The German Spy and the Codebreakers: Hans Thilo Schmidt and the Allied Efforts to Break the Enigma Codes

By John Colman

The German Spy and the Codebreakers is a book that describes the remarkable efforts by French Intelligence officers to recruit the spy who provided the Allies with the German Enigma codes and his remarkable revelations about Germany’s stunning military growth that was downplayed or ignored by European and British leaders before World War II.This book fills in empty spaces in our understanding about exactly what information Hans Thilo Schmidt passed to the French, the dates of the meetings, who was in attendance, and the impact it had on the Polish efforts to break the Enigma codes. It also puts into perspective the enormous volume of German military intelligence that the French had received from Schmidt and their reactions to that intelligence. Lastly, the individual sacrifices made by Bertrand, the spymaster Lemoine, Schmidt and the Polish codebreakers that have been described in written accounts published decades apart in different languages are now brought together in one book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Colman
• Release date: Jan 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532347665

John Colman

Career Profile: Education - Bachelor of Science English Composition - Chemistry, Wayne State University 1964-1970. Worked on the the total synthesis of campothecin with the Chemistry Department under Cal Stevens. Product Development Director and President of Life Extension Supplement Formulators. Senior feature article writer for Life Extension magazine 2004-2007. Product Development Director Stem Cell Products, LLC 2007-2008. Currently: President of RC Formulations, Inc. Writer of non-fiction World War II history. Specialize in World War II spy history and cryptography. Scientific Background: Major Human Clinical Trials: Gamma Tocopherol and Sesame Lignans Effect on Serum F1, F2 Isoprostanes, Peroxynitrite Radical, Nitrotyrosine and Nitration.(PATENT). Effect of Oral Supplementation of Wheat Sprout Extracts on Joint Inflammation in Patients Diagnosed with Osteoarthritis.(PATENT PENDING). Responsible for over $80 million dollars in sales of developed, launched and article-based products in the supplement business. Responsible for 21 major product launches, participation in 40 launches 22 patents pending previous 5 years. Cited 2,346 journal articles in articles authored. Wrote 10 human clinical trial protocols. Lead investigator in 5 human clinical trials.

Book preview

The German Spy and the Codebreakers

Hans Thilo Schmidt and the Allied Efforts to Break the Enigma Codes

Publication date: January 17, 2018

John S. Colman

The German Spy and the Codebreakers

1.Pre-war 1929 -1939 and World War-1939-1945

2.Military intelligence – History

3.World War 1939-1945 - Cryptography

ISBN 978-1-5323-4766-5

I dedicate this book to my loving wife, Ronnie, for her support, and my daughter Dana, who guided me through the publishing process. I also dedicate this book to Neuveau Monde Editions, Paris, France who published, Notre Espion Che Hitler, written by Paul Paillole and to Casemate Publications, Oxford, UK and Haverstown, PA, USA for publishing The Spy in Hitler’s Inner Circle. Paillole’s book translated by Curtis Key and Hannah McAdams describes all the meetings between Hans Thilo Schmidt and French Intelligence. It would have been impossible to describe the exact meetings and what was said and exchanged during these meetings without their publication efforts.

I also dedicate this book to Gustave Bertrand, whose persistence in finding a solution to the first machine code, Enigma, saved countless civilian and military lives and shortened World War II by years. He matched French spy intelligence with the Poles advanced mathematical skills so that the German machine codes were finally broken, and the precise wiring of the Enigma machine was replicated.

His patience with the Poles for not sharing their Enigma discoveries with him is remarkable, since it lasted from 1932 to late 1939. The Poles finally disclosed what they knew to the French and British officials only a few weeks before the invasion of their country by the Third Reich.

In Rumania, he rescued many members of the Polish codebreaking group and brought them to the Paris suburb of Gretz-Armainvilliers to continue their decipherment of the German codes at crucial early stages of the war.

After the Germans invaded France, he successfully evacuated the Polish and Spanish codebreakers to a secret base in Oran, Algeria and, once again, set up successful codebreaking operations there.

