Read The Secrets of Station X Online
Authors: Michael Smith
On Churchill’s orders, Hut 3 produced a detailed report purporting to be a complete dossier of the German plans obtained by an MI6 agent inside the German GHQ in Athens. This was sent to Cairo over the special Middle East link and then passed to General Bernard Freyberg, the New Zealand Commander in Crete, encyphered in the virtually unbreakable ‘one-time pad’ cypher system. Although Freyberg did not have the resources to fight off a sustained attack, the knowledge garnered from the ‘German documents’ robbed the Germans of any element of surprise – Freyberg allegedly looked at his watch when the German paradrop began and said: ‘Right on time.’ Alerted by the codebreakers, his men were able to pick off the
enemy paratroopers at will, causing carnage and considerably delaying the inevitable defeat.
‘Crete was an example of how knowing a great deal, through the
Red
, didn’t necessarily lead to the correct results,’ said John Herivel.
All the German plans, the details for the invasion of Crete were known through Hut 6 decodes on the
Red
. We all knew about the German plans for the airborne assault on Crete – because there was no attempt to stop the people in Hut 6 from knowing what was in the decodes – and therefore we felt very confident that we would defeat it. But in fact we didn’t. What did happen was that they had such enormous difficulty in taking Crete and suffered such enormous losses that Hitler decided he wouldn’t try a parachute descent in that strength again.
The tendency of the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC) to ignore much of what Bletchley Park Naval Section said reappeared in April and May of 1941 during an event that was to have a dramatic effect on morale at Bletchley Park – the sinking of the
Bismarck
. The battleship, the showpiece of the German navy, had been in the Baltic since her completion the previous September. The Admiralty was watching and waiting for her to break out into the Atlantic to attack the Allied convoys bringing supplies to Britain.
Early indications that the
Bismarck
was about to leave the Baltic came in decrypts of the
Red
Enigma which showed that the
Luftwaffe
was mounting a close watch on the activities of the British Home Fleet anchored in Scapa Flow. An MI6 agent was dispatched to monitor the passage of ships through the Kattegat, the narrow strip of water separating Denmark from Sweden, and, on 20 May, he reported that two large German warships had left the Baltic bound for the North Sea. The
sighting
was confirmed by photographic reconnaissance and a few isolated breaks into the main Naval Enigma cypher showed that
the
Bismarck
, accompanied by the new cruiser the
Prinz Eugen
, was about to attack Britain’s transatlantic trade routes.
A British naval squadron was dispatched to hunt the
Bismarck
down. She was sighted on the evening of 23 May and next morning was engaged by the
Hood
and the
Prince of Wales
. The
Hood
was sunk and the
Prince of Wales
hit but not without the
Bismarck
herself sustaining some damage. She parted company with the
Prinz Eugen
and the Royal Navy ships lost contact with her. Throughout the following day there was confusion as to what direction the
Bismarck
was travelling in. The repeated insistence by Bletchley’s Naval Section that the
Bismarck
was heading for the safety of a French port was ignored. Hinsley had telephoned the OIC following the engagement to tell the duty officer that radio control of the
Bismarck
had switched from Wilhelmshaven to Paris, a clear sign that she was sailing south towards France. It was not until the early evening of 25 May, following yet another heated telephone conversation between Hinsley and the OIC, that this reasoning was finally accepted.
The manner and speed of its confirmation were to become a part of the Bletchley folklore. Just minutes after Hinsley’s angry exchange with the Admiralty, Hut 6 decyphered a message on the
Red
Enigma from General Hans Jeschonnek, the
Luftwaffe
Chief of Staff, who was concerned over the fate of a relative, a member of the
Bismarck
’s crew. He was told that the
battleship
was making for the safety of Brest. Armed with this news, Royal Navy ships of both the Mediterranean and Home Fleets closed in on her. When aircraft from the
Ark Royal
succeeded in jamming her rudder on the evening of 26 May, her fate was sealed. In messages only decrypted after she had been sunk, Admiral Lutjens, the officer commanding the
Bismarck
, signalled: ‘Ship unmanageable. We shall fight to the last shell. Long live the
Führer
.’
