GERMANY'S FIRST CRYPTANALYSIS ON THE WESTERN FRONT: DECRYPTING BRITISH AND FRENCH NAVAL CIPHERS IN WORLD WAR I

By autumn 1915, at the latest, the military authorities were convinced that the interception of the communications of the enemy and the decryption of the ciphers was rewarding. Both Roubaix and the Information Department were upgraded.

On 27 October 1915, the Bavarian Minister for War established Intercept Station Roubaix by formal decree as a regular unit of the Royal Bavarian Army and so made decryption a regular army activity. But there was a side effect. The Prussian officer, Hoffmann, who nominally was still officer in charge of Roubaix, had to be replaced by a Bavarian officer.29 Reserve lieutenant Walter Wickop, who in September had already taken over informally, was now made officer in charge of Roubaix in his own right.

On 12 November 1915, the director of the W/T Service GHQ formally established the Information Department as a military unit. It reported directly to him and was renamed Information Office of the Director of the Field W/T Service (Nachrichtenstelle des Chefs der Feldtelegraphie). Its staff comprised of the W/T Commander 6 as its head, the naval officer attached to W/T Command 6, First lieutenant Hoffmann, plus Reserve lieutenants Bäumler, Hugo Meusel, and Ernst Wilmersdörffer, two corporals - one of them naturally Ludwig Foppl, who had been promoted in October, and four telegraphists. Meusel was a 29year-old teacher from Munich, who had joined W/T Command 6 in April 1915 and had become a member of the Information Office in June; Wilmersdorffer a 25-year-old junior lawyer and son of the Royal Saxon consul general in Munich, Theodor Wilmersdörffer, who had joined Heavy W/T Station 2 on 2 August 1914. Meusel had received his promotion at the end of October, Wilmersdörffer at the beginning of September.30

Föppl was made a Reserve Lieutenant, too, but only in July 1916 - regulations prescribed that first he had to be made a sergeant and serve several months in that grade. There were no vacancies at that time, but he received his promotion nevertheless in view of his achievements, which were highly praised by his superiors. The Sixth Army Staff Officer Signals, Major Schellenberger, wrote in June 1916: "I deem the well-known services of Sergeant Foppl for the great cause [i.e. the German war effort] of such outstanding importance that a supernumerary promotion might well be justified. Föppl's activities have been expressly and extensively acknowledged widely outside the [Sixth] Army by diverse authorities, repeatedly by the chief of the Admiralty Staff of the Navy, and by the award of respective decorations."31

The fact that the W/T Commander 6 had to double as head of the Information Office demonstrates how pressing the lack of officers had become. First Lieutenant Hoffmann finally had to leave in the middle of February 1916, because the Prussian army needed him for one of its own units. He was appointed head of its W/T Department 115.32

Meanwhile the Imperial Navy had decided to set up its own interception and evaluation center at Neumunster. This meant that it needed Lieutenant Commander Braune back. He left in February 1916.33 As he had come to know all the decrypting techniques of the Information Department and all its solutions of British codes and ciphers, the new institution of the Imperial Navy was off to a good start. Braune became the father of German naval signals intelligence.