BRITISH code breakers were providing Churchill's wartime government with daily accounts of the systematic killing of Jews as early as the summer of 1941, well before Hitler formally declared the "final solution", according to secret documents released yesterday by GCHQ.
The first authoritative evidence of the mass execution of Jews is contained in reports of German police messages intercepted by the British code and cypher breaking centre at Bletchley Park - the forerunner of GCHQ - and sent to Churchill and a select group of intelligence officers.
They reveal a relentless pattern of atrocities often referred to euphemistically as "cleaning up operations" and "gas cleansing stations" - as the German Ordnungspolizei and SS battalions ruthlessly liquidated tens of thousands of Jews on the eastern front.
A report in July 1941 referred to the shooting in one day of 1,153 Jews in Russia. A month later, the SS cavalry was reported as having "liquidated 3,274 partisans and Jewish Bolsheviks". Another message read: "The figure of executions in my area now exceeds the 30,000 mark."
By September 1941, code breakers told British intelligence that "the execution of `Jews' is so recurrent a feature of these reports that the figures have been omitted from the daily transcripts Whether all those executed as `Jews' are indeed such is of course doubtful, but the figures are no, less conclusive as evidence of a policy of savage intimidation, if not of ultimate extermination."
The code breakers also reported that Gen Kurt Daluge, head of the Ordnungspohzei, was worried that his messages back to Berlin were being intercepted. He resorted to using the phrase "action according to the usage of war", to describe the slaughter of Jews.
The intercepts, marked "Most Secret: To Be Kept Under Lock and Key", were released at the British Public Record Office, six months after similar reports - some of which originated in Britain were opened at the US archives in Washington under the Freedom of Information Act.
Despite the sheer quantity of evidence of atrocities against Jews, the allies were constrained in their ability to react. "It was a double tragedy," Prof David Cesarani, a respected Jewish historian, said yesterday. "The allies could not reveal their knowledge because it would have betrayed the codebreaking, and it was at the nadir of allied power. They could have done little to stop it."
The intercepts contain daily reports from 1942 of the numbers of people held, and the number who died, in concentration camps, including Dachau, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen.
A report from Hungary as late as September 1944, noted that "Jews are still rounded up and deported to Poland" in "special trains" bound for Auschwitz. It added: "... it may be noted that a message about chemicals for use in malarial districts and therefore to destroy mosquitos is addressed to Auschwitz for the attention of Himmler's Special Commissioner for the Combating of Animal Pests."
Meanwhile, a report released yesterday describes how a special SS battalion was set up with the task of robbing Poland, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Greece, and Tsarist palaces in Russia of "valuable documents, artistic treasures, furniture etc".
It says: "These prizes were reserved for the use of the higher Nazi bosses in their villas; the lesser bosses had to content themselves with rare books and costly vases."