When the growing Abwehr presence threatened his operations, he secretly moved his team to the ‘free zone’ of France and again organized codebreaking operations in the Chateau Vignolles until the Germans occupied all of France after the Allied landings at Casablanca.

Bertrand was arrested by the Gestapo but managed to be set free, fleeing to the to the Normandy coast where he warned his fellow codebreakers to go into hiding there. He was subsequently evacuated to England by MI6.

Alan Turing, the top British codebreaker and mathematician, made the claim that he could have broken into the Enigma codes without the benefit of the earlier Polish codebreaking work in about two years. Let us consider the impact that two years delay in winning the war would have in terms of the human toll. Between September 1939 and May 1945, approximately fifteen million people were gassed or starved to death in Hitler’s concentration camps. Two more years of war would mean that at least three to five million more civilians and P.O.W.’s would have died, and, instead of Russia losing 23 million soldiers, several million more would be lost.

The Allied invasion would be delayed until 1946 and the Russians would have made an end-around from Berlin to the coast of France where all of Europe would have fallen under Soviet rule – an unthinkable scenario.

Instead, the Allied invasion took place in June 1944 and the Soviets were stopped at Berlin, but still managed to do an end around to occupy Albania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. Stalin’s intention to seize all of Europe was blocked only because the Allied invasion took place when it did.

This book pieces together Bertrand’s struggles and Hans Thilo Schmidt’s remarkable revelations about Germany’s stunning military growth that was downplayed or ignored by European and British leaders. It illustrates the dangers of disregarding intelligence from the highest sources for political expediency – the lesson is as applicable now as it was then. This book fills in empty spaces in our understanding about exactly what information Schmidt passed to the French, the dates of the meetings, who was in attendance, and the impact it had on the Polish efforts to decrypt the Enigma codes. It also puts into perspective the enormous volume of German military intelligence that the French had received from Schmidt and their reactions to that intelligence. Lastly, the individual sacrifices made by Bertrand, the spymaster Lemoine, Schmidt and the Polish codebreakers that have been described in written accounts published decades apart in different languages are now brought together in one book.

Table of Contents

The Cipher Machine

The Spymaster

The Treasure Trove

The Route

Germany on the Brink

The Turning Point

Hitler Assumes Power

Meetings Across Europe

The Forschungsamt

The Secret Plan

Escalating Events

The Invasion of Poland

War

Sharing the Secret

Escape to Rumania

Evacuation and Return

Escape and Evasion

Arrest and Evacuation

Bibliography

Notes

Appendix: Recovery of a V-2 Rocket

Chapter 1 – The Cipher Machine

The Mysterious Package

At noon on the first Saturday in January 1929, the Polish Railroad Customs office in Warsaw received a crate from Germany addressed to a German firm with offices in Warsaw. A representative of the firm immediately arrived at the customs house unannounced, telling the clerk at the front desk that the crate contained radio equipment that was shipped by mistake and must be returned to Germany without going through customs inspection. The man’s insistence and calls from the German consulate raised the suspicions of the customs house officials.

Government offices were closed on Saturday afternoons and the Germans were told that they would have to wait until Monday to pick up their package during normal business hours.

The customs officials were sufficiently alarmed by these calls and notified the Polish Radio Intelligence Office which dealt with radio-related matters at that time. The bureau chief there realized that secret inspection of the package was beyond his departments' ability and he told the customs official to call the chief of Polish Counterintelligence, Stefan Mayer, for help. Mayer understood the significance of the event and quickly organized an operation for retrieval of the package without detection. His men noticed the sudden heavy surveillance of the customs house by German Abwehr agents. Antoni Palluth and Ludomir Danilewicz were the two engineers called in to secretly inspect the intercepted crate for the Cipher Bureau. At 3:00 P.M. the same day, Danilewicz, a twenty-five-year-old radio operator, was working on some radio equipment in his home workshop when his telephone rang. The duty officer of the Army General Staff was on the other end and told him to take a taxi to the Staff building on a secret and important matter. (1)

Upon arriving, Danilewicz found the halls of the Staff building almost deserted save for Lieutenant Maksymilian Ciezky, an old acquaintance from the Cipher Department who he had done work for over the years. As an electrical engineer and early Ham radio operator, Danilewicz had provided Ciezky and the Polish General Staff with radio-related advice and equipment in the past.

