PETER HANSEN (251-LIFE-1987) spent time working for the ABWEHR (the German Secret Service) during WW II and he has information that is known to a mere handful of people. He gives this secret information especially to SHARKHUNTERS. Here he tells us:

In KTB #176, we read that Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, believed that Reichsleiter Martin Bormann was in fact, a Soviet spy, but there was no proof. We continue……

While there were numerous paid informers and agents before the war and during the war, most originated in that already mentioned fellow traveler leftwing block of the population by and large. An additional smaller number were females of the secretarial/assistant types, some of them sexually frustrated or disappointed that were signed up mainly by Polish spymasters and a few French officers. Again, none of these knew anything or supplied any information that was connected with the Enigma operation and system.

This leaves two actual traitor for money cases, one of whom the then Czechoslovakian Secret Service paid and another, whom the French paid, both of them over a period of several years starting about 1935. Both of these men were old line Nazi party members who were pushed into the jobs they originally obtained by Heinrich Himmler in one case and Hermann Göring in the other.

Both of these ‘deserving’ party members gambled, bet on horse races and had extraordinary expenses for girlfriends and prostitutes, which their salaries naturally could not cover, so they shopped around for payola possibilities and offered themselves as providers of secret information. Initially both of these traitors were in middle level positions that had some connections with Abwehr and Security matters. However, the one working for Prague soon was promoted away from his original position and changed around several times but invariably in slots that dealt with matters connected with Bohemia and Moravia mainly, not with Enigma or connecting connected work. This man even managed to get transferred to Prague after Czechoslovakia was occupied in 1939 and remained there in SS connected police positions until 1942 when he was finally caught.

The second traitor, who offered himself to the French – who were at the start very reluctant to accept him as they feared he was an agent provocateur, worked initially in the so-called Chi Stelle, an office connected with and setting up coded systems and selecting coding tables. He had first approached both the Americans and the British in Berlin, but both turned him down as a fake. He furnished the French with copies of Enigma One Machine handling and operating instructions and also some coding tables for several time periods, utilized by the Army.

The French had no use for them because they had no Enigma connected information before the war, but passed these copies along to the Poles, as they had heard Poland was working on Enigma code breaking already. The real joker however is the fact that the two top officers of the Polish Secret Service overseeing that department WITHHELD these copies from their small group of mathematicians who worked on the Enigma One Systems and had already achieved some limited success because these bosses wanted their analysts to crack the codes themselves instead of depending upon the French to help them and fearing they might suddenly have to face a stop in the flow of information.

They wanted Poland to stand on its own efforts even though they lacked the financial and technical means to really set up a large enough operation to do so on a broad basis. The Poles, as we know, managed to crack some of the original Army and Navy Enigma codes as there was initially not yet any separate Air Force operating but once the Navy introduced the M-2 Enigma and technical additions to the systems, the Poles were totally stymied again in late 1938, though they periodically continued to crack and read lower grade traffic that continued to utilize the older, simpler machines. Eventually the Poles constructed some Enigma

One limitations on their own, partially buying and partially stealing the blueprints and improved that way, their speed of cracking such older type signals faster. Finally in the summer of 1939 during a joint meeting in Warsaw, the Poles handed over one such reconstructed Enigma machine to both the French and the British as their contribution to joint efforts. However, when the sample given to the British arrived in Bletchley Park, no practical use was found for it though it helped to make the English code breaking staff familiar with the Enigma machine system and its variations – but until May of 1940, no results were achieved.

Then, just as the Western Campaign started to occupy Holland, Belgium and France, the Luftwaffe Enigma codes were broken, because Luftwaffe radiomen and officers were often careless and repeated messages originally sent in one key of lower grade to other recipients in a higher grade of code. Just what Bletchley Park needed to break into the circuits by comparing identical contents signals. Then, to insult to injury, the so-called Flievos, Luftwaffe liaison officers attached to the Army, repeated the identical texts in Army code too!

These Flievos attached to the Army Commands to assure coordination of Army operations with Luftwaffe air operations were admittedly often under time pressure and had to deal with shortage of radio signal support staff, so they just copied whatever Air Force information they received into Army messages or vice versa and Bletchley Park immediately grabbed that opportunity to get their teeth into comparison solutions, having expected such an opportunity with great anticipation with the end result that the Army codes were likewise penetrated and cracked within a few weeks time.

These very same Flievos were also attached to German Navy Commands for specific naval/air operations, though truly joint operations were comparatively rare because Fatman Göring opposed them generally and attempted to minimize them as much as possible – only if it either was a ‘national’ joint effort, like Operation WESERÜBUNG, the occupation of Norway and Denmark, such joint operations were usually only possible while the Fatman was traveling on personal matters or taking one of his frequent drug-recovery ‘vacations’. However, again by literally copying naval messages in Luftwaffe easier codes or vice versa, Bletchley Park was given samples and made breaks into the considerably more complicated naval codes and systems, and offered Bletchley Park openings to widen their knowledge.

Now one very essential and highly efficient part of the ULTRA organization and workings hardly anybody mentions or cares about, this was the “Y” Organization of the many English listening stations and radio watch operations that were set up and geared to all German radio signals and circuits, generally manned by females of the Navy and sometimes the Royal Air Force auxiliary staffs doing boring, tiresome, demanding work on long around the clock shifts, because without obtaining the coded German signals, Bletchley Park would of course, have nothing to go on much less crack and read. This silently serving organizational network of numerous reception only stations with direct telephone connections and teletype lines to immediately pass along their picked up messages were so efficient that, at times, more than twenty different radio watch stations picked up the very same German messages, permitting elimination of hearing errors or garbled messages to the extent possible.