The success against the
Brown
Enigma, which prepared the RAF fighter aircraft to take on German bombers during the
Blitz
, was highly secret and not known to many of the staff,
whereas the sinking of the
Bismarck
had involved not only Hut 6 and Hut 3, but also the Naval Section Hut 4, using
intelligence
that didn’t come from Enigma. So for most of those working at Bletchley this was the first time they had seen
tangible
evidence of the effect they could have on the war. News of the codebreakers’ role in the affair swiftly got around the Park raising morale and giving them a real feeling of making a contribution to the war effort. Malcolm Kennedy was in the dining room in the mansion at Bletchley Park when the news came through on the one o’clock news that she had been sunk. ‘Spontaneous cheering and clapping broke out from those at lunch when the announcement was made,’ he said, ‘though some of us had heard the good news slightly before. To give the devil his due,
Bismarck
put up a very good show.’
Years later, Mavis Lever took her son to see the film
Sink
the Bismarck
.
I saw it go down and suddenly I really did feel quite sick. I put my head down and my son said to me after a while: ‘It’s alright Mummy, it’s gone down.’ He didn’t know. But I was thinking how awful it was that one’s breaking of a message could send so many people to the bottom. But that was war and that was the way we had to play it. If we thought about it too much we should never have been able to cope.
Throughout the campaign in the Balkans, Railway Enigma had been indicating a series of movements, named after famous actors and film stars, heading north and east towards Poland. During March, April and May, message after message on links using the
Red
cypher pointed to a major concentration of German troops and air support converging on an assembly point at Oderberg, near Krakow. While much of the movement could have reflected a German attempt to intimidate Moscow, as many in Whitehall were inclined to believe, the inclusion of a prisoner-of-war interrogation unit and the urgency with
which units were being pulled out of the Balkans convinced the codebreakers that the Germans were about to turn on their Russian allies.
‘It becomes harder than ever to doubt that the object of these large movements of the German Army and air force is Russia,’ said one long-term report issued by the Hut 3 research section in early May.
From rail movements towards Moldavia in the south to ship movements towards Varanger fjord in the far north there is everywhere the same steady eastward trend. Either the purpose is blackmail or it is war. No doubt Hitler would prefer a
bloodless
surrender. But the quiet move, for instance, of a
prisoner
-of-war cage to Tarnow looks more like business than bluff.
It was not until 10 June, when the Japanese diplomatic section translated a message to Tokyo from the Japanese ambassador in Berlin confirming that the invasion was imminent, that Whitehall finally accepted, amid a welter of evidence from
Ultra
decrypts emanating from Hut 6, that the codebreakers had got it right. Twelve days later, Hitler launched the aptly named
Operation Barbarossa
, the invasion of the Soviet Union. It was to bring some of the most distressing decrypts the
codebreakers
were to handle at any point of the war.
The messages of the SS and the
Ordnungspolizei
, the
ordinary
uniformed German police, who were mopping up behind the German lines during
Operation Barbarossa
make chilling reading, providing details of the systematic murder by the advancing German forces of thousands of Jews. The first news of these killings was read at Bletchley Park. On 18 July 1941, Army intercept operators based temporarily at Chicksands picked up a message from
Obergruppenführer
Erich von dem
Bach-Zelewski
,
Ordnungspolizei
commander in the Soviet republic of Belorussia, to Kurt Daluege, head of the
Ordnungspolizei
, and Heinrich Himmler, the
Reichsführer-SS
, or head of the SS.
The cypher in use was a basic double transposition cypher. In a transposition cypher, the letters that make up the text of the message are shuffled in some pre-determined way. As the name suggests, in a double transposition system, the order of letters produced by the initial process is shuffled a second time. It was broken relatively easily by Bletchley Park, originally by Tiltman, but thereafter in routine fashion in Hut 5.
