Allied Intelligence Agencies and the Holocaust: Information Acquired from German Prisoners of War

In the early days of World War II, British intelligence agencies began secretly recording conversations between German prisoners of war in the hope of acquiring information on technical advances. The information gathered was to be used in the war effort against Germany. Transcripts of these conversations, now declassified, represent a previously unknown or overlooked source of information about the Holocaust, providing evidence of individual German officers’ participation in and knowledge of war crimes. The fact that the transcripts of and reports on the monitored conversations were locked away for over thirty years after the end of the war supports the view that intelligence agencies placed a higher priority on maintaining the secrecy of their methods than on aiding the prosecution of war criminals.