Channel 4 - Spying on Hitler's Army: The Secret Recordings (2013)

This powerful docudrama tells the story of one of World War II's last secrets.

British intelligence undertook an audacious operation to listen in on the private conversations of 10,000 German prisoners of war without their ever knowing they were being overheard. The prisoners' unguarded reminiscences and unintentional confessions have only just come to light, and prove how closely the German army were involved in the atrocities of the Holocaust.

In this programme, they are dramatised - word for word - from the original transcripts. British intelligence requisitioned three stately homes for this epic task, and converted each into an elaborate trap. The 100,000 hours of conversation they captured provided crucial intelligence that changed the course of the war, and revealed some of its worst horrors, from rape to mass executions to one of the earliest bulletins from the concentration camps.

But when the fighting ended, the recordings were destroyed and the transcripts locked away for half a century. Only now have they been declassified, researched and cross-referenced.

The programme also features the historian who uncovered the transcripts, and one of the surviving 'listeners' - a hidden army, largely made up of German-speaking Jewish refugees, who had to transcribe accounts of appalling anti-Semitic crimes while never betraying their existence to the men they spent every day monitoring.

Produced by October Films.

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