Original subtitles

When he's talking, look at him.

Okay. Speak.

The secret recordings are one of the biggest

intelligence operations of the Second World War.

Using around a thousand personnel, listening in to the conversations,

the unguarded conversations of German prisoners of war

and even Hitler's generals.

Even in the most far fetched science fiction scenario that I can imagine,

there will never be a scenario like the one the British intelligence

encountered during World War II. On the one hand,

you have a German prisoner of war sitting and speaking to his friend,

confessing about war crimes he committed.

And on the other hand, a British soldier is listening, recording

and transcribing. That British soldier is actually a Jewish refugee

from Germany who was listening to what was happening to his own family.

It is practically impossible to find perpetrators

of any atrocity where they will speak honestly

with regard to what happened and with regard to their feelings

and their explanations about what happened.

What you get with this recording is real time statements.

This operation was so top secret, hush hush, even into the Cold War,

that historians knew nothing about these files

until the end of the Cold War.

There is nothing like this in the research of World War II,

where the story of the Holocaust

is being told by the Nazis themselves,

without any filters, and most importantly, in real time.

The transcripts of the recordings reveal more than anything,

the scale, the method, and the soul

of those who perpetrated the Holocaust.

My father, Erich Mark, once said to me,

"There are two things that you have to work at every day

"and you must never take for granted.

"One is democracy and the other is marriage."

What he meant by democracy is that we each have to be conscious

of what democracy means.

He was aware, as all German Jews were in the '30s,

that Hitler was elected democratically.

And he was elected democratically because many people were

just tired of all the changes

of government and they just said, fine, whatever it is, let it be.

And that is the time when democracy is in danger, is when people

no longer take an interest

in working at it and thinking for themselves

and thinking of their future.

My father was one of 110 Jewish secret listeners,

and as it turns out, he was the last surviving secret listener.

These were people who sat in the basement where captured

enemy officers were housed

in such a way that they would chat to each other in order to

release secrets, which they didn't realize were being bugged.

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

He had signed the Official Secrets Act, and that is a

closed and locked door.

The British devised a plan to listen to every prisoner of war

who passed through certain detention sites,

and these sites would be wired with microphones in every corner that

you can think of.

In labs, under the pool table, in the fireplace, essentially the

whole place was wired with undetectable microphones.

The goal was that those POWs could leave without understanding

that all their conversations

are being recorded and then

transcribed by the British intelligence.

This was an operation unprecedented in its scale.

Almost 10,000 soldiers passed through those detention sites.

The British allocated almost unlimited funds for this operation.

The prisoners didn't realize we were listening in to them and so

they were very relaxed and

we gained some of the highest secrets of the Nazi regime.

It was incredible.

And it would amass over 75,000 transcripts of conversations.

It was a huge industrial scale intelligence operation.

They were released into the National Archives in London

between the late 1990s and early 2000s.

It took over five years for someone in the UK Ministry of Defence

to actually look at these files

to check that there was nothing still sensitive in them.

During our research for this series,

we travelled to the National Archives in London

and we've extracted all the source material

that involves the Holocaust, war crimes and anti Semitism.

Essentially, touching an open nerve

that very few historians have dealt with.

The significant breakthrough is that for the first time

we have direct testimonies of the Holocaust

that no one has read or heard before.

I had the privilege of spending a long time in the

National Archives in London, reviewing those documents myself.

For me, it was a horrific, shocking revelation.

I had never encountered such raw materials like that.

Their voices come to life, but in complete apathy,

showing little, if any, regard to human lives.

There are passages when the transcriber

writes in brackets, "Laughter."

And I remember that it caught me.

It was a very deep, unsettling experience.

And the sad truth is,

the Allies knew about the extent of the extermination,

and they knew it as early as 1942, and they did nothing.

I found it really shocking.

These are actually prisoners talking to each other

about how the Nazi killing machine worked,

step by step.

You remain changed forever.

It's making me quite emotional.

You can't erase those descriptions.

They kind of become personal

because the stories of how individual Jews died

at the hands of the Nazis.

In a way, it's no longer a huge figure, these are

individuals and that touched me

deeply that you can't be unchanged after that.

In 1933, Hitler comes to power and he is extremely charismatic.

He manages to form a government that actually changes everything

and makes Germany into the Third Reich.

Very quickly, he makes those extreme ideas,

something that you can hear everywhere.

And what Hitler does is he harnesses this idea to make the case

that the Jews are in fact Germany's major enemy.

And if they're not eliminated, that it will in fact come back to Germany

and Germany will be weaker and stop to exist.

The recordings offer us a glimpse into the rooted anti Semitism

in the mind of the German soldiers.

We enter the mind, regardless if it's a private or a field marshal,

as he tells us his own views about the Jews.

This is one of the crucial findings

that emerged from these recordings

because we now understand just how anti Semitism

was embedded in their personality and characters.

