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The Holocaust Codes

The Untold Story of Decrypting the Final Solution

Christian Jennings author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:John Blake Publishing Ltd

Published:1st Aug '24

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The Holocaust Codes cover

The first dedicated study of the cat-and-mouse struggle between a British cryptographer at Bletchley Park, and an Austrian SS officer responsible for the mass killings of thousands of Russian and Polish Jews. The account of how Nigel de Grey cracked the Enigma-coded signals of SS Major Hermann Höfle is one of the greatest untold stories of the Second World War.

Never told in detail before, this is the account of how, for four years, British and Allied codebreakers decrypted secret SS and Gestapo messages detailing the mass killings of the Holocaust, and how the Germans in turn deployed cryptanalysis to try to conceal their persecution of Europe's Jews.

'Massive, groundbreaking new research that sheds more truth on the Holocaust.' - Helen Fry

Never told in detail before, this is the account of how, for four years, British and Allied codebreakers decrypted secret SS and Gestapo messages detailing the mass killings of the Holocaust, and how the Germans in turn deployed cryptanalysis to try to conceal their persecution of Europe's Jews. The compelling and fast-paced narrative is told from the perspectives of two central and opposing characters, who never meet.

At Bletchley Park, there is the legendary but unsung British codebreaker Nigel de Grey, shy, determined, nicknamed 'the Dormouse' by his colleagues. In Nazi-occupied Poland, SS Major Hermann Höfle, a former taxi driver from Salzburg, and one of the Third Reich's ruthless bureaucrats of mass death, oversees the operations of five concentration camps, including Treblinka.

De Grey fought hard to make sure the vital intelligence from decrypted signals reached Allied leaders and was acted on. Höfle, meanwhile, used complex coded messages to try to conceal the mass killings. De Grey worked with his American counterparts, as well as codebreakers and intelligence agents from the Soviet Union, France, the Vatican, Switzerland and Poland. Yet he had dangerous enemies closer to home: a cabal of senior British government and intelligence officials disbelieved or ignored repeated intelligence reports about the ongoing Holocaust.

Flawlessly researched, this is the story of a battle between good and evil, between life and mass death, a cat-and-mouse war of electronic wits. More than eighty years on, as Russian leaders face war crimes charges in international courts, the words 'Never again' seem more pertinent than ever.

A meticulous and fascinating contribution to the history of the Holocaust, filling in what the Allies knew and when. Allied Intelligence went to the wall to protect Ultra - out of the question was to alert the world to the mass killings of captured Jews if it threatened Bletchley's secrets. Jennings exposes this open secret that was known from early on and unravels one of the Second World War's outstanding mysteries: why publicising our knowledge of the Final Solution was not a priority. * Nicholas Shakespeare *
Massive, groundbreaking new research that sheds more truth on the Holocaust. This previously untold story of Bletchley Park and its deciphering of messages about the Nazi killing machine places firmly on the record the shocking truth of what was known about the Holocaust and when. * Helen Fry *

ISBN: 9781789467260

Dimensions: 240mm x 162mm x 35mm

Weight: 625g

368 pages