Eavesdropping on the enemy

Say ‘Colditz’, and the name immediately triggers an image of prisoners of war digging tunnels, building gliders and in general plotting outrageously to cross the barbed wire into freedom. You could shout ‘Trent Park’ from the rooftops and, until now, no one would have known what you were referring to. But this book should give the name as lively a notoriety as the brooding Saxon fortress.

Trent Park in Middlesex was where Britain housed the cream of captured German officers. They were brought together, not to prevent their escape, but to encourage their conversation. Scattered throughout their cells and huts was a network of concealed microphones designed to record whatever they had to say about the war, the Nazis and Hitler himself. The bugged talk eventually covered 50,000 pages, providing vital information about morale and military thinking.

Today the value of that eavesdropping is, if anything, even greater. Unlike the Germans who were asked after the war about their participation in the Nazi nightmare, these witnesses did not know whether they had won or lost. Consequently the bugs offer a snapshot of the unvarnished thoughts and motivation of soldiers who felt themselves to be still engaged in a war they fought with a ferocity that killed 50 million people.

Inevitably, the first priority is to find out what they knew of the Holocaust. Research in the 1990s turned up compelling documentary evidence of the Wehrmacht’s complicity in the killings, but here we have the voices of the military themselves. In one appalling passage, a general describes a single incident in 1941 when he watched the near-naked victims being forced to lie down in three pits as long as cricket pitches, feet to the walls, heads in the centre, ‘like sardines in a tin’, where they were shot with machine guns, while a line of men, women and children, more than a mile long, shuffled forward to be stripped of clothes and jewellery, eventually to drop down on to the still-warm corpses and be killed themselves.