by DAVID KAHN
What had they accomplished? They had achieved some remarkable technical successes, and for some that was enough. Kunze and the other mathematicians usually lost interest in a problem after its cryptanalytic difficulties had been surmounted. Even the codebreakers who were interested in their influence on their country’s policy could rarely learn anything about it: the diplomats seldom told them, and Selchow stood between them and the users. Moreover, the effects were diffused over many messages, commingled with other sources of information, distorted by Nazi preconceptions, so that it was virtually impossible to single out cryptanalyzed information as critical in a specific event. Finally, and most important, Germany lost the war, reducing all the Pers Z efforts in the final analysis to nullity. “As I am accustomed to say,” said Schauffler, “a bridge builder can see what he has done for his countrymen, but we cannot tell whether our life was worth anything.”
Yet they read the secret communications of the British Empire, Ireland, France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Vatican, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania, Poland; Egypt, Ethiopia; Turkey, Iran, China, Japan, Manchukuo, Thailand; the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Venezuela. Not every code of every country was always read, but the solution of the codes of 34 nations of the earth suggests that, whether or not the the Pers Z cryptanalysts’ life was “worth anything,” the reckoning cannot involve whether they had done their duty. That they had.
In the nightmare totalitarian jungle that was Nazi Germany, the bigwigs of National Socialism consolidated their positions by building up personal power structures. Extra power could come from the knowledge obtainable through intercepting communications. Thus it was that a few weeks after Hitler appointed Hermann Göring as Air Minister in his new government in 1933, the fat ex-air ace established an eight-man unit in his Air Ministry to do as much intercepting as possible. He called it the Forschungsamt (“Research Office”), but its research was highly specialized. Apparently attached to the minister’s office, it bore no relation either to the research division of the Luftwaffe’s technical office or to the Luftwaffe’s own military intercept and cryptologic unit.
Göring installed the Forschungsamt in a requisitioned building on the Behrendstrasse, Berlin, but moved it at the end of 1933 to the Hotel am Knie in the suburb of Charlottenberg. He named as its first chief an old friend and loyal party member named Hans Schimpf, a former naval lieutenant who had once served as liaison between the Army and the Navy cryptologic organizations. In 1934 the unit did exactly what Göring expected it to do when it supplied him with information that helped him win Hitler to his side in the first great power struggle of the Third Reich—that between Hitler’s oldest friend and closest associate in the Nazi movement, the homosexual Ernst Roehm, on the one hand, and Göring, Heinrich Himmler, head of the S.S. and the Gestapo, and the Junkers on the other. Roehm was shot, and soon thereafter Schimpf suffered the same fate, presumably because he had done his job so well that he knew too much. Göring replaced him with Prince Christoph of Hesse, younger brother of Prince Philip of Hesse, one of Göring’s friends since the late 1920s. Christoph, then in his mid-thirties, was the fourth and youngest son of the Landgrave of Hesse, former ruler of that principality and a member of one of the oldest traceable families in Christendom (to Charlemagne). Christoph became a ministerial director in the Air Ministry and also had the title of Oberführer of the S.S. on the staff of the S.S. Reichsführer, who was Himmler. He died in Italy in 1941.
The Forschungsamt tapped telephones, opened letters, solved encoded telegrams. Its reports were called Braune Blätter (“Brown Sheets”). A typical one, of March 19, 1945, which was passed to the economic division of the armed forces, reported that on March 14 the Swiss political department informed the Swiss embassy in Lisbon about an agreement reached with the Allies concerning railroad operations from southern France. The Forschungsamt also recorded the conversations of Göring and Hitler. These were passed to the appropriate government department for action or reference, if necessary. In its most famous case, it transcribed 27 conversations from Göring’s office with various officials in Rome and Vienna that settled Austria’s fate in the hours before the Anschluss. Ironically, one of those whose subservient words to an overjoyed Hitler were recorded for posterity was Prince Philip, emissary of the Führer and brother of the chief eavesdropper.
