Transcripts For CSPAN3 Breaking The German Enigma Code 20240713

Washington, d. C. , host this is event. Im very excited to introduce the program with author dermit turing. He is the author of a number of books including allen tearing and the bomb breakthrough. He is the nephew of the famous analyst allen turing. Prior to the writing career, he worked for the International Law firm clifford chance. He is currently a trustee of bluchly park and turing trust. He serves as the bluchly park fellow of college in oxford. Last but certainly not least, he is a member of the honorary board here at the International Spy museum and he is a tremendous supporter of our educational efforts here at spy. So we are excited to have dermit here today to discuss how enigma was really broken with the cooperative efforts of poland, britain, and france. After the formal presentation, with he would like you to invite to walk up to the mikes on each side of the theater and go ahead and ask your questions. Tlcht is plen there will be plenty of time to ask your questions and get them answered. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to dermit turing. Thank you. [ plaus ] many thanks, chris. And to all of you for coming and for the welcome. Just before i start, i just like to say to chris and to the team here at the spy museum, its amazing to see how this place has transformed since the move last year from your previous premises. Its very, very exciting museum to be associated with. Its a privilege for me to be here today and to be associated with you more generally. Youre wondering what the real story is behind the enig many code breaking. Youve seen the movie and you no he that benedict is a gentleman on the right. He played my uncle who is the gentleman on the left. Have i got that right . . Yeah, i got that right. Anyway, these two characters are sort of confused or maybe holmes is the guy on left. Anyway, never mind. So we all know the truth. At least we think we know the truth about enigma. A little bit more involved. Can you go by the dvd if you havent already seen it. It is a memo which from where im standing, the print is big enough to read. I guess if youre at the back you may not be able to see this. This memo is in the British National archives. It dates from 1938 and the year before wall breaker and europe, theyre written by the crypt analyst which shortly became bluchly park and john tiltman. He subsequently worked for the nsa here in this is what happens to old spies. Dhoe they dont actually retire. When you retire from the uk, government it wasnt called the government code anymore. It was called gchq. When you retire from there, then he is hired by the nsa. Thats how things work. John tiltman worked here for a while. For about 20 years, in fact. This is what he wrote in 1938. He is writing about the enigma machine. I dont need to introduce that. That is benedict over there on the right. Were provided by the french. With photographs and directions for use of the German Army Enigma machine. There is an attachment on the front of the machine which does not appear on the model available to the public. This is the thing that tiltman is asking about. This plug board arrangement on the front. Which was not available on the commercial machine. Directions given, tillman goes on, do not fully explain the function of this attachment which is still not understood here. This is 1938. The british do not understand base he cannily how this german army model of the enigma machine works. This is interesting. This is right before the outbreak of war. En that state of ignorance if you like goes on right up until pretty much the outbreak of war. It goes on right through until july of 1939. The brits still dont know the answer to these questions. So if they dont know how the enigma machine works, this raises a question for me. Contrary to when you come away from the imtagitation game understanding and find the daily settings of the enigma machine, that design was ready and in the hands of the engineers by no later than november of 1939. Something almost miraculous happened. Knowledge has been just transformed in that time. And thats a puzzle. So what im going to talk to you about for the next few minutes is what is the answer to that particular mystery . Im going to introduce you to my friends which are documents. Im a geek, like finding old documents in archives. Im talking about how the photographs came to be taken in a moment. There is a photograph of an enig many machine. Its not a very good picture of an enigma machine. We have a document on the left. Berlin, 1913. You can see the number of the document is redakted by the photographer. Dwoent want anybody to know who it is who is connie it is. And this is the operating instructions for the enigma machine. The document in the middle is inside front cover of this which tells you that under the law of 1914, if you give this way to the enemy, then you will go straight to jail and you will not be able to pass go and you will not be able to collect your 200. They will hand it over to the french by the early 1930s. And the ones that do not explain the