Christian Jennings
The Holocaust Codes
Summary
In this presentation, Helen Fry will be in conversation with Christian Jennings on his latest groundbreaking book, The Holocaust Codes, about how, for four years, British and Allied codebreakers decrypted secret SS and Gestapo messages detailing the mass killings of Jews in the Holocaust. We will also discuss how the Germans in turn deployed cryptanalysis to try to conceal their persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews.
Christian Jennings
Christian Jennings is a British author and foreign correspondent, and the author of ten non-fiction books of modern history and current affairs. These include the acclaimed The Third Reich is Listening: Inside German Codebreaking 1939-1945, the first comprehensive account in English of German wartime cryptanalysis. His latest books include Syndrome K: How Italy Resisted the Final Solution, and the current work, The Holocaust Codes: The Untold Story of Decrypting the Final Solution. He has lectured for Bletchley Park on German codebreaking, and from 1994-2012 he spent fifteen years reporting for publications such as The Economist and Reuters on international current affairs and complex war crimes investigations, including genocide and its aftermath, across twenty-three countries in the Western Balkans and Africa. He spent nearly ten years alone in Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Congo, Kosovo and Bosnia. Among his other books, four are about the Second World War and its aftermath. Syndrome K: How Italy Resisted the Final Solution, Anatomy of a Massacre: How the SS got away with war crimes in Italy, At War on the Gothic Line: Fighting in Italy 1944-45, and Flashpoint Trieste: First Battle of the Cold War have been published variously in Great Britain, the US, Italy, Canada, Australia and other Commonwealth territories, China and the Czech Republic.
Helen Fry
Helen Fry has authored and edited over 25 books covering the social history of the Second World War, including British Intelligence and the secret war, espionage, and spies, as well as MI9 escape and evasion. She is the foremost authority on the “secret listeners” who worked at special eavesdropping sites operated by British Intelligence during WWII. Helen is the official biographer of MI6 spymaster, Colonel Thomas Joseph Kendrick. She has also extensively written about the 10,000 Germans who fought for Britain during WWII. Helen has appeared in a number of documentaries and has provided advisory services for TV and drama. She also appears regularly in media interviews and podcasts. Helen is an ambassador for the National Centre for Military Intelligence (NCMI) and serves as a trustee of both the Friends of the Intelligence Corps Museum and the Medmenham Collection. She works in London.