He was told that a suspicious crate had arrived at the customs office a few hours earlier and was being held at the customs house for discrete examination. He and Antoni Palluth, a partner of his who was an experienced cryptologist, collected equipment and tools on the following Sunday morning.

They were warned that the customs house was under unusually heavy surveillance by German Abwehr agents and they must be careful in approaching the building. They were guided into the customs house through a back door under the watchful eyes of Polish intelligence agents.

They methodically examined the crate and then carefully opened it in a back room of the customs house. Instead of radio parts, what they saw before them was a complex mechanical device, similar in appearance to a typewriter, which Palluth recognized as some sort of new cipher machine.

They began measuring its dimensions, photographed each part, and drew diagrams of its inner wiring. They then reassembled it and tested it to see how it worked.

Whenever they pressed a typewriter key on the machine, a bulb lit above it which had a different letter on it. They carefully reassembled and resealed the code machine in its original crate with identical postal seals so that even the most careful examination by the Germans would give no clue that it had been opened.

The diagrams and descriptions of the device were given to the Intelligence branch of the Cipher Department where it was duly filed away. The crate was shipped back to the radio company in Berlin. (2)

Palluth and Danilewicz were partners at the newly formed AVA Radio Company in Warsaw and already had a close working relationship with the Polish Cipher Bureau. They built a copy of the German Enigma machine with the help of one other trusted employee in a separate back room of the radio company after the other employees had left for the day. This Enigma 'double' served as a prototype for thirty more Enigmas they would build for the Polish military departments to communicate securely with one another.

The Polish Enigmas they made were obviously wired differently than the intercepted German version. Five more Enigmas doubles were constructed and saved for future use since they correctly assumed that a German military version of the device would soon appear. This interception pointed to the machine that the German Navy was using since 1926 to send coded messages that were impervious to traditional linguistic code breaking methods.

Marion Rejewski was a gifted mathematician who graduated Poznan University with a master’s degree on March 1st, 1929, having submitted a thesis entitled Theory of double periodic functions of the second and third kind and its applications. He then went on to attend secret courses in cryptology that were given by the newly formed Cipher Bureau for talented mathematics students under the direction of Lt. Colonel Gwido Langer.

The original Polish Cipher Bureau had hurriedly been reformed in late January 1929, partly in response to the fact that the Poles had intercepted this new and complex cipher machine. The Cipher Bureau now had a strong reason to believe that some version of the Enigma machine would be adapted for use by other branches of the German military in the future. The interception of the Enigma machine and the failure of traditional linguistic codebreaking methods in decoding this new cipher machine’s messages left only one alternative – higher mathematics. The director at the Poznan University’s Mathematics Institute, Professor Zdzislaw Krygowski was informed by Major Franciszek Pokorny, chief of the Cipher Bureau of Section II of the General Staff and Lt. Maksymilian Ciezki of the German Department that a new cryptology course was being formed at the beginning of January 1929. (3) The interception of the Enigma machine in early January and the formation of the cryptology course in early January was no coincidence.The new Polish Cipher department’s German section BS-4 chose mathematics students from Poznan University for a special reason. Poznan was formerly part of Pomerania under the German Empire founded in 1871 and its inhabitants spoke German and Polish fluently. The Polish General Staff wanted Langer to hire the most highly skilled mathematics students for code breaking, and Poznan University had the best mathematics department in the country.

The Polish Cipher Bureau was different from all the other European code and cipher departments at that time – it carefully selected its code breakers from university mathematics departments rather than using military personnel who were promoted through the ranks. This fact, more than anything else, allowed the Poles to have the most qualified code breakers at their disposal – only mathematical analysis would solve the breaking of codes generated by new and sophisticated cipher machines.

