by Lynne Olson
Until November 1942, Rejewski and six Polish colleagues had continued their work with Major Gustave Bertrand and his French code-breaking team at a secluded château in the countryside of Provence. But the threat of detection by the Vichy French and Germans was steadily mounting. In early November, mobile direction-finding teams, in vans and trucks with circular antennas on their roofs, began sniffing around the area.
On the morning of November 8, Bertrand and his team learned of the Allied invasion of North Africa; three days later, they were told of the German takeover of Vichy France. Within hours of hearing that latest news, all the cryptographers fled the château, and the Poles went into hiding in Cannes on the French Riviera coast. The escape plan Bertrand had devised for them, which involved fleeing over the Pyrenees to Spain in two separate groups, proved ramshackle and badly executed. The guides for the first group abandoned their five charges just as they set out for the Pyrenees. The Poles were forced to proceed on their own, with no one to turn to for help or advice. They eventually found another guide, who betrayed them to the Gestapo. All five were sent to German concentration camps, where two died before the war’s end. “Any one of these men might have purchased their freedom by telling their captors that Enigma had been broken but, none did,” noted Dr. Reginald Jones, the British government’s chief science warfare adviser. “Their loyalty to their allies matched their brilliance in cryptography.”
The second group—consisting of Rejewski and Henryk Zygalski, another of the three young cryptographers who had first cracked Enigma—also encountered terrible difficulties. As they crossed the Pyrenees at the end of January 1943, their guide pulled a gun on them and demanded all their money and possessions. They made it to Spain on their own and were promptly taken into custody by Spanish police, who threw them in jail. They were kept in a series of Spanish prisons until early May, when the Polish Red Cross finally secured their release. In August, they were taken by ship to Britain.
“What a windfall for the English!” Bertrand, who had stayed behind in France, exclaimed when he learned of Rejewski’s and Zygalski’s arrival on British shores. To him, it seemed logical that the higher-ups at Bletchley Park would welcome the Poles with open arms. Instead, apparently for “security reasons,” they were barred from Bletchley and assigned to a small Polish cryptography unit in Boxmoor, a small town near London. There they were put to work breaking low-level codes of SS forces in occupied European countries. “Setting them to work on [those codes] was like using racehorses to pull wagons,” Alan Stripp, who worked in Bletchley Park’s Japanese code section, later observed.
According to Stripp, bringing Rejewski and Zygalski to Bletchley Park would not only have served as an acknowledgment of what they had contributed to Ultra, it would also have greatly benefited the English code breakers, who were still struggling with the complexities of the Enigma naval cipher. “We cannot exclude the fact that the Poles’ perfect knowledge of the machine and the habits of the German signalmen would have been very helpful if not decisive,” Stripp remarked. “The extraordinary expertise we would have gained was largely put aside by British intelligence.”
Dispirited by the British cold-shouldering, Rejewski drafted a note to the Polish government in exile in late 1944 suggesting that the British be urged “to cooperate with the Polish [cryptographers] as loyally as the Poles worked and continue to work with them.” The exile government did ask MI6 to come to the aid of Rejewski and Zygalski, but there was no response. Evidently, British security and intelligence officials thought the Poles had been tainted by their two-year stay in Vichy France and five-month confinement in Spanish prisons. In fact, neither cryptographer had ever fallen into German or Vichy French hands, but the British refused to reconsider.
The Poles’ cause was weakened by the fact that neither Dillwyn Knox nor Alastair Denniston—the two Bletchley Park officials who had worked most closely with them in the early days of the war—were around to plead their case. Denniston had been replaced as head of Bletchley in late 1942, and Knox, who had been the Poles’ greatest advocate, had died of cancer three months before Rejewski and Zygalski came to Britain.
With both gone, no one at Bletchley Park seemed to have any memory of the crucial events of 1939 and 1940: the British and French visit to Warsaw, the Poles’ gifts of two Enigma machines and the techniques they had used to break the early codes, and the day-to-day cooperation between the British and the Polish-French code-breaking centers in France. The breaking of Enigma had become a British monopoly, and the Polish cryptographers and their crucial contributions were thrust into the shadows. “It is clear that of the many people who worked on Enigma, very few ever knew about the Polish contribution,” Stripp noted. “The ‘need to know’ principle extended to that as to many other matters there.”
As it happened, some newcomers to Bletchley did receive a garbled version of the Poles’ involvement. Reginald Jones, who spent some time there, was told by Bletchley’s deputy chief that the Poles had somehow stolen an Enigma machine and presented it to the British. “Such a theft, of course, would have been a tremendous coup of the cloak-and-dagger variety, but it would not by itself have been a cryptography feat,” Jones observed. Gordon Welchman, who would eventually head the Bletchley section responsible for work on Enigma, was told the same thing when he was hired.