operation of this plug board device at the front of the machine. Everyone of whoom m is a spy. Beginning on the left, this is my friend hunt schmitt. His brother was the head of the german armys Cipher Office. And wasnt doing very well. And he begged his brother to give him a job. And his brother gave him a job in the Cipher Office and good old hans tilo had access to the safe where certain documents were kept. The salary of a german Civil Servant in between the wars period wasnt particularly great. And we know what happened to the German Economy between the wars period and so hans was thinking a ways to supplement his income. It looks smart in this one. This is about the time he joined the something called the nationalistic, socialistic german workers party. In other words, the nazis. And thats the photo of him on his nazi membership card. That was mid 1930s after hitler had come to power. Were still stuck in the 1930, 1931 period. Hitler is still trying to get his machine going to get himself elected. Hans schmitt needs the money. Hes got the documents. And so whats he do . He goes to the obvious person who is likely to be able to buy them from him which is the French Embassy. He walks up to the street in berlin to the French Embassy and he asks to speak to the military lead eastern says i have document thats might be of interest to you. I think is quite interesting. Berlin believes unlike certain other cities that or maybe even certain like other cities that it is the capital city of spying. And so its not surprising to discover the french in between the wars merdperiod had a proce. What they would do is refer the walk in to the gentleman in the middle. Hes very charming looking, isnt he . I tell you, hes very charming indeed. His career was as a professional card shark. He started his career in the 1870s and he was banned from most casinos across europe. He had been to jail a few times. And he managed to get quite a tidy fortune by charming a young man and pour lots of champagne down their throats and then win lots and lots of money off them at cards. So this hes got very many names. Most of the time when he was gambling he was going by the name of the baron from kerney which is a false name. But when he was born he was called rudolph stallman. He smoke 11 languages, german and french completely fluently. He became rudolph number one. Bhi the time he is meeting hans schmitt, he is rudolph some of the time. When hes not baron from kerney. He was baron from kerney for some of the time. Okay. So rex, that was the spy cover name and a lot easier than baron flon kerney or any of the other things. So we call him rex from now on. Rex, having retired from gambling, was hired by the german sorry, by the French Intelligence Service. This is a natural progression, isnt it . So the French Intelligence Service hire rex. And his job is to fix the walk in spy with the same kind of steely gaze that he would fix on his victims in the casino. He is the ideal person to check schmitt because he is a native german speaker. So he invites hans schmitt to a meeting. This has to be set up in the proper approved fashion. So there is a first of all there is a letter that goes to hans schmitt in fighting him to come to a particular address where there will be a letter waiting for him that will tell him where to go to go to the meeting and so forth. And then all the other meetings after that are set up with unsigned anonymous postcards which have sort of coded information about where he can go and find out information about where documents are to be dropped. Its fantastic. So eventually, get to the stage where rex met schmitt and checked him out and, yes, hes got some documents. But schmitt is not the sorry, rex is not the expert on whether documents are the real thing or not. So he calls in help from the experts in france and that would be captain bertrand who is the man on the right. Captain bertrand is the head of section d of French Military intelligence. Section d consists of captain bertrand. But thats fine. Captain bertrands job is to buy and sell foreign code books because the french Cipher Bureau, the decoding guys who are all retired. They were really good in world world i but they reached retirement age. When you fryar being a crypt analyst, you cant go into gambling. Its sort of like the street works the other way. So the crypt analysts were no longer around. Bertrand wasnt a crypt analyst. So the only way for them to read foreign codes is to buy the code books from people like hans schmitt. Okay. We have to set up a meeting so bertrand can look at the stuff that schmitt lifted out of the safe and see whether its the real deal. They meet in a hotel in a small town in belgium and this is where it all gets fun. Rex and schmitt go into the bar and they listen to the music and drink champagne and then brandy and they smoke cigars and bertrand has to look at the documents. Hes the one that cant drink the champagne and brandy and the cigars and he has photographs so he realizes he actually has got the real deal. Hes got the enigma machine operating instructions. So he takes the photographer and camera