this information?"

The senior Nazi officers understand that once the war is over,

they're going to be prosecuted as war criminals.

So they start to coordinate their stories, and by doing so,

they again reflect on everything that they have gone through during the war.

And what we get is an astonishing amount of material

about the Holocaust.

And the Germans did not stop.

A few days before the liberation of Paris,

near the end of August of 1944,

the last deportation train left from there to Auschwitz.

And similarly, in Corfu,

the last deportation train left for Auschwitz

a few days before the Allies arrived.

Lodz was liberated in January 1945,

but in the summer of 1944,

seeing that the Red Army was actually quite close,

the Germans rounded up the last 65,000 Jews of Lodz

and sent them all to Auschwitz.

This is at a point where Allies know exactly what's happening in Auschwitz.

They know that Jews are being deported from

Hungary to that particular

Auschwitz Birkenau death camp and the capacity to

intervene at that stage was present.

There had been calls to bomb that camp and it never happened.

It wasn't a military priority. The Polish government in exile put

out a press release in mid

March 1944 which spoke explicitly about what happens at Auschwitz

and this was published in major newspapers in the United States.

It wasn't published in the United Kingdom.

It was not published in Britain because of a general narrative

about how the war should be narrated. The war should be narrated in terms of

fighting, allies victories, not about victims, atrocities

and not really about Jews.

From Nazi Germany's point of view, when a decision had to be made,

when Hitler had to decide what is more important,

trains given to the mass murder of the Jews or to the needs

of the army, the decision was very clear.

First of all, the mass murder of the Jews.

That is the goal of the war.

Unfortunately, the killings don't stop when the

Allies are coming closer.

Actually, in many times, they even intensify.

The horrors of the concentration camps were being revealed.

Photographs of living skeletons, gas chambers and ovens at

Buchenwald made us wretch.

Although the British government had issued a white paper on

Nazi concentration camps,

the atrocities listed were nothing like this.

Other reports of the torture and annihilation of millions of

innocent men, women and children,

reports that were thought to be exaggerated at the time

they were received, proved to be revoltingly true.

Toward the end of the war, the British decide to show a clip

from the concentration and death camps to the Nazi generals.

They are conducting a very strange human experiment.

And so after the liberation of Belsen,

when the film footage came out,

Kendrick ensured that every single German general

at Trent Park watched the film footage of the camp.

And the reactions were exactly as you would expect.

Some of them denied it.

"We knew nothing about this."

Others said, "Well, we were only obeying orders."

Instead of feeling remorse or guilt, all they can think of is what was

done to us, to Germany.

What happened to the Jews is unimportant.

So they tell themselves a story to justify and explain what they've seen.

And on the other hand, you have a group that come to terms

with what the Germans did.

And they understand that this mark of shame cannot be undone.

There is no place to run, no place to hide, and they have to

face the harsh reality.

They saw the impending defeat as a defeat by the Jews,

so what they're really terrified,

in terms of defeat, is what Jewish revenge is going to look like.

There was this secretly recorded conversation

among German officers,

where they essentially say,

"We have to figure out what we're gonna say about this."

And they talked a little bit, and they said,

"Well, the thing to do is write a letter to Churchill.

We'll put all of the atrocities on a very small group of people."

They began working on the text of the letter,

and the letter said, "We are absolutely indignant

about these things that are being discovered.

Nobody knew about this stuff. We're stunned. We're shocked."

And there are actual scenes in these transcripts where officers

are saying to one another,

"Okay, here's what we're going to say. Befehl ist Befehl. Orders are orders.

There was really nothing we could do about it."

Or "Here is what we were going to say. We knew nothing about this.

We're as outraged as you are.

Very few people in Germany knew what was actually going on."

You can see them working on getting their stories straight.

What happened with this letter is anybody's guess.

The senior Wehrmacht generals near the end of the war

anticipate the day after, and they are divided into two groups.

Those who confront what they've done, and those who deny it.

Among the deniers, here are those who are saying,

"If only we had waited after the war,

we could have won it, and then we could have killed all the Jews."

There's an extension to that line of thinking. Those who spoke about what

was done to us, the Germans, how we suffered in Dresden,

how we suffered in Hamsburg. They don't have a shred of guilt

about what was happening to the Jews and what they have done to them.

And they are by far the most dangerous among the prisoners.

In the recordings you can sense a discomfort

of the murdering of the Jews, but it's a tactical one.

We should not have murdered the Jews in this way.

We should have done it earlier. We should have done it later.

We should have done it in a different way.