Christoph’s membership in the S.S., or Schutzstaffel (“Protection Staff”), the notorious blackshirted strong arm of the Nazi party, pointed to a close relationship between the Forschungsamt and the S.D., or Sicherheitsdienst (“Security Service”), the branch of the S.S. that served as the ideological watchdog for the Nazis. The S.D., for example, determined who voted the wrong way in German plebiscites by numbering the back of the ballots with milk, a simple but effective secret ink. Its efforts were primarily internal, and since private citizens, even conspirators, seldom use complicated code or cipher systems, its cryptanalytic organization—if it even had one—was small and nameless. This is not to say that the S.D. was not interested in other people’s conversations: it probably did its share of telephone tapping and mail opening.
A “Brown Sheet,” or cryptanalytic report of the Forschungsamt
After 1936, the S.D. extended its watchdog duties from just the party to the government as well, with a domestic branch and a foreign branch that would nullify dangers before they could be launched against the sacred soil of the German Reich. Probably the S.D. also broadened its communications activities somewhat. It filched a diplomatic telegram here and there, and listened in to diplomatic telephone conversations, even one, on May 7, 1940, between Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Britain and Premier Paul Reynaud of France—Chamberlain and Reynaud could certainly be considered enemies of Germany and the Nazi party. But the S.D. probably got most of the external communications intelligence that it needed from the Forschungsamt, which was quite as interested as the S.D. in preserving the Nazi regime.
Himmler headed the S.S. as a party official; as a government official he headed the two Reich police organizations: the Gestapo, which handled political crimes, and the Kripo, or Kriminalpolizei, which dealt with ordinary crimes. Both had communication intelligence sections, but, as with the S.D., these probably concentrated primarily on telephones and mail and had but little cryptanalysis to do.
In 1939, the party and government police organizations were merged as the R.S.H.A., the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (“Reich Central Security Office”). The Gestapo became Amt IV of the R.S.H.A., the Kripo Amt V. The government domestic watchdog branch of the S.D. evolved into the R.S.H.A. Amt III, Domestic Intelligence, and the foreign branch into Amt VI, Foreign Intelligence. Amt VI was charged with the production of secret information about enemy countries.
It apparently directed its thoughts mainly to the more traditional methods of gathering such intelligence. But shortly after the Anschluss, Walter Schellenberg, a young S.D. official, seized the files of the Austrian secret service and found that among the most interesting documents were those on cryptanalysis. This find may have soon thereafter recalled to the mind of Wilhelm Höttl, a youthful Austrian staff member of the new R.S.H.A., the World War I deeds of the Austro-Hungarian cryptanalysts, which General Max Ronge had detailed in an exciting book. Höttl discovered that General Andreas Figl, former head of the Austrian Dechiffrierdienst, had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1938. Höttl got Heinz Jost, then head of Amt VI, to free Figl and to install him as an instructor in cryptology in a villa in the Wannsee section of Berlin. Here he passed on his experience to a new generation.
But such training takes time, and any intelligence that the R.S.H.A. obtained from communications continued to come to it from other sources. It seized an occasional plaintext telegram and somehow acquired a one-part Spanish code and used it to read intercepts. It also was granted what must have been the first opportunity in history to get codes wholesale. Yamato Ominata, Japan’
s intelligence chief in Europe, offered to deliver the Yugoslav general staff and Turkish, Vatican, Portuguese, and Brazilian codes for 28,000 Swiss francs, or about $20,000. The offer may well have been accepted, for all those codes were read at one time or another by various German agencies.
In addition, the R.S.H.A. depended upon the military and the Forschungsamt for communications intelligence. Thus, in the autumn of 1941, Schellenberg, who had become deputy chief of Amt VI, asked Reinhard Heydrich, head of the whole R.S.H.A., to contact both the Forschungsamt and the military. Schellenberg wanted them to concentrate their intercept posts and cryptanalysts on Vichy and Belgrade traffic for some information he needed. At about the same time, Heydrich called the chief of the Wehrmacht signal organization and asked him to send Schellenberg any information about American-Japanese negotiations that he might obtain.
