It all began long before World War II, in 1919, when under the auspices of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Z branch was created, whose task was to intercept diplomatic correspondence of friends and enemies of the state.
In total, team Z has uncovered a lot of ciphers and codes from more than 30 countries over the entire period of work: the USA, England, France, Japan, Italy and other less significant players in the world arena. The decryption results were received by the Minister of Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop and personally by Adolf Hitler. In addition to Group Z, the Foreign Ministry had its own separate decryption services - the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine. The structure of radio intelligence in the troops had the following hierarchy: the central decryption body provided operational information to the main command, and special companies worked at the front line, whose tasks were to intercept radiograms in the interests of the local command.
During the interrogation on June 17, 1945, Colonel-General Jodl gave an exhaustive account of the importance of radio intelligence on the Eastern Front: “The bulk of intelligence about the course of the war (90 percent) was radio intelligence materials and interviews with prisoners of war. Radio intelligence (both active interception and decryption) played a special role at the very beginning of the war, but until recently it did not lose its importance. True, we have never been able to intercept and decipher the radiograms of the Soviet headquarters, the headquarters of the fronts and armies. Radio intelligence, like other types of intelligence, was limited only to the tactical zone."
It is noteworthy that the Germans achieved great success in deciphering enemies from the Western Front. So, according to Dr. Otto Leiberich, who at one time served as the head of the post-war special service BSI (Bundesamts fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, Federal Security Service in the field of information technology), the Germans managed to "hack" the massive American encryptor M-209.
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The decoding of the M-209 radio messages became one of the most successful results of the work of cryptanalysts in Nazi Germany.
In the United States, it was known as the C-36 and was the brainchild of the Swedish cryptographer Boris Hagelin. The Yankee army purchased about 140 thousand of these scramblers. The ability to read such a massive enemy encryption machine was a clear strategic advantage for Germany.
A veteran of the Wehrmacht's decryption service, Reinold Weber (the Parisian unit of FNAST-5), a few years ago shared with German journalists the intricacies of the operation to hack the M-209. According to him, in the Third Reich it was even possible to create a prototype of an automated machine to speed up the decoding of the most complex and voluminous fragments of intercepted radio messages from the Americans.
Good ideas are just in the air. The British at about this time (1943-44) built a Colossus, designed to automatically decrypt the radio messages of the famous Lorenz SZ 40 / SZ 42. Dehomag even received an order for the manufacture of the first fascist "computer" for hacking the M-209 in 1944. the order was completed for two years, but the Reich, which was rolling down a slope, did not have such luxury, and all decryption procedures had to be done virtually manually. It took a long time, and often operational information was hopelessly outdated before it could be deciphered. The Germans were able to hack the M-209 not only with their own cryptanalysts - they had copies of a similar encryption technique purchased in Switzerland through the Foreign Ministry.
"Big Ear" (research department of the German Air Ministry) has been engaged in interception and decryption work in the interests of the Luftwaffe since April 1933. The area of interest of the department included wiretapping, cryptanalysis and perlustration. The Big Ear specialists did not hesitate to work with diplomatic messages, as well as to spy on their own citizens. Due to the wide range of responsibilities and small staff, the research department did not gain much success in breaking enemy codes and ciphers.
Much more significant were the achievements of the "observation service" of the Kriegsmarine, created in the 1920s. One of the first advances was breaking the radio codes of British ships in the port of Aden during the Italian attack on Abyssinia between late 1935 and mid-1936. The British were in a state of war, so they switched to battle codes, but they reacted rather negligently to this - their messages were full of repeated phrases and words, as well as standard formulations. It was not difficult for the Germans to hack them, and later use the developments for further decryption, especially since the British later modified the codes quite slightly. By 1938, Kriegsmarine specialists were reading most of the British administrative communications ciphers.
As soon as the cold confrontation with Britain turned into a hot phase, the Germans began to break the Admiralty ciphers, as critical for planning the actions of submarines, surface fleets and long-range aviation. Already in the first weeks of the war, it was possible to read messages on the movement of ships in the North Sea and the Skagerrak Strait. The German Navy received top secret radio intercepts regarding the use of Loch Yu as a base for the home fleet. Here were the strongest formations of British warships.
The battleship "Scharnhorst", which, on a tip from the cryptanalysts of Germany, sank the ship "Rawalpindi"
The practical result of the work of the interceptors and decoders of the Kriegsmarine was the combat exit to the sea of the battleship Scharnhorst, during which the British warship Rawalpindi with a displacement of 16 thousand tons was sunk. For a long time, the German raiders rattled the Royal Navy, and the British tried to do something, but the Nazis perfectly read all the radio messages concerning the maneuvers of the ships. At the very beginning of the 40s, German cryptanalysts could read from a third to half of the entire radio exchange of the British Navy. The victims of this work were six British submarines, which the Germans sent to the bottom on a tip from the "surveillance service". When German troops invaded Norway, they had to organize a special diversionary strike, to which the British threw the bulk of their forces. It was the decryption that made it possible to determine the British intentions to attack the German landing party heading for the shores of Norway. As a result, everything ended well for the Nazis, the British missed the main blow, and the country was occupied by Germany. On August 20, 1940, the Admiralty finally realized that the Germans were reading their private correspondence and changed the codes, which briefly complicated the work - after a couple of months, the surveillance service also opened the new codes of the British.
Raider "Atlantis" - the hero of the Japanese ransomware
The history of the Second World War knows examples of the capture of Great Britain ciphers in a combat situation. At the very beginning of November 1940, the German raider Atlantis very successfully attacked and captured the English ship Otomedon with a valid code book. The good fortune of the Germans was that the secret materials of the British were packed in a special package, which was supposed to go to the bottom in case of danger of capture. But the officer responsible for dumping the valuable cargo overboard was killed by the very first German shot, which predetermined the discrediting of the ciphers. Also, from the steamer Otomedon, the Germans got their hands on the operational plans of England in case of a war with Japan. The importance of such information was appreciated by Emperor Hirohita and awarded the captain of the Atlantis with a samurai sword. It was a unique gift for the Germans - the Japanese presented such a present only to Rommel and Goering.
Later, in 1942, a similar raider "Thor", already in the Indian Ocean, captured the crew of the ship "Nanjing" from Australia. This time the most secret documents went to the bottom, but about 120 bags with diplomatic mail ended up in the hands of the Nazis. From them it was possible to learn that the British and their allies had long ago broken the codes of Japan and read the entire radio exchange of the samurai. The Germans immediately came to the aid of the Allies and radically revised the communication coding system of the Japanese army and navy.
In September 1942, Germany received the gift again, sinking the British destroyer Sikh in shallow Atlantic waters, from which divers were able to retrieve most of the code books.