In Jones’s memoir of the war, published in 1978, he repeated the story of the Polish theft of the German cipher machine. Welchman did the same in his 1982 book about his work at Bletchley Park. Both men were greatly chagrined when they later learned what the Poles had really done. “The credit I gave them was utterly inadequate,” Jones said, and he tried to make amends in another, later memoir. Welchman, for his part, wrote a long paper, entitled “From Polish Bomba to British Bombe: The Birth of Ultra,” shortly before he died in 1985. The paper began, “Until just before the Second World War, a small Polish team of three mathematician-cryptologists, headed by the brilliant Marian Rejewski, had been happily breaking the German military cipher machine, the Enigma, for many years.” Later in the paper, Welchman wrote that Britain’s Ultra operation “would never have gotten off the ground” if it hadn’t been for the Poles’ prior work. As generous as Welchman’s tribute was, it didn’t do much to change the conventional wisdom that the British had been responsible for breaking Enigma. It also came too late to have any impact on Marian Rejewski’s life.
At the end of the war, Rejewski was depressed and in poor health, suffering from the rheumatoid arthritis he had contracted during his imprisonment in Spain. He rejected the idea of staying in Britain: there was nothing to keep him there, and he was desperate to reunite with his wife and two children, whom he had last seen six years earlier.
With his family, Rejewski settled down in his hometown of Bydgoszcz, a city in northern Poland. As was true for anybody who had lived in Britain during the war, he was under constant secret police surveillance from the day he returned. In the view of Poland’s communist government, any previous contact with the West was equated with “fascism.” Thousands of Poles who had fought the Germans in every way possible, whether as resistance fighters or as members of the returning Polish armed forces, had already been arrested and imprisoned. Some had been tortured and killed. For years after his return, Rejewski’s mail was opened and his phone tapped. His friends and acquaintances were regularly quizzed about him, especially about what he had done during the war. Yet security officials never discovered his connection with the breaking of Enigma, and he remained free.
Rejewski did everything he could to avoid attracting the authorities’ attention. He never became involved in any political or social activity, nor did he pursue high-level mathematics jobs. Instead, he worked at a string of low-level positions, including as an office clerk. A Polish historian called Rejewski’s postwar life “nothing but depressing.” His daughter said he had “a barren existence” until his death in 1980.
Not until the twenty-first century did the British governme
nt finally acknowledge officially that the Poles had indeed played a role in breaking Enigma. On July 12, 2001, a monument commemorating their contribution was installed on the grounds of Bletchley Park. Even so, it hardly did justice to the seminal nature of their work. The monument’s inscription says only that the Poles’ efforts “greatly assisted the Bletchley Park code breakers and contributed to the Allied victory in World War II.”
In 2014, Sir Iain Lobban, the head of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Britain’s signals intelligence agency, equated the breaking of Enigma to a relay race in which the baton had been passed by the Poles but the team “as a whole won the medal.” True enough—but the fact remains that, to this day, the first runners on that relay team have been denied their full share of the credit and glory of the race’s triumphant end.
Near the end of the war in Europe, a teenage boy in Holland rhapsodized about what life would be like in peacetime. “There will be food again, and gas, light and water,” he said. “Trains and trams will be running; our men will come back from forced labor in Germany; our prisoners of war and students will return. I will be able to go out whenever I want. I don’t have to be afraid when a car comes into the street or when the doorbell rings at night. There will be papers, cinemas, dancing, and cars; families will be reunited.”
But as the boy would soon discover, the grim reality of postwar life in Holland and the rest of scarred, impoverished Europe would bear scant resemblance to his comforting daydream. Bombed-out buildings still littered the landscape; in France alone, more than 1.5 million buildings had been destroyed, almost twice as many as in World War I. Throughout the Continent, rail lines, bridges, dikes, docks, and ports were in ruins. Once fertile farmland was flooded, cities were landscapes of desolation, and postal, telephone, and other vital services were largely nonexistent. There were food shortages everywhere; the same was true for coal and other fuel. During the bitter winters of 1945 and 1946 (two of the coldest in Europe on record), most homes, offices, and schools went unheated. In the words of the American journalist Theodore White, the countries of Europe were “as close to destitution as a modern civilization can get.”
As the nations struggled to survive and then to begin the massive job of rebuilding, they were forced, too, to confront their wartime pasts, to acknowledge that although many of their citizens had defied the Germans, many others had collaborated with them. Like so many war-related questions, the issue of collaboration involved layer upon layer of complexity, including how the term should be defined. For some people, including the British writer and ex–MI6 operative Malcolm Muggeridge, the definition was obvious: “Under the German occupation, everyone who did not go underground or abroad was in some degree a collaborator and could be plausibly accused as such.” Such black-and-white views tended to be held by people who lived in unoccupied countries such as Britain and the United States and, as a result, had no idea of the ambiguities of life under the Germans. In Britain and America, “we [regarded ourselves] as the good guys,” the British novelist Paul Watkins remarked. “We did not have to think about what it might have been like to live as collaborators. Anyone who collaborated was weak and deserved to die along with the rest of the bad guys.”