A soldier or a general captured at any given moment

gives us his own experiences

of what he encountered during the war.

And these reflections helps us to understand

how the mass murder of Jews developed

into a full scale genocide.

When they make it a biological imperative

by discussing Jews as parasites, or as plague,

or as a dangerous bacillus,

when you start to use that type of rhetoric,

it drives a certain way of thinking.

How do you get rid of the plague?

You have to exterminate it.

You have to annihilate it, right?

From the moment the Nazi Party becomes the power leading the state,

we can see antisemitic expressions in many different places.

And the peak is in Nuremberg Laws in September 1935.

The assault on the Jews is a legal assault

and very soon we can see Jews kicked out of the civil service as well

as from many other places.

In January 1935, my grandmother put my father on a train.

My father came to this station in London.

He was alone, just twelve and a half years old.

He came from Germany because he couldn't be

educated anymore in Germany.

He'd been thrown out of his grammar school

for being a Jew and he needed an education somewhere.

And this was the place that would take him in.

He arrived very late at night, 10pm, he said it was a very

cold, wet, rainy January day

on the 13th of January 1935.

And he brought with him a suitcase, a small suitcase,

with just a few clothes and his beloved Teddy, Hans,

who is still in the family and very precious to us.

He couldn't know, he had no idea what the future held for him.

He certainly had no idea that he'd end up as a secret listener

for the British Intelligence Corps.

On the night between November 9th and November 10th, 1938,

something dramatic happens in Nazi Germany.

An organized attack starts.

Synagogues are being burned, businesses are being looted,

people, Jews, are being killed,

and tens of thousands are being arrested the next day.

And I'm talking about the Kristallnacht,

the Night of Broken Glass.

This is the first event in which we can see

widespread violence within the street of Nazi Germany,

expressing the ideological themes of the Nazi Party.

September 1st, 1939, the Second World War breaks out.

Nazi Germany invades Poland, and within a month,

the Polish army collapses.

France and Great Britain declare war on Nazi Germany.

But actually from that moment, they do nothing

until they themselves will be attacked.

The British didn't have to wait long for German POWs.

At least one German pilot escaped by parachute while his blazing

machine went hurtling down to earth.

The pilot landed safely and was captured.

At the beginning of the war, most of the prisoners were from the U boats.

They'd been sunk in various campaigns

and the survivors pulled out of the water

and they came to these secret sites.

Then, of course, we started to capture German Air Force,

the pilots and the crew.

But also, we don't often think about those commando raids

that were mounted into Norway, into parts of France.

British military captured prisoners there

and brought them back to secret sites

and they gave up vital information.

German prisoners of war arrived at the Tower of London

to what will become an eavesdropping operation

that will continue until several months after the war.

That iconic tourist attraction today that we all love

was actually the very first place

where we held German prisoners of war in the autumn of 1939.

And already the special engineers had been in,

they had embedded microphones in the light fittings,

in the fireplaces, in some of the towers.

And the first German prisoners started to arrive

by the middle of September 1939.

There's no roughing up of prisoners, there's no brutality.

They would have a sort of phony interrogation.

They'd go back to the room where their mate was

and they'd start to boast

about what they hadn't told the interrogating officer.

And they also think that the British

are stupid and incompetent.

We know that because we heard that through the microphones.

Oh, the British, you know,

they don't really know how to conduct a proper interrogation.

But the British military intelligence officers

knew exactly what they were doing.

It was all part of this elaborate ploy

to get those prisoners to speak

to those hidden microphones.

To conduct such an operation,

you need a very particular figure.

And the British had a historical stroke of luck.

They found Thomas Kendrick,

an intelligence officer who was not just an intelligence officer.

He was a gentleman, an officer, and a master spy.

Thomas Joseph Kendrick is one of my greatest heroes.

He operated as one of the leading spy masters

for MI6 in Europe, out of Vienna, in the 1920s and '30s.

So he was undercover as the British passport control officer.

Of course, that was a cover for his intelligence work,

in which he ran spy networks right across Eastern Europe,

Czechoslovakia, Hungary,

eventually into Italy and into Nazi Germany.

In March 1938, Adolf Hitler did what he'd long intended

to do, he annexed Austria

in what became known as the Anschluss.

From the moment the Anschluss starts,

the Jews of Austria find themselves

in a situation unlike anything

even the Jews of Germany have faced yet.

People are being dragged to the street,

forced to scrub the pavement.

Children and old people are humiliated in awful ways.

As this is happening, Adolf Eichmann comes to Vienna

in order to organise the emigration of Austrian Jews in an orderly way.

In a few months, more than 50% of the Jews of Austria

will leave the country.

The following morning after the Anschluss,

Kendrick arrives at the office to find the

files say over 800 Jews queuing, desperate to get out,

and his staff make a conscious

choice to embark on a humanitarian mission.