Himmler disliked such dependency and in March of 1942 he sent Schellenberg to Göring’s beautiful country house, Karinhalle, to urge that the Forschungsamt be incorporated into Amt VI. Göring greeted him in a Roman outfit, toga, sandals, and all, carrying his Reichmarschal’s baton, and, after hearing Schellenberg, said vaguely, “Well, I will have a word about it with Himmler.” Nothing happened, of course, and Schellenberg, who at this time became head of Amt VI, set up a well-funded department, to carry out research in secret communications including invisible inks and microfilms as well as cryptography and cryptanalysis. Figl may well have been the nucleus of this group. It may have provided the digraphic cipher—ten tables 26 × 26, one of which was selected to encipher each message—that one R.S.H.A. radio net was using much later in the war. This system may have been adapted from the Army, which at one time used digraphic substitution as a field cipher. For internal communications, the R.S.H.A. used cipher machines supplied by the military.
The new department did not, in any event, produce a great deal of communications intelligence, for Schellenberg continued to get most of his from the outside. Starting in 1942, he said, “Every three weeks or so I gave a dinner party at my home where the technical heads of the three services, Defense Ministry, Post Office [which unscrambled transatlantic telephone conversations], and Research Stations [Forschungsamt] discussed new developments and helped each other with their problems.* These meetings were perhaps more than any other single factor responsible for the high standard of the scientific and technical side of my service. It was the cooperation and interest which these people showed to me personally which made most of my success in Secret Service operations possible”—an unexampled acknowledgment of indebtedness to communications intelligence by a cloak-and-dagger man.
The R.S.H.A. repaid some of this generous help with the products of the greatest spy coup of World War II—Operation Cicero. “Cicero” was Elyesa Bazna, an Albanian working in Ankara as the valet to Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, British ambassador to neutral Turkey. Bazna had taken wax impressions of the keys to the black dispatch box which Sir Hughe kept beside his bed for the secret papers that he liked to pore over late at night. The valet would open the box, photograph the documents, and sell the rolls of film to the R.S.H.A. agent in Turkey, L. C. Moyzisch. Cicero received £15,000 a roll—in counterfeit notes.
Encipherment table H-1 for a digraphic cipher of an R.S.H.A. radio net in Norway
The documents consisted largely of cables to Sir Hughe. They were of the highest importance—reports of Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill conversations, for example. But when this information began streaming into Berlin in November and December, 1943, Hitler and other top officials refused to believe that it was genuine. “Too good to be true,” Ribbentrop told Moyzisch. The fact is that he did not want to read therein the impending doom of the German Reich.
The messages, which bore date-time notations, could help in breaking the British diplomatic codes, and though Pers Z would seem to have been the logical recipient, Schellenberg gave the photographs to his communications-intelligence friends in the military. They cooperated fairly closely with Pers Z, however, and they probably passed the material to it. Pers Z may also have gotten copies from Ribbentrop. Kunze and Paschke both saw Cicero documents and were unimpressed. For the British were by then superenciphering their most secret messages in a one-time pad. Though the Cicero messages may have contributed to the solution of some lesser British systems and so helped produce some minor information, they could not make possible the recovery of the one-time keys of any other messages. Operation Cicero, so complete a success in one sense, was thus an almost total failure in another.
At about this time, Höttl, the young man who had discovered Figl, became, at age 28, the head of Amt VI E—the Amt VI section for southeast Europe. He soon grew friendly with Hungarian Army intelligence, whose chief one day showed off his communications-intelligence unit. The Hungarians did indeed have a fine organization, and it very much impressed Höttl. He thought that it did relatively more with its poor resources than did Pers Z, the Forschungsamt, the German military cryptanalysts, and the police eavesdroppers all put together. In the middle of 1944, he convinced the pro-Nazi Hungarian Premier, Andor Sztojay, to have the unit furnish him with its results. The unit’s commander, Major Bibo, who lived only for his work, agreed to concentrate on the traffic that Höttl wanted when Höttl promised him more men, better equipment, and extra money.
