British Deception Helped Defeat Nazis, Save Jews

By Jerry Klinger

LONDON, England — The dead body of a British officer found floating in April 1943 in the waters off the coast of Southern Spain, near Huelva, may have been a key reason Hitler was unable to finish murdering the last Jews of Europe.

A valise, chained to the body’s wrist, contained top-secret military documents with plans to invade Greece by British and Allied forces.  Nazi spies working with Spanish police copied the documents and sent them to Berlin.

The German military was expecting the Allied attack to be Sicily. Hitler convinced the documents were real, and convinced he was right, overruled his generals. Hitler ordered the redeployment of massive units of Armor and Infantry from Sicily to Greece to counter the coming invasion.

July 1943, British and American forces invading Sicily faced much lighter opposition.  An estimated 10,000 Allied casualties had been averted by Hitler’s decision.

July 1943, the greatest Tank Battle of World War II took place in Russia.  The Germans were desperate for reinforcements. Hitler, still convinced the dagger of the Allied invasion was Greece, refused to release his army, doing nothing in Greece, to help push back the Russian tide at Kursk.

The Battle of Kursk was the turning point of the war in Europe.  Hitler’s armies were crushed and began the long, steady, inevitable retreat West to ultimate defeat.

The dead body floating in the waters off Spain with the valise of top-secret papers had been a ruse, a deception, a misdirection of monumental success.  The plan was the creation of two British Military Intelligence officers, Churchill’s corkscrews as they were known, Naval Commander Ewen Montagu, a British Jew, and Flight Lt. Charles Cholmondeley, a British aristocrat.

The insane plan of secret misdirection, finding a body, creating a life story, and releasing it off Spain with faked secret battle plans to deliberately be found by the Nazis, was incredibly improbable, but it worked.

Until the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation became associated with Martin Sugarman of the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women, there had never been even a modest memorial of recognition to the greatest secret intelligence effort in Europe during World War II.

November 2021, after a two-year struggle, largely delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, the first-ever memorial was placed adjacent to the Hackney (London) Mortuary, where Operation Mincemeat had largely played out.  The historical interpretive marker, in true corkscrew reflection, was placed low to the ground, below the expected line of passerby’s sight, on an adjacent pylon.

No one can say with 100 percent certainty, Operation Mincemeat defeated Hitler.  But no can deny, Operation Mincemeat, the creation of a Jew and a Christian together, did the impossible and played a very important role in Hitler’s defeat.

Operation Mincemeat saved thousands of Allied soldiers’ lives and possibly millions of Jewish lives.  How many…the historians and even the antisemites will have to argue that out till the cows come home.

A spring dedication is planned.

The text:

The Hackney Mortuary played an important role in a British military operation during the Second World War (1939-1945), which helped save the lives of thousands of soldiers.

In April 1943 Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu CBE KC RNVR, a British Jew, and Flight Lieutenant Charles Cholmondely MBE, a British aristocrat, planned Operation Mincemeat to misdirect German forces’ attention from the Allied invasion of Sicily. They brought the donated body of a man to the Hackney Mortuary where it stayed on ice for three months. Cholmondely and Montagu transformed the corpse into a fictitious officer – Major William Martin. The body was taken to Scotland, and then to a point off of southern Spain, where it was placed in the water carrying letters from senior Allied officers suggesting the Allies would invade Greece, not Sicily. When the body was found, the letters were shared with Nazi intelligence, misdirecting German forces, saving thousands of British and American soldiers’ lives during the invasion of Sicily.

“Set a watch before my mouth: and over the door of my lips”

יתפש לד לע הרצנ יפל הרמש הרהי התיש Psalms 141:3

Hackney Council,

Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation,

Martin Sugarman (AJEX).

*

Jerry Klinger is the President of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, www.JASHP.org