to the bathroom on the first floor, sorry, im an american, on the second floor in the hotel and necessity do the photography there. Where are they using the banl room . I think the reason they were using the bathroom is because the photographic apparatus is large and clumsy and probably quite noisy. And therefore they need to go somewhere where they werent going to tract a lot of attention. They took the photographs in the bathroom. It is these photographs that i showed you before that found in the french archives two or three years ago. The original photographers taken by bertrand and his team in 1930 of the enigma operating instructions and the photos of the machine itself. So says bertrand, enigma is no longer a problem. Sow goes around to the colleagues in the crypt analytical unit and shows them these things and says, German Army Enigma. Problem solved. They say au contraire captain. Not at all. You get operating instructions. What we need is wiring diagrams. And in particular, with he need to know that what that fwhat tfn the front is. He gives the documents to the brits. People like captain tiltman. Who say, look, bertrand, old chap, very kind of you to give us this stuff. But you gave us operating instructions and operating instructions are hopeless if we dont know what the wiring s if you gave us wiring diagrams, thing was be a lot better. Sofr bertrand still is not dismayed by this. The year before, eyhes been instructed to reach out to poland. Poland and france have a common problem. Germ i wedges between the two countries. And so polish and german objectives are probably aligned. He made friends with the polish Cipher Bureau. And sow offe he offers the docu to colonel langer. Colonel langer says, hey, these are fantastic. This is what weve been waiting for all along. I know theyre only operating instructions but it gives us something to get our teeth into. Lets give it a go. If we get anywhere, well let you know. Langer puts his own team on to it. Im now going toingo introduce to another one of my friends. He looks like a mathematician. He is a mathematician and really, hes the most unlikely spy. This is the thing, spying transformed itself in the middle of the 20th century into something that geeks and in other words can do. So there is hope for all of us, even people like me. I might make a spy one day. This is a mathematics graduate. And he sent in to a small dark room because thats appropriate if youre a mathematician to spy and a nerd, and he is given commercial enigma machine, one without a plug board on the front. He is given the documents that bertrand photographed in the bathroom. And he is given a bunch of enigma intercepts, radio messages that have been intercepted and in morris code and written down. This is one thing i regard as being one of the top three code breaking achievements of the 20th century. And hes the first of the top three to do this. He manages to turn the problem of the wiring of the enigma machine and the coding rotors into a set of mathematical equations. In permutation theory. Some of us loved algebra in high school, some of us didnt. You remember if you multiply both sides by two, then five minutes later you can divide both sides by two and end up in the same place. Now, i want you to imagine trying to do that with unboiled eggs. Okay. So you take some eggs out of the fridge. You divide them by two. Now multiply them by two. Do you get back to where you started . No, you dont. You have to call the cleaners urgently. Okay . This is what permutation theory is like. They work like eggs. Dhoenlt work like algebra. But marian had been taught permutation theory in the mathematics course and able to solve the permutation equations. And deduce the wiring. This is the path. And the German Army Enigma. The fake enigma. There is a jumble of wires at the back. Those sitting in the front row, can you see that keyboard is all wrong. Its in alphabetical order. Its not in q, w, r, t, z, whatever, i spoke american correctly. I said z, not zed. There may be canadians in the audience. Okay. So that is an enigma machine. Its a polish fake enigma machine. Its no the a fake. Its a reverse engineered an log if you like of an enigma machine. That one was built in france. Its one of two or three surviving polish fakes. Thats great. So theyre able to so they solved the problem. The brits were still agonizing over in 1938 and 1939, they know what the wiring is. And that means they can start on the real problem which is the code breaking problem. Its all very well to know what the wiring is in in the machine. You got to know how the machine is set up every day in order to be able to decipher enigma messages. There is only 150 million million million different ways of setting up the machine. It will take all the time in the universe to get there. You have to do something clever. They brought in the rest of the mathematical team. This is a gentleman on the left and another on the middle and these guys come up with a host of code breaking techniques which will enable them to figure out how this enigma machine is set up by the germans every day. And these guys are the