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GERMANY'S FIRST CRYPTANALYSIS ON THE WESTERN FRONT: DECRYPTING BRITISH AND FRENCH NAVAL CIPHERS IN WORLD WAR I
Cryptologia, Jan 2005 by Brückner, Hilmar-Detlef
ABSTRACT: Beginning in December 1914, staff members of the Bavarian Sixth Army wireless telegraphy command broke into the low-grade cipher system of the Royal Navy and worked their way up to high-grade codes. They also solved two French high-grade codes. In December 1915 a provisional army office was created for the interception and decryption of British naval wireless-telegraphy (w/t) communications. In January 1917, coincidental with the beginning of unrestricted submarine warfare, this unit became a regular army unit.
KEYWORDS: World War I, British codes and ciphers a-p, a.c.6, a.c.7, a.f.6, a-p, ABMV, Fleet Code, Fleet Signals Book, French Naval Signal book, French universal system (chgt), signal intelligence, signal security, operational security, German naval intelligence, wireless-telegraphy (w/t), Bavarian Sixth Army W/T Command 6, Intercept Station Roubaix, Information Department Director W/T Service GHQ, Observation Office W/T Command 6, Bavarian W/T Surveillance Command, Föppl, cryptanalysis, Gronsfeld, Gronsfeld Rack, cribs, key repeats, re-encodements.
EDITOR'S NOTE
This article helps fill perhaps one of the greatest missing links in cryptologic history: Germany's codebreaking endeavor in World War I. This proved valuable enough for that country to set up agencies for cryptanalysis in the peace that followed. Yet almost nothing is known about it.
A portion of that history is of course legendary. Signals intelligence engineered the German triumph of Tannenberg in August 1914 and greatly aided the defeat of czarist Russia. But this information comes only from printed sources, since the Prussian-German military archives in Potsdam were destroyed in two Allied air raids, one in 1944 and especially the one on 14 April 1945. The technical, organizational, and operational details that the original worksheets, logbooks, messages, and reports would have provided are lost. They are lost as well for the Western Front, where no world-shaking German victories took place to generate memoirs.
Some secondary material indeed exists. The charming Dr. Hermann Stutzel, who in his old age solved crossword puzzles without using the diagrams because that would have made solution too easy, wrote a brief memoir about his work as a World War I cryptanalyst in "Geheimschrift und Entzifferung im Ersten Weltkrieg" ["Secret Writing and Codebreaking in the First World War"] Truppenpraxis (Juli 1969), 541-45. World War I signals officer Colonel Fritz Nebel, inventor of the famed ADFGVX field cipher, who remembered everything with precision, left a brief, unpublished memoir, "Aus den ersten Jahren des deutschen Funkaufklârungsdienstes" ["Out of the First Years of the German Radio Intelligence Service"]. The naval archives, which survived World War II in a swimming pool (drained) at Tambach castle near Coburg, incorporate papers of the imperial navy's own WWI codebreaking unit, at Neumunster. But these contain only occasional memoranda from the army - for example, a warning from Stutzel about the weakness of German Foreign Office codes - and do not depict army cryptanalysis. Likewise, the unpublished post-World War II memoirs of two Foreign Office cryptanalysts, Adolf Paschke and Dr. Rudolf Schauffler, touch briefly on their work in World War I army cryptanalysis, but these total only a handful of pages. Germany's ally, Austria-Hungary, began cryptanalysis in 1911, and its leading figures, Colonels Andreas Figl and Max Ronge, have left memoirs, both unpublished. Ronge, who also published a study of his country's intelligence service, burned the papers of the codebreaking unit at the end of the war. In any event, that unit did not deal with Central Powers cryptanalysis on the Western Front, and their memoirs do not discuss it, except perhaps tangentially.
These lacunae are partially offset by the fact that in the German empire the kingdoms of Saxony, Wurttemberg, and Bavaria had their own military contingents. In war these fell under the operational control of the Prussian general staff, through the king of Prussia as emperor of Germany and supreme war lord. But they kept their records in their capitals of Dresden, Stuttgart, and Munich, while the grand duchy of Baden, though its army corps was incorporated into the Prussian army, preserved its military records in Karlsruhe. These four archives including Dresden's, which had been moved before the 1945 air raid that bombed out that city - thereby escaped the destruction of Potsdam's.
Of the four, Bavaria was the largest, richest, and most independent; it maintained excellent archives. And, fortuitously, signal units of its army found themselves, at the beginning of trench warfare, near the English Channel, where they could intercept the easily solved messages of low-level Royal Navy units. They energetically seized this opportunity, and thus inspired German cryptanalysis in the west. This is the story that Hilmar-Detlef Bruckner has unearthed from the Bavarian military archives and presents here. He has found part of the missing link. He has restored the protagonists to history. Let us hope that his work becomes the springboard for more studies of German Western Front cryptanalysis in World War I!
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