Those who thought of collaboration in simplistic terms could not comprehend the reality of trying to survive in an uncivilized, unstable environment in which the norms of society had broken down. “If you wanted to eat and go to school, you had to collaborate,” Watkins observed. “The only other choice was to vanish into the hills or risk being sent to a concentration camp. If you wanted to hold on to some semblance of your former life, your only choice was to do as you were told.”
Sir Isaiah Berlin, the noted Russo-British philosopher and historian, was more understanding of human nature in his thoughts on collaboration: in order to make it through the war, an individual might be forced to have dealings with the Germans, but “you did not have to be cozy with them.” The historian Stanley Hoffmann, who lived through the German occupation in France, had another, more complex definition. Hoffmann divided collaboration into two categories: involuntary, in which one reluctantly recognizes the necessity of cooperation in order to survive, and voluntary, in which one exploits the necessity and actively abets the enemy for his or her own gain.
However collaboration was defined, those believed guilty of it were subjected to violent retribution at the end of the war. In every occupied country, resistance members and other citizens rose up against suspected informers and collaborators “with as much fury and disregard for personal civil liberties as collaborators had moved against resistance workers during the war,” one historian noted. Such vengeance was particularly ferocious in France, where it was known as the épuration sauvage (“savage purification”).
In the days and weeks following the war, thousands of French citizens were killed by their own countrymen, many of whom were members of communist and other resistance-linked groups. Estimates of the number of these summary executions vary widely, ranging from 6,000 to 40,000. Calling the period “one of the more squalid episodes in France’s history,” Malcolm Muggeridge observed that some of the killings, supposedly committed in the name of justice, were later revealed to be “the working off of private grudges and envies.”
A hostile crowd surrounds Frenchwomen accused of sexual involvement with Germans. Stripped down to their undergarments, they likely all suffered the fate of the woman on the left—having their heads shaven.
Throughout the occupied countries, women accused of “horizontal collaboration”—sexual involvement with Germans—also suffered widespread public wrath. Their heads shaven, they were paraded like cattle through the streets of countless cities and towns, often stripped naked, sometimes beaten and/or tarred and feathered. Crowds of onlookers jeered and spat on them.
British and U.S. soldiers and war correspondents who witnessed these postwar spasms of violence were shocked at such intolerance by supposedly civilized Europeans. Most knew little of the brutality to which much of captive Europe had been subjected, especially in the last year of the occupation, or of the Continent’s lawless wartime environment, in which once cherished personal and political rights had not existed for at least half a decade. “People who did not live under German domination…will find it difficult to understand that every moral law, convention, or restriction on impulses simply disappeared,” a Polish resistance member wrote after the war. “Nothing remained but the desperation of an animal caught in a trap. We fought back by every conceivable means in a naked struggle to survive against an enemy determined to destroy us.”
Shocking as the pan-European campaign of vengeance was, it burned itself out in a matter of months, with personal vigilantism finally giving way to the institution of official trials for collaborators. “In the circumstances of 1945, it is remarkable that the rule of law was re-established at all,” noted the British historian Tony Judt, who wrote a magisterial history of postwar Europe. “Never before, after all, had an entire continent sought to define a new set of crimes on such a scale and bring criminals to something resembling justice.”
In judging collaborators, France was faced with a particularly difficult dilemma. Its own government had been guilty of collaboration, as had a large percentage of its business, industrial, cultural, and social elites. Faced with such high-level cooperation with the enemy, the French courts were relatively selective in those they chose to charge and punish. By the end of 1945, only about 90,000 persons had been investigated or arrested. A little more than half—half of one percent of the population—were convicted of wartime offenses. Of that number, slightly more than 18,000 were given prison sentences, while the rest received other sanctions, including fines. Meanwhile, a relative handful of prominent Frenchmen were executed for war crimes, among them Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval. Marshal Pétain was also condemned to death, but because of his age and feebleness, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
In other European countries,
the net was thrown far more widely. That was especially true in Norway, whose postwar government arrested and tried about 2 percent of the nation’s population, including all 55,000 members of Vidkun Quisling’s pro-Nazi organization, Nasjonal Samling. About a third of that number—17,000—received prison terms.
In the Netherlands, nearly 100,000 people—slightly more than 1 percent of the population—were jailed for war crimes. More than half were members of the Dutch Nazi Party, many of whom had fought for the Germans in a Dutch unit of the Waffen-SS. In Belgium, 56,000 persons—slightly more than one half of one percent of the country’s citizens—were sent to prison.
In Czechoslovakia and Poland, the question of how many citizens collaborated is virtually impossible to answer. Although there were certainly those who cooperated with the Germans in both countries, the Czech and Polish communist governments more often than not used the charge of fascist collaboration to rid themselves of perceived political opponents, including many Czechs and Poles who had served in the resistance or fought with the Western Allies during the war.
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IN THEIR PROSECUTION OF those who had aided the enemy, the former captive countries paid virtually no attention to one type of collaboration—assisting the Nazis in the mass killing of Europe’s Jews. Of the estimated 7 million civilians who died during the war in Poland, France, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway, and Czechoslovakia,* nearly half—3.3 million—were Jews, most of whom were murdered in Nazi concentration and extermination camps.