pioneers of an electromechanical approach to code breaking. In the old days, world war i, code breaking is more about guessing what the enemys codes were. If you came across a code group that 16, 4, 9, 2, it could mean the battleship queen elizabeth. And code group 8, 4, 2, 2, could mean tomorrow morning. And so youd have to guess. And people are great at this. They can interpret the known code groups to work out what the missing one they dont know is. This is a pencil and paper exercise and requires linguistic skills. These guys are mathematicians. And together with their engineer colleagues, theyre coming up with ways of creating a logic test to figure out how the cipher might be working and theyre doing it particularly they invented this machine and the right hand side of the slide which is called a bumbaren that combines a mechanism brute force approach which goes through all the different rotor settings. So they go through them and test each of nem for a likely roto setting which is half way to the solution of how is the machine set up problem. Thats amazing. They developed this machine and theyre able to read german army, air force, and even navy enigma messages in real time in 1938. I told you this is going to be about spying. So we have kind of done the math now. We can go on and talk about something else. So im going to take you to switzerland. Schmitt did not drop out of the picture after he handed over those documents to be photographed. And then had to put them back in the safe. He developed a thirst for cash, really. Well come to that. I keep promising to tell you about the cash. Ill come to that. But hes having regular meetings with rex and the other officers of French Military intelligence. And hes not just handing over codes and ciphers material. Because one day in the mid 1930s, after hitler had come to power, he set up a meeting in this rather quaint Swiss Village which is called mirian. The reason it very dark blue on left hand side of the photograph is that really is a 1,000 meter drop. It is on the top of a cliff and a 1,000 meter drop. Dont get too close to the edge. But its a ski resort in the winter and hiking resort in the summer pt it summer. Its great. Perfect tourist industry spot. He sets up a meeting there. And rex and the French Military intelligence guy sit in the hotel there and its a usual sort of business with brandy and cigars and what have you. And parentally they have nice band as well. That is all very civilized this spying business. Schmitt turns up. He has this case that is made out of very finally soft polished leather. Its absolutely sort of very fashionable and very chic and quite visibly very expensive. He says i have good news and bad news. They say go on. I no longer quite so closely associated with the Cipher Bureau which at which point the french guys looked very dejected. He says, but i have been appointed as the Liaison Officer for the [ mumbling ] they said, the what . You have to imagine that youre in nazi germany. This is going to be tough. But okay. Gering, hitlers favorite guy for a long time and head of the German Air Force and so forth, gerings role in the nazi party was very significant. And because it was a nazi state, there were many spying organizations, many of which were spying on everybody else within germany. And so gurrings Research Office, it is kind of like a cover name that means nothing, gurrings Research Office was specifically set up to keep an eye on everybody else that needed an eye keeping on them in case they were going to conspire against hitler and the nazi party and so forth. So you could imagine this in the totalitarian states. So schmidts role is to keep tabs on or find out what is going on within the fort and hes offering this to the french who havent heard of this organization yet. A code breaking operations az well as its internal spying operation and it is so closely intertwined in all of the thinking, all of the military decisions, that schmidt has got now perfect, almost perfect knowledge of german strategic intentions and hes able over the courses of the years to share this with french intelligence. So let me give you some examples. Tank warfare development. So this is tank warfare is a new science in the 1930s. Hes closely associated with all of the documents, all of the strategic meetings and decisions being taken about, how to do tank battles, how to use tanks in a modern warfare scenario. Hes giving this information to the french. No, hes not. Hes selling it to the french. Hes getting an annual salary every time he delivers some of the priceless information. As war gets closer, hes able to explain precisely when the attack on poland is going to come, hes able to explain exactly when the attack on france is going to come. And he also explains how the maneuvers of the german army which was something called the sickle schnit, designed to cut off the british skpedishary force in dunkirk and destroy them in detail before moving on to take over the rest of france. Does that sound like something that might or might not have happened. Ee divulges all of this details. So we have details of weaponry