This is hardly a saying stating clearly

murdering the Jews was an awful thing.

We should not have murdered the Jews.

This you cannot find in the recording.

So these are German officers who are often reflecting

on the scenes they've witnessed

or the crimes they've perpetrated themselves.

So they're reflecting on their place, either because they think

they're going to be charged

for war crimes at a later date, or genuine concerns about

their family back at home.

In April and May, the Allied armies advanced with speed towards Berlin

and the defeat of Germany was now assured.

A sense of relief swept over us all in London.

Air raids were tapering off at last and the

blackout was lifted.

Victory in Europe celebrations were held on May 8th and 9th,

a two day holiday for everyone.

Cheering crowds gathered in Piccadilly, Trafalgar Square,

and in front of Buckingham Palace.

By the end of the war, the British have enough evidence,

enough recordings, enough transcripts

to prosecute whomever they want as war criminal.

Everything exists, everything is organized, everything is

catalogued, and all the people are within reach.

As the war came to an end, after months and years of

listening, my father expected that

those he had listened to, who'd boasted of their

atrocities and where the recordings

were all kept of them speaking, would also be sent to Nuremberg,

that these people would be held to account for their crimes.

The United States of America present count one of the indictment,

that all the defendants

participated as organizers or accomplices in a common plan

or conspiracy to commit crimes

against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

At the end of the war, the Allies want to prosecute

the Germans as war criminals.

And there's a fierce debate going on within the British intelligence.

In order to convict those criminals, should we expose this

critical intelligence information?

Should we share our secrets for the sake of humanity?

And the debate goes on for months within the intelligence community.

Anything which can possibly disclose, if only by inference,

the methods employed to secure

such information is to our mind to be avoided.

In any event, I understand that CSDIC is coming to an end,

and it will be no secret in the

next war that such a practice was employed.

Will you please take this matter up with the intelligence

branch and obtain their views on this minute?

We consider, as of the highest importance, the avoidance

of anything which could draw

attention or make public the method employed at CSDIC.

There are also technical issues.

You cannot clearly identify every single voice in the recordings.

So one can come up and say, "It's not me."

If the person who is alleged to have overheard the

conversation should be called upon to

give time, he must of necessity

divulge methods which are still in use,

But anything which will tend to increase

security mindedness on the part of an enemy

should at all costs be avoided.

In short, what up to now has been known

to comparatively few would become common knowledge.

In the end, they decided they cannot use the materials.

They are simply too secret.

These transcripts cannot be released to Nuremberg

because of a deeper threat.

We had just entered the Cold War,

and we were now needing to eavesdrop on a new enemy,

arguably a war that was going to be far more dangerous.

So the secrecy of methods of intelligence gathering

had to be kept.

The partners had now become rivals,

and the Americans and the British realized

they couldn't put everybody on trial.

If they put everybody on trial, first of all, the Germans would

hate them and might go over to the other side.

Moreover, all the crimes that had been committed against the Jews

and against the world were a national project.

Almost everyone had played a role.

If they put them all on trial, who was going to run the country?

Practically none of the generals in the transcript stood trial.

Ultimately, the prisoners who were recorded in the way that

they were were sent home,

repatriated in 1947, 1948.

What was ultimately needed was a democratic Germany

that would hopefully be part of the Atlantic community.

And there's an adage that historians

who look at this issue have, and it goes like this.

You can have democracy or you can have justice,

but you cannot have both.

In those days nothing was explained, to keep intelligence

safe you were only told what

you needed to know, which was very little, and you were told

what to do and you did it.

There was no explanation as to why these people weren't

being sent for trial.

And he couldn't understand why it wasn't happening,

he had spent all those weeks and

months and years listening to these people,

boasting of their atrocities,

and they were just released to go home to their families.

Having gone through this experience of listening

to the actions committed by the perpetrators

to then discover that these same people

were not necessarily going to be charged

because the evidence couldn't be used for a wider agenda

must have been really difficult for him to deal with.

He was so angry that these war criminals

had never had to face a trial, never had to face justice.

He wanted the world to know what they had done.

He felt if he couldn't trust the authorities

to hold people to account

for such terrible crimes they'd committed,

he didn't want to have anything more to do with it.

So he left the army and he went to the private sector.

They went back to their homes in Germany,

but not a single German general at Trent Park

ever faced the consequences of his war crimes.

In the end, a decision was made not to use those materials

and they are all sealed, locked,

and transferred into the archives.