Von dem Bach-Zelewski’s message read: ‘In yesterday’s cleansing action in Slonim, carried out by Police Regiment Centre, 1,153 Jewish plunderers were shot.’ (Slonim is a town in south-west Belorussia, midway between Warsaw and Minsk.)
On 4 August von dem Bach-Zelewski reported that in further mopping-up operations in an area south of the Belorussian town of Pinsk his men had shot dead ‘ninety Bolsheviks and Jews’. Later the same day, he reported that his SS Cavalry Brigade was still removing opposition in the region north to north-east of Lake Sporowski. ‘As at the evening of 3 August the SS Cavalry Brigade had liquidated 3,274 Partisans and Jewish Bolsheviks. Police Battalion 306 has shot dead 260 guerrillas,’ he said. Three days later von dem Bach-Zelewski reported that the SS Cavalry Brigade was now pushing further forwards. ‘By midday today a further 3,600 had been executed, so that the complete total for those executed by the brigade is now 7,819. This brings the total in my area to more than 30,000.’ His apparent determination to make as much of the killings as possible was such that one Bletchley Park analyst noted: ‘The tone of this message suggests that word has gone out that a definite decrease in the total population of Russia would be welcome in high quarters and that the leaders of the three sectors stand somewhat in
competition
with each other as to their scores.’
It is worth noting that the
Ordnungspolizei
were ordinary uniformed police officers, the same police officers who are supposed to protect people against crime and in whom most normal law-abiding people in civilised countries place their trust. There were three main German formations, roughly
speaking, mopping up behind the German lines. Von dem Bach-Zelewski’s men were the central formation, operating in Belorussia. There was a northern formation designated to carry out mopping-up operations in the Baltic republics, and another through the Ukraine in the south. At the heart of each formation was an
Einsatzgruppe
, or task force, made up largely of members of the
Gestapo
and
Sicherheitspolizei
, the Security Police, and split into four separate
Einsatzkommando
. It was the
Einsatzgruppe
of each formation that was expected to orchestrate the bulk of the killings. But messages decyphered by Bletchley Park very soon showed that the ordinary police units, as well as of course the SS troops, were heavily involved in the killings.
There had, as yet, been no indication in the messages intercepted at Chicksands that the police units in the north and the south were killing Jews, although there was no doubt that ruthless brutality was being inflicted on the local
population
throughout the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. On 24 August, clearly angered by the intercepts, Churchill made a BBC broadcast in which he denounced the ‘most frightful cruelties’ that were being carried out in those parts of the Soviet Union occupied by German forces:
Whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands – literally scores of thousands – of executions in cold blood are perpetrated by the German police troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol
invasions
of Europe, there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale or approaching such a scale. We are in the presence of a crime without a name.
Churchill did not mention anywhere in his speech that large numbers of those killed were Jews because to do so would have made very clear that the information came from intercepted German police messages.
On 23 August 1941, the day before Churchill made his speech, Bletchley Park decyphered a message from
SS Gruppenführer
Friedrich Jeckeln, commander of the SS and police troops in the south, which confirmed that like von dem Bach Zelewski, he was also busy killing Jews. In a report sent not only to Himmler and Daluege but also to Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Security Police, Jeckeln said 314 Battalion of the Police Regiment South had shot dead 367 Jews in the area around the Ukrainian towns of Belokorovichi and Luginy, south-west of Kiev. This was an important message. It confirmed the analysis of the Bletchley Park intelligence reporter that there was more to the killings of Jews than just von dem Bach-Zelewski
misinterpreting
his orders, or portraying his actions in a way likely to curry favour with his superiors. It was very clear that Jews were being killed simply because they were Jews. Its content may have been relayed verbally to Churchill by Stewart Menzies, the Chief of MI6. They discussed intelligence matters each morning and the Prime Minister was very clearly interested in the activities of the police troops operating behind the eastern front. It would be strange indeed if Churchill had not discussed them with Menzies prior to making his BBC broadcast.