In the following months, Kendrick and his staff issue

thousands of visas, many of them

false visas to get Jews out of Austria.

He becomes the Oskar Schindler of Vienna and the official

files tell us he saved up to 200 Jews a day.

Whilst this rescue effort's going on, Kendrick himself is at great

personal risk as the Gestapo are on his tail.

They're out to arrest this elusive Englishman.

They want to nab Britain's top spy in Europe.

Thomas Kendrick was arrested in Vienna in August 1938.

The British Foreign Office immediately

intervened and he was deported two days later.

He then returns to London and disappears from the public eye

and that's when arguably one

of his most important pieces of work is about to begin.

He knew how to organize large groups under his supervision.

Thomas Kendrick was the one who took command over this unit

whose job was to record and transcribe

all the conversations of the POWs.

In England, there are already enough German prisoners

of war to warrant this large

and quite comfortable looking prison camp.

As a matter of fact, these are U boat officers and men,

and I should think they're happier even behind barbed wire

in a foreign land than being hunted down at sea.

It was a highly top secret section

of the post office, the post office research center,

that actually sent in engineers to wire the place for sound.

This was the latest state of the art technology

that came from America.

It was supplied by the Radio Corporation of America.

We needed this high level technology.

The Germans clearly had no idea

every single thing that they did was captured.

Somebody, just two feet or whatever,

underneath them would be listening

and notating and clocking everything.

At the heart of all of this were the M rooms.

M stood for mic'd.

And this is where the secret listeners were.

And they would record the conversations onto

78 inch acetate disks.

So enormous disks, and this huge technology

that today looks quite ridiculous to us,

but it was latest state of the art.

There was no time off.

You had to monitor those conversations

every single day of the year, even on Christmas Day.

And, of course, the conversations were originally in German.

So once the conversations had finished,

the secret listeners had to listen to that conversation again

and write with pencil and paper, word for word,

what that prisoner had said or what they'd said to each other.

And then, of course, it had to be translated.

And what survives today in the National Archives are

the typed up conversations

in the original German and in the English translation.

So in contrast to today where you can record hours of audio

footage, often on a smartphone,

back in the 1940s you were using technology where the

capacity allows you for seven minutes,

you only have a finite number of vinyls that you can use,

and as a result you're recording these,

you're then listening back, you're transcribing them,

but then they're subsequently wiped to reuse at a future date.

So we lack the actual recordings themselves, and in the end it

means that the only details of the conversations that we have are

the transcripts that have been declassified into government archives.

And occasionally, as some of the secret listeners told me,

a particular prisoner might think,

I wonder if they're listening outside the door or something.

So he would turn the tap on,

there was a sink in their room,

and they would talk very quietly.

And those microphones were so sophisticated,

they could pick up that conversation so clearly,

even with the tap running in their room.

The first aim was, of course, to find out military intelligence,

information about weapons, and then, through that,

they found something very different.

Suddenly, they realized that they are actually recording

the annihilation of the European Jews.

From very early on in this operation,

prisoners were talking about atrocities,

and they were even boasting about the number of Jews that were

being murdered across Europe.

The British had a lot of categories of information that they were after.

Atrocities on the Eastern Front was not one of those categories.

From the moment Nazi Germany invades Poland,

the Jews of Poland find themselves in a completely different situation

and this starts from the very first hours.

Synagogues are being burned, community leaders are abused,

sometimes because of their Jewish appearance,

sometimes because of being seen as wealthy.

And those things are happening all over Poland.

This causes a profound shock.

This shatters the Jewish community at its core

from the very beginning.

Many decrees are being imposed on the Jews,

and one of the most difficult one is forced labor.

It meant abducting men.

And these Jewish men who were abducted

might be taken for work like clearing rubble

from the bombings, or simply for torture.

They eventually were put into projects that the SS and the rest of

the Nazi regime had in mind.

One of the recordings echoed the difficult conditions in the

camps of Skarzyszko-Kamiena and Szynszuchowa.

In that camp, the Jewish prisoners were forced to

work with bare hands with this yellow material that penetrated their skin,

causing them great suffering. The skin became yellow,

their hair dropped, their teeth fell out,

and they suffered greatly until many of them just died.

And many of these men never returned.

And the person who commanded this,

the man in charge, was Reinhard Heydrich,

one of the senior SS officers.

He's actually one of the deputies of Heinrich Himmler,

the head of the SS.

And Heydrich, who oversaw all of these special units

who were brutal and murderous in Poland,

sent out a schnellbrief, an express letter

to the commanders of those units

on September the 21st of 1939,

in which he spoke about the final aim,

without saying what that was,

and spelled out the steps on how to get to the final aim.

More than 3 1/2 million Jews lived in Poland

prior to the war, and about a third of them,

about a million, were religious Jews.

