Thread by @DrHelenFry

On 31 October 1943, a captured SS officer from Hitler's brutal death squad was bugged at Latimer House by the British.

He calmly described seeing Auschwitz from the train and knowing no one came out alive.

Then he recounted mass executions of 5000 Jews in one day:
(🧵)

On 31 October 1943, an SS officer was brought to Latimer House after capture in Italy. He was no ordinary SS officer, but from one of Hitler’s infamously brutal and merciless death squads – Einsatz-Kommando 3, Sicherheits-Polizei (Security Police).

Holding a rank equivalent to sergeant major, this SS Hauptscharführer came from one of the highest positions in Hitler’s Secret Police. Special reports generated from the M Room merely give him the codename M320.

(continued)

M320: I know the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland by hearsay. Actually you can see it from the train. It is a hutted camp for Jews. I heard say that there’s a crematorium there, and that no one who enters the camp comes out alive.

M322: I heard a lot in Vienna about Mauthausen.

M320: I personally haven’t seen any concentration camp, apart from Auschwitz, which I saw from the train. It’s not far from Cracow.

M322: Oh, down there.

M320: Yes. When you go through by train you can see it.

M322: Were mainly Jews sent there?

M320: Yes. I should be interested to know what they have done with all the Jews in the Reich, and then the ones from Austria, since they started to get rid of the Jews. I wonder whether they’ve slaughtered them?

(continued)

In a different conversation, this time with a British army officer (below, BAO), M320 spoke at length about mass executions by firing squads in the village of Ananyev in the province of Kherson, and referred to the shooting of as many as 5,000 Jews there in a single day.

BAO: How many people were shot at a time?

M320: They were always shot in groups of ten.

BAO: With tommy-guns?

M320: With rifles. One man to each. Ten men with rifles to ten.

(continued)

Continued:

BAO: Did they simply fall down into trenches or what?

M320: Yes. They had to get down into a trench – it was a kind of anti-tank trench. It was about two and a half to three metres deep and wide as this room, we’ll say. You had to shoot down at them from above.

BAO: Were they all killed instantaneously?

M320: Yes. There were men with tommy-guns who finished them off. The cars drove away one after the other and they could see the others being taken up and shot, and they knew that it might be their turn next. You’d see a woman holding a little child on each of her arms, and she might be pregnant as well – and there were whole families.

M320 was one of the longest-held lower-rank prisoners at Latimer House, possibly because of his position in the SS death squad.

He was still being questioned by British intelligence into 1944.

(continued...ending)

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