Wireless intercepts from their listening posts had detected a highly uniform code in use by the Kriegsmarine since 1926, which could not be broken by existing linguistic code breaking methods. Not being able to read potential adversaries' coded messages in the world of cryptography is the equivalent of going blind. Having completed his master’s degree, Marion Rejewski then enrolled in courses at Gottingen University in Germany to study actuarial statistics, but he suddenly dropped out of the course after returning to Poznan in the summer of 1930. Rejewski's attendance at Gottingen showed him the level of mathematics being taught in his field of expertise by the German professors, who were still teaching 19th century mathematics theorems. He reported to Langer that Polish 20th century mathematics was considerably more advanced than German mathematics, especially when it came to Rejewski's own field - permutation theory.

Rejewski's part-time work at the Polish Cipher Bureau, however, did not go unnoticed by German Abwehr agents, who had the Cipher Bureau under constant surveillance. This was easy for them to carry out since the Cipher Bureau branch was located next door to the University of Poznan in an underground structure with a single entrance. German agents were always seen passing by taking pictures of students and employees of the Cipher Bureau with their miniature cameras they always seemed to carry. Other groups of German agents were seen walking around the Saxon Palace, the new headquarters of the Polish military.

Stefan Mayer and Polish intelligence officials knew that the creation of files and photos of government employees by the Abwehr was a sign that this information would be used for the recruitment of Polish spies and to identify espionage targets for German intelligence. Marion Rejewski had now become a person of special interest to the Germans. They contacted his former professors at Gottingen and learned that he was one of the most gifted mathematics students the professors had seen in a long time.

A Frantic Search for Mathematicians

In the fall of 1930, the Germans introduced one of the most confounding changes to their cipher machine that was ever implemented – they added a plugboard to the front of the device with 26 holes that could be cross-plugged by three sets of cables with phone plugs at each end. The device was similar in appearance to a telephone switchboard. Coded messages now had billions of times more permutations. This marked the first appearance of the military version of the Enigma, which would be adopted by all the German armed services, albeit with slight modifications. Future changes to the device would be made and would require an ongoing recovery of machines and codebooks during World War II by the Allies for them to continuously read the German ciphers.

To save some space in creating a portable Enigma machine for field use, the Germans had hardwired the reflector, an invention that allowed the same machine to send and decode messages. The earlier Enigma models gave the reflector an adjustable wheel with settings A through Z, that appeared as a fourth wheel next to the other three coding wheels. The military Enigma now had only three wheels to encrypt messages. The removal of the adjustable reflector was the first serious cryptological design blunder that made the Enigma machine's coded messages more vulnerable to decryption, despite adding the plugboard. (4, 5) The plugboard did not disguise the underlying hard-wiring of the machines' three rotors.

Changing the daily rotor settings, the plugboard plugs and then changing the reflector setting would have made Enigma messages so complex they would be indecipherable by any mathematical means existing at the time.

Gwido Langer gathered the twenty top mathematics students at Poznan University who already worked for the Bureau and gave them a test to see if they could break a German code which they were told had been broken by the Cipher Bureau, a 'Double Dice' code from World War I. Only three students broke the code – Marion Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Rozycki. Langer then placed the three students in three separate rooms where they were given a more complex code. This time, only Marion Rejewski broke the code.

Chapter 2 – The Spymaster

Paul Paillole of French Counterintelligence describes Rodolphe Lemoine as a unique character of German origin. He became a naturalized French citizen and served our country without making a big deal of it for over twenty years. His loyalty was demonstrated on many occasions and his effectiveness proven by his masterful ability to resolve the most varied and ambiguous problems in a thorough and trustworthy manner. Thus, initial contacts with those who were deemed useful to our intelligence service were usually delegated to him. He performed wonders through his key role as an agent recruiter, his understanding of psychology and interpersonal skills, his knowledge of other countries, especially Germany, his language skill and his understanding of dialects. His height and his piercing and domineering stare added to his prestige as