For the young German soldier who was raised

within the Nazi education system,

this is actually the very first time

he meets those Polish Jews.

And when those Germans see those Jews,

an eruption of violence follows.

Polish Jews were ghettoized in the larger cities.

They were systematically robbed of all of their possessions

and their bank accounts, anything that could be of value.

But they were also killed at random.

Every now and then, you'd have a mass shooting

of hundreds of Jews.

Later on, in 1942, as the operation expanded,

the British realized that their listeners,

although fluent in German, are simply not good enough

because they couldn't grasp the small nuances

and dialect of the German prisoners of war.

The only way to transcribe with 100% accuracy was to use native speakers.

The British had such native speakers.

They will use German Jews who fled Germany in the 1930s

and enlisted to the British Army.

My father turned 18 in the summer of 1940.

And shortly after that, the British authorities rounded up

all German and Austrian nationals as enemy aliens.

The only way out of internment was to volunteer to join the Pioneer Corps.

And this is what he did.

This was when the British army realized, in the early to

mid 1940s, that they could use

native born German and Austrian Jews because they could pick

up the details, the nuances of people speaking their regional dialect.

And the next thing he knew, he'd signed the Official Secrets Act

and was going to do something for the war, which he was happy about.

He thought he was going to do something practical, useful,

get to the front, do something.

In fact he was sent to go and sit in the basement and listen to

bugged conversations of captured enemy officers.

So here is my father sitting in the basement, above him are

people boasting about their atrocities to each other.

"I killed this many in this place on this day." "Oh, that's nothing,"

says the other one. "I killed that many in such a place.

Much more efficient."

These are humans we're talking about. These are people, and these are Jews.

And here is my father having to listen to these conversations,

and at the back of his head all the time is,

"Where are my parents? Where's my family? Are they safe?"

What he did know was that he was bearing witness

to what they were talking about in the hope

that one day they would have to account for their crimes

and that is what helped him get through

"I'm listening to this, I'm recording this

and one day they will have to answer for their crimes."

It turns out from the research that women played an

absolutely crucial part in the recordings.

Women were in some cases the interrogators,

in other cases they were analyzing the intelligence

coming out of the M rooms.

These were roles traditionally not assigned to women

and let alone in wartime.

One of the most extraordinary, I think, roles that was

undertaken was by Katherine Townshend.

She was young in her early 20s, she was working on the M room tech,

and from 1942 until the end of the war and just beyond,

goes on to be head of the whole of the eavesdropping

technology for British intelligence in the Second World War.

I find that extraordinary.

My mother wrote a memoir and had it privately printed for the family.

She said things in the memoir

that she had never spoken about before because of the

Secrets Act. So the memoir really

was for just the family, and has not been actually publicly published.

I decided to apply for a commission with the hope of using my

knowledge of German, perhaps in intelligence.

Two weeks later, I received a notice of my acceptance

by military intelligence.

The Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Center, CSDIC,

was then the only unit of its kind,

but before long there were other CSDICs elsewhere in England,

and in the Middle East, India and Australia.

Despite their size, the enemy never discovered the sites,

or were able to destroy any of the centers.

With speed and accuracy, my colleagues transcribed and typed reports

in German and English

for distribution through most secret channels, sometimes by a

dispatch rider directly to Churchill himself.

For the British and Americans, this was not important enough.

Their mantra was, "We'll win the war,

"and this is how we're going to save the Jews."

The occupation of Poland is being established,

but at the same time, Nazi Germany

starts setting its eyes towards the West.

In the first half of 1940, the attack starts from the north.

First Denmark, then Belgium and France.

And within weeks, all Western Europe fell into the hands of Nazi Germany.

Britain remains almost the only country still fighting Nazi Germany,

despite the fact that it's being attacked, the blitz, the bombing.

And despite this suffering, despite the fact that there were a

few attempts to try to convince

Great Britain to sign an agreement with Nazi Germany,

this doesn't happen.

And Great Britain continues to be an important force in the

fight against Nazi Germany.

In the first half of 1940, the situation of Polish Jews

continues to be very difficult.

There are more restrictions.

The hardship is very difficult, and the food rations are very, very small.

But this is not yet the final solution.

It is not yet the total extermination of the Jews.

And in the summer of 1940, Hitler announced to his service

chiefs that they were going

to attack the Soviet Union the following year.

The Soviet Union was the center of the great global

conspiracy of Judeo Bolshevism.

At least this is how Hitler saw it.

And the discourse among these groups of officials in Germany

became very murderous, especially regarding Jews.

Hitler tells them, "This is a war of extermination."

Gradually, more prisoners of war fell into British hands,

including generals.

These generals commanded when the Holocaust took place.

The recordings show us not only how the extermination intensified,

but how it truly became a genocide.