and tactics and details of strategy. And weve got a reasonably constant flow of codes and ciphers material amounting over a sixyear period, over 300 documents counted by bertrand in his memoir. Schmidt is the spy to end all spies. So david collin, who you will all have heard of, the master of crypt analytic history said he was world war ii greatest spy and a think that is probably right. But what was schmidt doing with all of the money and how was he concealing it. So if youre a badly paid Civil Servant how come you could explain this swiss nice suit and the posh briefcase and all of that kind of thing. Not to mention the expensive holidays, here he is with his wife on one of these expensive holidays wearing an expensive dressing gown and it wasnt just the wife unfortunately, schmidt had a lot of other expensive habits. There was champagne and brandy and cigars, we heard about those and there were girlfriends and more brandy and then the girlfriends needed brandy and maybe not cigars. But then the nannies and the nannies were hired by him on the basis they might become girls and fired by mrs. Schmidt on the basis they might become a girlfriend and then she would hire a nanny uglier than the previous and the kids noticed that the nannies got uglier and it was very embarrassing. So we hit on the scheme. French said were worried about you and this cash because youre visibly living a lifestyle that does not commensurate with your earnings are supposed to be. So they hit on something called a Money Laundering scheme. Now hans schmidt had run a failed soap factory business in the early 1930s and so they invited schmidt to revive the soap factory idea and he could present the earning from spying as being the prophets of his soap factory. So the soap factory became solvent because he literally laundered the fruits of his labors through the soap factory business. He truly is a star of a spy. I mean he is fantastic. I like rex a lot. I mean, rex it great. But i have these two criminals competing for my affections as to which of them is the most splendid spy. Oh, dear, were going to have to go back to britain and deal with normal guys. So ill introduce you to some british spies. This is the chap with the cigarette is alice denniston from the head of the Government Cipher School until 1942 when he was fired. And his man the man in the middle is his number one crypt analyst a guy called dilly knox. And dilly knox is a professor of ancient greek. But when i say that, what he did as a professor of ancient greek is quite astonishing. He was trying to reconstruct a set of dodgy poems, this is like fourth century b. C. Porn, dodgy poems by a guy call tds heradas. But heradas has written on papyrus and in fragments so knoxs job was to try to reassemble the fragments into meaningful porn. Which was sort of great. But you could see that like a code breaking exercise really because youre piecing together things. It is partly a jigsaw puzzle, partly a linguistic pusle and all going on in ancient greek and slightly odd ancient greek because heradas had a slightly unconventional approach to writing verse. Why am i introducing these two guys to you . Because by 1938 britain had woken up to the idea that adolf hitler was not going be a good thing. And they had realized that the immediate threat to peace in europe was not the bolsheviks who they had thought it was but actually the nazis and they started communicating with the french about the possibility of something that might look like an alliance. A bit late, but okay. They got there in the end. 1938. Which is why tiltman is starting to write letter saying cant we ask the french about the enigma machine and see what they know. Now the french invite the british to a conference in paris in january of 1939 to discuss code breaking problems and in particular the problem of the enigma. Bertrand, who is the mover and shaker behind this, thinks it is a bit suspicious he handed this all over to langer in poland in 1931, and he hasnt heard a whisper since then about whether the polls have made any progress. So he invited the polls to this conference as well. So they turn up to the conference in paris and they discuss the problem with the enigma and they agree it is a very difficult problem and very important to solve it and solve it as soon as possible. Which is kind of a little bit deceptive on the part of the pols really, but who are you going to tell which allies do you think are real allies, which ones do you think are fickle, to what extent are you really willing to trust people with the secrets of your own intelligence gathering. This is a problem not specific to 1939. This is a problem specific to all eras. So i dont think it is surprising at all the pols said nothing at this meeting in january 1939. And you might think therefore a conference was a complete failure but i dont think it was because two things come out of it. One in particular is this this is the memorandum of agreement, it is in french but it is by bertrand and its the intelligence Cooperation Agreement of 1939. And it says for greater convenience and discretion from now on were going to