There was a myth after the war,

a very carefully cultivated myth,

that the Wehrmacht's hands were clean of all atrocities,

that this had been a professional fighting force

and that the atrocities against civilians

and the atrocities against prisoners

had primarily been carried out by the SS.

And this was a myth that the prisoners themselves

did a fair amount toward promoting.

Today we know that the mass murder of the Jews

was not done only by the SS.

There were many other German units who took part.

The Wehrmacht, the Order of Police, and many other different groups.

And they were talking about the murder of the Jews

among themselves.

We can hear in the recordings how much information,

detailed information many German soldiers had about

the murder of the Jews.

They knew about it, they talked about it in many different ways

and in many different details.

The recordings give us the final proof that the Wehrmacht was deeply involved

in the extermination of the Jews.

They cannot say that the only ones to blame were the SS.

Some senior generals of the Wehrmacht took it upon themselves

to protect the organization.

And what they claimed at Nuremberg was,

"I didn't see anything, I didn't hear anything, and I don't know anything."

Didn't Hitler think the Jews should be exterminated?

You didn't know anything about that?

I'd like to ask you a few more questions about the

Einsatzgruppen, the Einsatz commandos.

Was there an Einsatzgruppen attached to your army, to the 11th Army?

What did you do when you learned that there was an

Einsatzgruppen attached to your army?

What were you told about it?

Is the Commander in Chief pleased to have an independent unit operating in

this area which you can't order around?

Is that customary and do you like it?

They also claimed that the Einsatzgruppen, those infamous

death squads that ran wild in Eastern Europe,

was a term that they only learned about when they

arrived at Nuremberg in 1945.

And of course, it's not possible, and the recordings show it with clarity.

Because the soldiers did not just take an active part in murdering Jews,

they also took pictures and photographed what they were doing

and it's no longer a secret and the recordings show us.

The Wehrmacht was in every corner and in every place where

Jews were being massacred.

The agreement with what the regime did, the murder of the Jews,

was so widespread in Germany

and we see this reflected in the conversations of

these German POWs as well,

those who participated, those who witnessed,

those who knew about it, heard about it,

and even those who expressed some kind of sympathy

for the Jews did that only in their private conversations

with the other POWs.

Hitler had no chance to carry out the Holocaust

without the support of his high ranking officers.

His generals supported him with their silence,

with their acceptance, and the fact that they were the one

who executed these orders.

In May 1945, Germany surrenders. The war in the pacific will continue

until the summer, and the eavesdropping operation will continue

until November of that year.

And the unit itself, and all its infrastructure,

will be used in other arenas.

For 60, 70 years those Jewish secret listeners

could never talk about their work.

They had to contain whatever emotion they felt.

Everyone in those times obviously had to sign the

Official Secrets Act and nobody knew.

My grandfather died and my grandmother lived on to an old age.

Nothing was mentioned. I'm sure she didn't know.

They separated their emotion and accepted the situation.

The stakes were so high in those days that people just did what

they could do honorably and didn't need the reflection of

other people but also

knew that they would they would be putting other people at risk if they

revealed any information.

They don't know what the consequences will be if

they allow that trauma to come out and so they buried everything,

the secrets and the trauma.

A lot of my grandfather's direct family died in concentration camps.

They perished in Auschwitz and my great grandmothers

went to Theresienstadt

and I was shown the death certificate of her there in Theresienstadt.

So we have the evidence of what happened to his direct family.

The last time my father saw his family in Germany was in 1937.

For years my father didn't know what had happened to his parents.

He knew they'd been taken away.

Where they'd gone he didn't know.

The only thing in a sense that is helpful

is that Nazis loved to keep records so eventually the records turn up

and eventually he discovered that his parents had had their German

nationality removed so that it was legal to kill them.

That's how the Nazis did it.

They were put on a train, cattle truck, and sent to the Warsaw ghetto.

And finally my father discovered, thanks to

papers that surfaced,

that they'd been sent to Treblinka and murdered there on arrival.

When he discovered what happened to his parents, he was already 90.

And at the end of his life, when he was very frail,

he was about 97, he died at 98,

he said to me, "I'm happy to go. I've had a good life.

I've had a good marriage. Always work at your marriage.

Marriage and democracy, those are the things you work at every day."

He said, "I've had a good life because I've had children

and I have grandchildren, and Hitler didn't get that."

The Holocaust was the largest organized crime in human history.

And in today's world with so many Holocaust deniers and so very few

Holocaust survivors that are left,

these recordings provide us with a clear indictment

against the people who perpetrated the Holocaust.