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Secret recordings of Nazis revealed in new documentary
Recording Evil shows unfiltered discussions of the Holocaust between Nazi prisoners of war
April 23, 2025 14:51
Recording Evil shows unfiltered discussions of the Holocaust between Nazi prisoners of war
April 23, 2025 14:51A new documentary will reveal harrowing, never-before-seen transcripts of conversations between Nazi soldiers and officers held in British prisoner of war camps, after researchers combed through recently declassified secret recordings.
Beginning at the onset of the Second World War, British spies bugged estates and prisoner of war camps with hundreds of secret microphones to record some 10,000 captured Nazi soldiers and officers who, unaware that they were being recorded, spoke candidly to each other about what they saw and the actions they carried out during the war.
Intended to extract military intelligence, the recordings ended up revealing details of the mass extermination of Europe’s Jews in the perpetrators’ own words.
The recordings were transcribed and translated in real time by teams of German-speaking Jewish refugees who had fled the Nazi regime. Around 75,000 pages of transcripts were archived by British intelligence, though the audio tapes themselves did not survive. The transcripts were delivered directly to Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US intelligence.
Recording Evil, a documentary in three parts presented by Israeli public broadcasting corporation KAN, will premiere in Israel on Saturday 26 April.
The film features excerpts from the memoirs of British intelligence officer Catherine Townshend, who oversaw the secret recording rooms. In addition, the children of the Jewish refugee transcribers – many of whom were unaware of their parents’ involvement in the top-secret project – share their reflections on the operation’s significance.
While some conversations between prisoners revealed remorse and their coming to terms with having committed war crimes, others shed light on the methods of extermination, the logistics of death trains and camps, accounts of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and in some cases expressions of pride in the part they played in the Final Solution.
The transcripts of these conversations were kept confidential for nearly 80 years in the vaults of the British Archives. In 2022, to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, the British government made all its records related to the Holocaust available to the public for the first time. Since then, a limited number of researchers have combed through thousands upon thousands of documents, recordings, pictures, and over 150,000 transcripts.
Researchers for the documentary said they read “transcripts that were abhorrent and incredible. In contrast to previous testimonies where former Nazis filtered their words, downplayed their roles, and screened their statements out of fear of publication or legal repercussions, in this case, the Nazi officers describe the extermination with zero censorship.”
Some conversations between Nazi prisoners describe how Jews were forced to dig their own mass graves before firing squads would arrive and shoot them. Then, another group of Jews would arrive, and they too would be shot and fall in. An SS leader described how he would grab the children by their necks and shoot them with a machine pistol so he could be sure of their immediate deaths.
Another conversation reveals how instead of shooting the smaller children, who would not sit still, SS officers “picked them up by their legs and slammed them on the ground”, killing them like they were “cats”.
Another quote read: “When I’m asked why I also killed children, my only answer is: I’m not such a coward as to leave that job for my kids when I can do it myself.”
According to the documentary’s makers, the series also challenges the narrative that the Wehrmacht – Nazi Germany’s armed forces – only played a minor role in the killings and that SS units carried out most of the exterminations.
“The testimonies indicate that Wehrmacht officers were involved in the murder of Jews. The testimonies suggest that the Wehrmacht personnel were aware of, and saw, what was happening but took no action; all while being conscious that the events constituted terrible war crimes,” the makers said.
The documentary serves “as an unequivocal response to Holocaust denial, antisemitism, and historical distortion that has risen in the past decade.”