call ourselves by the following abbreviations, x is paris, y is london and z is warsaw. And then he said can you please number the documents so we could keep track of them. So very good. And that is important too. Because what they are doing is theyre sharing everything except this piece of information that the pols know that nobody else knows that they know. So to give you some examples, picking up radio traffic, poland has radio masks to intercept signals that are not actually able to be picked up by the british or the french. So theyre actually providing information that is valuable. Theyre also agreeing to cooperate on codes and ciphers problems, enigma is not the other fruit. There is a load of other codes and ciphers and this is easier to cooperate and there is a whole bunch of core respondence and it is in german because it is the language but they are cooperating. So from january 1939 marks the beginning of this special infosharing relationship. The other thing that comes out of the conference is that it is agreed that if any of the three countries makes a breakthrough on the enigma, they are to send a gram that something has come up. In july, the pols are confronted with two problems. One, they cannot break enigma messages any more. And the reason for that is the germans have lots of reasons but the principle reason is the germans have added two extra rotors to the library of available rotors could put in an enigma machine. Instead of having three rotors there are now five to choose from and that means that there are now 60 different ways of putting three rotors into an enigma machine whereas previous there had only been six. The pols had got six of their famous bomba machines, they did not have 60. And when that 60 of them, they were not able to rapidly enough break the enigma messages and they needed some help with their technology. The other thing that happened by july 1939 is blinding the obvious, that hitler was ratting the saber very, very loud and they were feeling that they really needed to transform their intelligence sharing relationship into something that felt a bit more like a tough military alliance. So holi so polish intelligencs given authority on high to share the enigma secret. So they send out a telegram. [ speaking Foreign Language ] and knox and denniston go this time to warsaw, bertrand goes to warsaw with his number two and they are told the secret of enigma. Now told the secret in this building, i like this building because this is still a center of spying. This is a 1938 building that was built for the polish Cipher Bureau and it still exists just outside of warsaw and it is now the headquarters of nato air Traffic Control for eastern europe. So youre not allowed in. And you werent ever allowed in. So you could see it has soldiers guarding it. And that thing is a memorial plot to the polish these grills on the windows, it is much bigger underground. It is like the doctor but it is much bigger underground but the grills on the windows have got pock marks from german machine gun bullets when poland was invaded in 1939. It is a quite interesting building but you cant go in. What they came away with from this meeting, twoday meeting, is this list and again you could see it is in german because that is the common language of each one is like an entire chapter in the enigma story. But weve got things like how to reconstruct the cipher wheels in the enigma machine. How you find the cross pluggings on the plug board, what else have we got. Debomba, that is the bomb machines and various other things and the last one is other possibilities is number 17. So there is a lot of information being changed hands. Just pausing there, i think ive now answered the question i started off this talk with, which is how come the british went from zero knowledge about not quite zero knowledge but close to zero knowledge but the enigma machine in july 1939 to the point why they could design the bomb machine and be discussing how it might work with engineers as soon as november 1939. Its because of this. This transfer of knowhow, just transformed the ability of the british team to be able to get on with the problem. So what happened next . I probably dont need to introduce this gentleman. Hes not one of my friends and some of you would probably say hes not a gentleman. He is taking the salute in the sexon square in warsaw after the conquest of poland, this photograph would have been taken probably about october 1939. The reason it is my favorite world war ii photograph is because hitler has no idea that in this building behind him is where marion reefski uncovered the secrets of the enigma machine. So what is going on . The polish code breakers didnt get trapped in poland. They were ordered to escape with their precious knowledge and they eventually wound up in france working for bettrtrand w is promoted to major just outside of paris where this is interesting because the x, y and z triangle is reconstituted with the pols and french working in this building, and the teleprinter link to the park, the three codebreaking teams are all working harmoniously together and breaking