While it is correct that from between 50 and 70 different Enigma coding systems were in effect during 1943/1944, Bletchley Park generally did manage to crack between twenty and thirty only on the average, they concentrated upon those circuits that most concerned and interested them militarily and neglected others entirely or for some periods of time, sometimes for lack of qualified analyzing staff and also insufficient ‘Bombes’ constructed along pre-computer codewords. Again, here the Poles were the first who had constructed such ‘Bombes’ and the name was directly taken over from them because operational samples as well as certain mathematical calculation sheets and tables were likewise presented to France and Britain together with the gift samples of their reconstructed Enigma One machine in the summer of 1939 already.

But the British improved and considerably upgraded these to allow for faster calculations and broader operational utilization as the more advanced Enigma systems came into use. With other words, there was a constant technical struggle to better the equipment employed both on the British as well as the German sides too, in steps sometimes bits and pieces.

Furthermore, most of these different circuits and regional nets were only introduced from 1942 onwards increasingly. In the Navy primarily after the technically further improved M-3 and later on the M-4 Enigma machines were distributed in sufficient numbers and brought into service with additional Walzen (rotor) turn wheels for a variety of combinations and selections. These were only used in the Navy systems, not by the Army or Luftwaffe. However, again because of those Flievos and some lazy and stupid harbor commands, identical messages were radioed in both the older and simpler codes as well as the newer improved codes, and thus Bletchley Park was given grabbers to dig into the newer systems. Likewise smaller units and secondary commands continued to utilize the older, simpler systems and even for the weather reports demanded from U-Boats, upon the insistence of Fatman Göring, a suicidal job, hated by all submariners incidentally as pure location give-aways, were then repeated in the lower grade weather code systems for further distribution by the receiving German coastal stations and thus again picked up by the British “Y” Systems and relayed to Bletchley Park for comparison cracking attempts.

This inane duplication of messages was never properly understood by German communications inspectors in spite of the fact that these criminal errors and shortcomings had been pointed out by Naval Communications experts as early as 1928! Their findings were filed away and ignored, because it was considered impossible to mathematically crack the tremendously increased numerical possibilities, but human stupidity and repetitious routine laziness were never considered as occurring because they were, of course, forbidden – thus they could not occur, according to the thinking of the OKM Ministry and the Coding table preparation offices, that in addition permitted the incredible and irresponsible repetitious use of the identical coding tables repeatedly after a certain period of time had elapsed, as this was easier than straining their brains and creating constantly new ones. The British immediately caught on to this opportunity and made maximum use of it because their records of past messages and specific markings were retained on 2x4 cards with numerous handwritten notations and comments.

One of the first Americans brought into Bletchley Park for introduction to ULTRA stated – the British work in very limited spaces with rather tight budgets and have a flock of almost antique filing cabinets with plain white notation cards where unbelievable amounts of information are recorded for rechecking and later retrieval. Now at the Pentagon we would instead have huge halls full of gleaming security cabinets watched over by oodles of M.P. types in air conditioned comfort, but generally these would be almost entirely empty and largely nothing but Potemkin type fronts to impress outsiders, yet not furnishing even a sliver of facts about the opponents! Because in matters of intelligence, just throwing money at problems is never the full and rarely the best answer!

The Heimisch circuits were used until the end of the war, but after 1942 they were much more restricted as to what commands and units used them or participated in them. The Overseas Foreign water keys were primarily arranged for auxiliary cruisers or raiders that went to great length NOT to send any messages at all, though they did receive them periodically from the OKM or other operational commands, including the B-Dienst.

EDITOR NOTE – The German B-Dienst was the German network of radio listening posts, eavesdropping on Allied radio traffic.

But radar finished such operations in the fall of 1941 for good, and because first of all, few units used this circuit and comparatively few signals were encoded in that particular system, hardly used at all from 1942 onward though they remained valid, still Bletchley Park never had enough message input and never resolved that type of key either, both for lack of samples as well as eventual interest. However, when Ship 16 (ATLANTIS) was sunk while refueling U-Boats plus a few days later its supply ship PYTHON likewise also by British cruisers in very remote locations away from normal shipping lanes.

Virtually everybody in the know was convinced that the U-Boat keys must have been penetrated and cracked by the British and after the rescued crews of those two surface ships were brought back to western France by several U-Boats, Captain Bernard Rogge immediately raised this subject with (then) Vice Admiral Karl Dönitz, who met these U-Boats upon arrival.

Dönitz was very indignant and threatened Captain Rogge with court martial unless he immediately ceased to even mention such a possibility, much less talked further about it! This was in December of 1941 and those who overheard this conversation and knew anything about Enigma systems hardly could believe their ears, because they certainly agreed with Captain Rogge’s conclusions under the prevalent circumstances but to no avail, unless they wanted to be punished for believing otherwise…..

EDITOR NOTE – OTTO KRETSCHMER (122-+-1985) told us on many occasions, that he was convinced the Navy Enigma was cracked, and that being on the air with radio traffic invited destruction.