Christian Jennings

At dawn on 12 August 1944, German SS troops arrived in the Tuscan mountain village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema. On arrival, they proceeded to murder up to 560 Italian civilians in the olive groves and chestnut woods of the small hamlet. The victims were women, the elderly, and more than eighty children. One was a baby barely three weeks old.It was the most high-profile massacre committed by the Germans in Italy – and yet, despite three separate war crimes investigations, the Sant’Anna killers escaped justice.Sixty years later, ten of the SS men who were at Sant’Anna were sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia by Italian courts, but they died free.Anatomy of a Massacre tells the full story of what happened at Sant’Anna di Stazzema – from Tuscany to Rome and Germany – and tries to answer the question: why were the survivors denied justice?

<p><b>'Massive, groundbreaking new research that sheds more truth on the Holocaust.' - Helen Fry</b><br><br>Never told in detail before, this is the account of how, for four years, British and Allied codebreakers decrypted secret SS and Gestapo messages detailing the mass killings of the Holocaust, and how the Germans in turn deployed cryptanalysis to try to conceal their persecution of Europe's Jews. The compelling and fast-paced narrative is told from the perspectives of two central and opposing characters, who never meet.<br><br>At Bletchley Park, there is the legendary but unsung British codebreaker Nigel de Grey, shy, determined, nicknamed 'the Dormouse' by his colleagues. In Nazi-occupied Poland, SS Major Hermann Höfle, a former taxi driver from Salzburg, and one of the Third Reich's ruthless bureaucrats of mass death, oversees the operations of five concentration camps, including Treblinka.<br><br>De Grey fought hard to make sure the vital intelligence from decrypted signals reached Allied leaders and was acted on. Höfle, meanwhile, used complex coded messages to try to conceal the mass killings. De Grey worked with his American counterparts, as well as codebreakers and intelligence agents from the Soviet Union, France, the Vatican, Switzerland and Poland. Yet he had dangerous enemies closer to home: a cabal of senior British government and intelligence officials disbelieved or ignored repeated intelligence reports about the ongoing Holocaust.<br><br>Flawlessly researched, this is the story of a battle between good and evil, between life and mass death, a cat-and-mouse war of electronic wits. More than eighty years on, as Russian leaders face war crimes charges in international courts, the words 'Never again' seem more pertinent than ever.</p>

The urgent, dramatic and untold story of how, for four years, British and Allied codebreakers decrypted secret SS and Gestapo messages detailing the mass killings of the Holocaust, and how the Germans in turn deployed cryptanalysis to try and conceal their persecution of Europe's Jews. The compelling and fast-paced story is told by two central and opposing characters, who never meet each other. At Bletchley Park, there is the legendary but unsung British codebreaker Nigel De Grey, shy, determined, nicknamed 'the Dormouse' by his colleagues. In Poland SS Major Hermann Hoefle, a former taxi driver from Salzburg, and one of the Third Reich's ruthless bureaucrats of mass death, oversees the operations of five concentration camps, including Treblinka. De Grey fought hard to make sure the vital intelligence from decrypted signals reached Allied leaders and was acted on. Hoefle, meanwhile, used complex coded messages to try to conceal the SS mass killings. De Grey worked with his American counterparts, as well as codebreakers and intelligence agents from the Soviet Union, France, The Vatican, Switzerland and Poland. He had dangerous enemies closer to home, too: a cabal of senior British government and intelligence officials disbelieved or ignored repeated intelligence reports about the ongoing Holocaust. It is the story of a battle between good and evil, between life and mass death, a war of electronic wits and cat-and-mouse. Seventy-five years on, as Russian leaders face war crimes charges in international courts, the words 'Never Again' seem even more pertinent than ever.