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Britain's German-Born Jewish "Secret Listeners" Helped Win World War II
(Times of Israel) Robert Philpot - Historian Helen Fry describes in her new book, The Walls Have Ears: The Greatest Intelligence Operation of World War II, how captured Nazi generals were confined at Trent Park, a stately country house in north London that resembled a gentleman's club. But unbeknownst to, and unsuspected by, the Nazi military commanders, Trent Park was wired for sound. "The generals did not realize that everything that could be bugged was - from the light fittings to the fireplaces, plant pots...under floorboards of the bedrooms, and even the trees in the garden," Fry says. The house and its surrounding estate were nothing less than "a theatrical stage set." Unseen by the generals, an army of "secret listeners" - many of them Jewish refugees - eavesdropped on their conversations from a basement room. The conversations were transcribed, translated, and passed on to intelligence agencies and government departments. Fry's book draws on thousands of transcripts and reports in Britain's National Archives which were released in the late 1990s. The eavesdropping elicited a wealth of intelligence: on the Germans' battle plans, new technology being developed by the Nazis on U-boats and aircraft, and the progress of Hitler's secret weapons program that produced the V1 and V2 rockets. There were also graphic eyewitness accounts of the mass murder of Jews in the East - by the very men who had perpetrated them. "The unguarded conversations of the generals revealed to the intelligence services that Germany's military commanders not only knew about the war crimes committed, but some were complicit in it," writes Fry.