The Third Reich Is Listening: Inside German Codebreaking 1939-45

Drawing on recently declassified documents, this is the utterly compelling history of the successes and failures of Germany's codebreaking and signals intelligence operations throughout World War II.

The success of the Allied codebreakers at Bletchley Park was one of the iconic intelligence achievements of World War II, immortalised in films such as The Imitation Game and Enigma. But cracking Enigma was only half of the story. Across the Channel, German intelligence agencies were hard at work breaking British and Allied codes.

The Third Reich is Listening is a gripping blend of modern history and science, and describes the successes and failures of Germany's codebreaking and signals intelligence operations from 1935 to 1945. The first mainstream book that takes an in-depth look at German cryptanalysis in the Second World War, it tells how the Third Reich broke the ciphers of Allied and neutral countries, including Great Britain, France, Russia and Switzerland.

It offers a dramatic new perspective on one of the biggest stories of WW2, using declassified archive material and colourful personal accounts of the Germans at the heart of the story, including a former astronomer who worked out the British order of battle in 1940, a U-Boat commander on the front line of the Battle of the Atlantic, and the German cryptanalyst who broke into and read crucial codes of the British Royal Navy.

Christian Jennings is a British freelance foreign correspondent and the author of six works of non-fiction. Since 1988, across twenty-three countries, he has been writing books and journalism on international current affairs, modern history, and popular science for publications ranging from The Economist and Reuters to Wired, The Guardian, and The Scotsman. He has been based variously in Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Burundi, Kenya, and Switzerland. He now lives in Turin, Italy. His recent book At War on the Gothic Line (Osprey, 2016), was described in The Spectator as ’military history at its most engaging’.