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From Chapter Seven: From Enigma to Atbash and Back
All the effort that goes into breaking a code is lost the moment the enemy realizes
that it has been broken. (Hence the shattering security implications of the quantum
cryptographic keys mentioned above.) Cracking a really difficult cipher is therefore
only half the job; the other half is keeping the fact hidden. Unfortunately, one
of the fastest and easiest ways to let the cat out of the bag is to give evidence
of knowing something which can only be known by reading the cipher. One of the most
dreaded decisions facing any military strategist is whether to refrain from acting
upon a discovery--and so perhaps allowing a terrible price to be paid by others--for
fear that action would result in a far higher price later.
At one time one of Turing's Enigma decryptions had been too directly acted upon,
and as with the Americans near-disaster with the Japanese code previously, it almost
reversed the course of the British victory at sea. By playing off German ignorance
of the decryption, the Allies fooled many (but even so not all) of the Nazi high
command into believing that a feint on D-Day was the actual invasion. Success depended
almost wholly on the Allies knowing what the Germans knew (and thought); and upon
the Germans knowing neither what the Allies knew nor that the Allies knew. By the
time Berlin figured out what was going on, it was too late. (Rommel, sensitized to
the extraordinary value of decryption, did figure it out--but Hitler would not listen
to him.)
As Rabbi Weissmandl sat in the bunker, immersing himself in the ancient codes
discovered by the Kabbalists, he agonized over the Allies' failure to respond to
his pleas to save his people from destruction. Why did they not bomb the rail lines
to Auschwitz? It wasn't that they disbelieved his smuggled information: he had letters
acknowledging it. In the years after the war, the Allies repeatedly claimed that
it was simply because such bombings would have done no good in the larger scheme
of things. The Germans would just rebuild immediately.
But Weissmandl knew that most of the Nazi high officials were keenly aware of
the price they would pay were the world to become aware of their secret crimes. If
the lines to Auschwitz--of no military significance--had been bombed, the message
to Berlin would have been unequivocal: we know, and you shall pay. The deportations
and exterminations would have ceased immediately. And Weissmandl knew the Allies
knew this, too. So why did they not act?
Only in 1996 was it finally revealed that even before Rabbi Weissmandl forwarded
his smuggled map of Auschwitz, British and American intelligence already knew about
the Holocaust--in excruciating, bureaucratic detail--from the "Ultra" Project,
the Enigma transmissions intercepted and decoded by the Allies in London. They knew
about it in June, 1941, seven months before implementation of the "Final Solution"
would begin; six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor which they did not believe.
A calculation had been made, and agreed to by Churchill himself, long a friend of
the Jews: saving the Jews was not worth revealing to the Nazis the fact that their
vaunted war-code had been penetrated. The Allies feared that the Nazis would conclude
that the cracking of Enigma was the only way their dire secret could have been exposed.
It would have been inconceivable to them that the deed had been done by a pathetic
Slovenian Rabbi.
But what seemed, and perhaps was, a heartless failure of the Allies to respond
to the plight of his beloved Jewish people left Weissmandl himself a broken man.
If it was true, as he believed and lived by, that "to save a single life is
to save the world," what could be said about a calculation that deliberately
paid out one or two million of them? That the calculation itself was carefully kept
from public knowledge until October, 1996, and then forced into the open, not volunteered,
suggests an answer.
The "hinge of fate" that won the war also closed the circle: the Jewish
Kabbalists had given the world cryptology and all its fruits; to keep secret the
acquisition, Auschwitz would be allowed to operate until the very end. What would
Weissmandl have thought had he lived to learn that there would subsequently arise
a powerful movement that denies the Holocaust altogether; that points to the Allies'
failure to act on what they were told as prima facie evidence that the Holocaust
never happened; indeed that claims the Holocaust was invented by one man: Rabbi Michael
Ber Weissmandl? The Holocaust denial movement would never have had the opportunity
to arise, nor anything that could even vaguely be thought of as evidence for its
claims, were it not for Allies' decision to keep secret for more than fifty years
its own extensive knowledge of it.
The ancient underground stream had come full circle; the primordial serpent had
bitten its own tail: what more fitting image could there be than the bite of a serpent
for such a cruel intersection of time and eternity as Rabbi Weissmandl had had to
live through? Could the anti-venin for the toxin of ultimate meaninglessness be extracted
from the bite itself?
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