Höttl went from room to room in Bibo’s offices and picked out the choicest of the copious solutions. A few days later, he laid the sheaf before Schellenberg and said: “Please read this, and if you would like to have it regularly, give me a credit for the first 100,000 Swiss francs.” But Schellenberg feared that Hitler, who distrusted the Hungarians because of their marked lack of enthusiasm for being an Axis partner, would not like the idea if he heard of it. He gave Höttl only a nominal sum. But Höttl wangled the francs out of the R.S.H.A. financial wizard, Friedrich Schwend—not too difficult a task, since the money was bogus.
Within six months, the unit exceeded even Höttl’s sanguine hopes by reading a goodly portion of the secret radiograms of embassies in Moscow. Figl seems to have joined it and become one of its star cryptanalysts, performing some minor miracles in his room with pots of black coffee and packs of cigarettes whenever the unit was stumped. Bibo’s interceptors and cryptanalysts had become the R.S.H.A.’s first major source of its own of foreign communications intelligence. It could read some American and British messages, especially in 1945, when it acquired a cryptanalyst “who could sift the unimportant from the important with the sureness of a sleep-walker.” It read almost all the radio traffic of the Turkish embassy, learning that Stalin deeply suspected his Anglo-American allies and feared that they might conclude a separate peace with Germany. The reports of the Turkish military attaché, Höttl was told by General Alfred Jodl, chief of the Wehrmacht operations staff, contained the most valuable information about Russia that the high command then had. By this time, about the end of 1944, the advancing Russians forced the unit to retreat from Budapest to the Odenburg hills and, three months later, to an Alpine redoubt. These disruptions did not choke off the flow of intelligence, which ended only when the war did.
“I do not want to exaggerate the importance of what we achieved, although in this one year of my collaboration with the Hungarians there were at least a hundred successes such as seldom fall to the lot of a Secret Service working in the ordinary ways,” Höttl wrote. His impressive tribute, which independently seconds the praise that Schellenberg offered to other cryptanalysts, confirms the overwhelming supremacy that communications intelligence attained in both quantity and quality over almost any other form of secret intelligence in World War II.
Long before the S.D. or the R.S.H.A. came into existence, a military organization handled Germany’s intelligence and counterespionage functions. This was the Abwehr. The name means “counterespionage,” and that was the original function of the six-officer Abwehr unit permitted Germany under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. As the German Army grew, so did the Abwehr’s functions, until it encom
passed foreign “counter” intelligence and standard military intelligence. The name, however, stuck.
In 1934, Hitler merged the Army, Navy, and Air Force into the Wehrmacht, with a single general staff for all the armed forces—the O.K.W., or Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. To this the Abwehr was attached, and in 1935 a naval officer, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, took over as Abwehr chief. He was a sensitive, white-haired, mufti-garbed, mysterious personage. He hated Hitler, and his organization abominated the Nazi-spawned S.D. and R.S.H.A. that reduplicated Abwehr functions. The feeling was reciprocated, but the rivals reached an uneasy truce in which the Abwehr handled military matters and the others nonmilitary. However, in February of 1944, Hitler dissolved the Abwehr headquarters and merged it into the R.S.H.A., where it became Amt VI/Mil under Schellenberg.
The Abwehr had three headquarters sections: Abwehr I, for secret intelligence, whose Group G produced invisible inks and forged passports and other documents for secret agents, and whose Group I maintained wireless contact with Abwehr secret agents; Abwehr II, for sabotage and special duties; Abwehr III, counterespionage, whose Group N, added in wartime, secured communications organizations. Among the Abwehr radio stations for agent contact were those at Hamburg, where 20 transmitters were installed in separate concrete dugouts in an open field and were remote-controlled from the receiving center a few kilometers away, and at Ulm, where 19 transmitters radioed agents from a small wooden building constructed in 1938 on a hill just outside the city.
