Eavesdropping on Hell: Historical Guide to Western Communications Intelligence and the Holocaust, 1939-1945

Preface

There is no river but memory Raise up, raise up a pillar of our tears.

—"Leaving Sodom" by Ann Lauinger

Surely, the grimmest part of the Second World War was the Holocaust (or Shoah). This entailed the systematic and wholesale destruction of European Jewry and other groups such as Slavs, Poles, and Romany (Gypsies), among others, which the Nazis had deemed "inferior" and then slated for destruction because of race, blood, or disability. In fact, one of the major war aims of Nazi Germany was the extermination of global Jewry. During the war years, Europe's landscape was scarred by the presence of concentration, labor, and death camps. Einsatzgruppen (operations groups), and numerous German Police units roamed the western Soviet Union in the ...