Against Jews

The M Room operation was set up with the aim of gathering secret military, naval and air intelligence material about Nazi Germany. But this unit soon began to discover something quite unexpected.

As early as 1941, the secret listeners began to pick up graphic details from prisoners' conversations which talked in graphic detail about the persecution of Europe's Jews by the Nazi regime, especially in Russia. Some prisoners bragged about how many Jews had been killed and exactly how the killings had taken place. In some cases, the prisoner boasted that he had actually carried out killings. The secret listeners overheard how thousands of Jews were rounded up, marched to a forest, stripped naked and shot on the edge of the pit into which they fell and were left.

Other conversations spoke about how difficult German soldiers found it to shoot Jews, so the Nazis invented the mobile gas trucks: Jews were herded into the back, the door was closed, and they were gassed to death. By 1943, one prisoner boasted that three million Jews had already been murdered by Nazi Germany. British Intelligence found it incredible to believe the numbers because they had no independent evidence. In hindsight, it is now known that this estimate was accurate. Kendrick asked the secret listeners to record all conversations of any atrocities so that these could be used as evidence at the trials of Nazi war criminals at the end of the war.