E175 - Decoding the Holocaust

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

January 2025

The 27th of January 2025 is the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau - an event marked annually by Holocaust Memorial Day.

In order to perpetrate the mass killings and other crimes of the Holocaust, the Nazi regime needed to coordinate and communicate about its activities. This included wireless communications which were intercepted and decoded at Bletchley Park.

In this episode we take a look at what the Government Code and Cypher School (Bletchley Park) knew about these Nazi crimes, how and when this information was obtained, and how western governments responded to the news.

Bletchley Park’s Research Historian Dr David Kenyon is joined by journalist, author and Holocaust historian Christian Jennings to discuss his work on the role of codebreaking in these terrible events.

Image: ©Bletchley Park Trust 2025

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, #Enigma, #Holocaust,

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The From the home of the codebreakers and the birthplace of modern computing, this is the Bletchley Park podcast.
0:39.0	Welcome to the January 2025 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast.
0:45.8	Decoding the Holocaust
0:47.2	January the 27th, 2025 is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau,
0:58.0	an event marked annually by Holocaust Memorial Day.
1:02.0	In order to perpetrate the mass killings and other crimes of the Holocaust, the Nazi regime needed to coordinate and communicate about its activities.
1:10.0	This included wireless communications
1:12.6	which were intercepted and decoded at Bletchley Park. In this episode, we look at what the
1:18.3	Government Code and Cipher School knew about these Nazi crimes, how and when this information
1:23.4	was obtained and how Western governments responded to the news.
1:30.7	Bletchley Park's research historian Dr David Kenyon is joined by journalist, author and Holocaust historian Christian Jennings
1:35.6	to discuss his work on the role of code-breaking in these terrible events. Christian, welcome to Bletchley Park. Thank you for coming. To get us started, can you
1:52.5	tell us a little bit about your personal background and what led you to study this subject in the first place?
1:58.2	Yes, thank you, David. Excellent to be here at Bletchley Park, where the magic happened.
2:04.1	And yes, my background, I was a foreign correspondent for 14 or 15 years based in 23 countries
2:11.5	across the Western Balkans and in Africa, writing primarily for Reuters News Agency, for the Economist, sometimes the Daily
2:21.0	Telegraph, the Scotsman, about wars, ethnic conflict, humanitarian disasters, and in some
2:28.4	places, the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide in Burundi, Kosovo, Bosnia, about the process of and the aftermath of
2:38.8	genocide itself, which led me to have some understanding of how they plan, how they happen,
2:45.6	what it looks like on the ground, what it looked like in the churches of Rwanda, the forgotten eucalyptus groves of
2:52.8	Burundi, the freezing fog of Kosovo in the winter morning, the mortaries, the mass graves of
	...

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