Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [54]
Finally, Bletchley veteran Roy Jenkins – later Lord Jenkins of Hillhead and biographer of Churchill – observed that the attack on Coventry, while ‘shattering its monuments and shops’, ironically ‘did less damage to its aircraft factories’. He also pointed out that a raid that took place over Birmingham barely a week later was far more lethal, resulting in 1,353 deaths.6
The same hideous moral dilemma implied in the treatment of Bletchley’s information about the raid on Coventry was to apply throughout the war. By the spring of 1941, the Blitz was largely over, as Hitler turned his full attention east towards Russia. But there were still those in British Intelligence who believed that a Nazi invasion of British shores was imminent, and it suited German Intelligence to give such false indications to divert attention away from genuine plans.
It has also been said that Churchill and the British government knew of the systematic extermination of the Jews which by 1941 was gathering horrifying pace, with vast numbers of men, women and children being sent in cattle trucks to Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka and Sobibor. In August 1941, there were seventeen decrypts, over the period of eight days, of German police messages; they concerned the shootings of thousands of Jews.
In a radio broadcast given on 25 August, Churchill said: ‘Whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands, literally scores of thousands, of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police-troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions in the 16th century, 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.’
So why did Churchill not mention the Jews? The reason was that to have done so would have been to reveal to the Germans, once again, that their messages had been intercepted. It was all Churchill felt that he could do to let it be known – at last – that the Allies were aware of the multiplying atrocities, and would do everything in their power to stop them.
A little later, Bletchley was able to break into the codes dealing with German railways – the same railway lines that led to the concentration camps. To a certain extent, they were able to glean from these messages the forced deportation of waves of thousands upon thousands of people, the lines leading inexorably to these places of death. As some have seen it, railway lines are easy targets for bombers – they glitter in the moonlight. Should the Allies not at least have tried to cripple this infrastructure, to try and bring the deportations to an end?
The answer, it seems, was the same: nothing could be done that would betray the Bletchley secret. In any case, such efforts would have been little more than a temporary hindrance to the Nazis; a railway line can be easily repaired. It was more fruitful to aim for larger military and industrial targets. The only way that the horror could be halted – no matter how fine and detailed the intelligence – was by halting Hitler himself.
All this demonstrates Bletchley Park’s fearful responsibilities. From 1942, the Abwehr section of Bletchley Park found itself decrypting tables which turned out to be SS returns on the numbers of people entering and dying in the camps; mass extermination reduced to chilly, efficient bureaucracy. To know exactly what the enemy is planning – to know just how many hundreds, thousands of lives will be extinguished, to know such things in advance from secret messages – now seems a burden too great to imagine.
Most of the codebreakers, of course, possessed no such knowledge, at least on a day-to-day basis; they dealt with fragments, fragments of fragments, random messages from hither and thither, before handing on the baton to the following shift. Nevertheless, they knew well the import of what they were doing. And for the senior