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A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with Rabbi Julia Neuberger

Good morning.

It’s Holocaust Memorial Day today, when we remember the Nazi regime’s mass murder of six million Jews, along with Roma, homosexuals, communists, and others regarded as untermenschen- sub-humans. British intelligence actually learnt something of that murder from bugging the conversations of German officer Prisoners Of War held captive during World War II. The listeners were German refugees, mostly Jews.

One group of captured German generals thought they were being unbelievably well treated, held in a stately home, drinking wine and eating good food. They boasted about how stupid the British were, but failed to realise that British intelligence had bugged every part of their accommodation, in order to glean information.

The historian Helen Fry believes that what was learnt from these bugging operations was as significant to winning the war as the code-breaking work at Bletchley Park. British intelligence overheard admissions of the German army’s participation in atrocities and mass killings of Jews, something denied by the German army for 65 years until the bugging evidence was released.

The listeners faced a tough job. One, Fritz Lustig, said: "We felt no guilt - on the contrary, we felt proud to be able to contribute to the British war effort….." He died aged 98 in 2017, able to reflect on his proud record of helping the British win the war, by listening to Nazi officers giving away secrets, such as about weapons development at Peenemuende, which the British then destroyed. Today, of all days, we should be grateful to those ‘listeners’. They were fortunate in escaping the Nazis, and they made such an enormous contribution to their adopted country that they helped it win the war.