enigma. Meanwhile, alan touring is working on his design for a bomb. This commemorative stamp amusing me because the british like to do these commemorative stamp collector stamps so this was done in the early 1990s. They did a series on famous scientists. Most of the famous scientists had their faces on the stamps. But apparently that is what alan turrings face looked like. Now they wouldnt have a problem there. Okay, so, this is quite interesting. The only problem is that germany has hi eye on invading france and sooner or later this arrangement is not going to survive. The french and the polish team have to escape once again. And then eventually they set up in the south of france, in the unoccupied part of france. But we have a problem. In fact, we have several problems. When germany occupied warsaw in 1939, they took back to berlin as many documents as many secret documents as they could find. This is normal practice. The reason i am here researching on code breaking things in america is because the americans took all of the german intelligence documents they could find and photographed them and stuck them in the National Archives here which is quite helpful to come and do research in the u. S. On german world war ii history. Dont ask me. It is confusing. But all right. So what the germans did was they analyzed the documents they found in warsaw and they came across some really quite alarming material which suggested that the polls had been reading enigma messages before the outbreak of the war. So they concocted wanted lists, which are there is an example of one of them on the left here. And these wanted lists have the names of the polish code breakers and they have mug shots of the code breakers and they were looking for these guys in presence. So the intelligence was not bad. They had tracked these guys down to france. They didnt know where they were but thought they were in france somewhere. Hence the wanted list. They had obviously come across this guy, who looking slightly older and a bit more seedy but the cigar gives it away, doesnt it. That is my friend rex. That is rex probably in the 1940s, i should think, maybe late 30s but probably 1940s. They had gone the barren forn keurig on the list as well. People on the lookout for x spies would have been too alarmed. But this is a problem. Because everybody in german intelligence wants to track down rex. Because they know that rex holds all of the secrets. You may be asking yourselves who the gentleman on the right is. And you want me to introduce him and youre hoping that ill tell you hes one of my friends. Hes not. Hes a panther general. Hes Rudolph Schmidt. She was in the Cipher Office in the 1920s, 1930s, gave hans his big break into the spying time. But by 1943, 44, general Rudolph Schmidt is a very senior very highly regarded german tank officer and hes got a problem. And hes got a problem because rex is the wanted list has done its work. Rex was arrested in early 1943. And because hes rex, he doesnt get taken to some dank cell somewhere, he gets fed with cigars and brandy and that makes him talk. So hes installed in a very nice hotel in paris. And hes interrogation takes about two months. And it is heavily lauded with very high quality food and plenty of drink and lots of cigars and he tells everything. And in particular he tell a story of how schmidt and the safe. General Rudolph Schmidt is relieved of his command. It is kind of unfair really, isnt it. I mean what did he do wrong . He gave his brother a job. But any way. Okay. This is a map of the south of france with red dots on it. This is the fate of these guys. Once the wanted lists are out and the germans have decided their innovating the unoccupied part of france, and the americans have landed in north africa, the world has suddenly turned upside down. The polish code breakers are on the run for the third time. And these dots are significant places in their story. This one is where rex baz holed up in the mountains just near the spanish border. And in a village called saiguz. I think it is probably just a coincidence that these other places, theyre also close. These places are within 10 minutes, 15 minutes drive and this is probably an hours drive through the mountains to get to pepinau. This is the base of operations for trying to get the polls out of what is now fully occupied france and there are pickups organized with british submarines and the operations dont work and the pols are having to realize the only way their going to get out is to cross the mountains into spain and hope they dont get picked up by the not very neutral spanish. Pepinaus space of operations, some of the pols and in particular reefski and sick owski, they make it to this place and they have to bribe their guide because this is people trafficking. You know how it works. You pay the fee to be trafficked. Half of the fee is to be paid on Safe Delivery of the people on the other side of the border and it doesnt kind of work that way because they get half way across the mountains and the guide robbed them, took all of their valuables off them and lifted all of their money on of them and the fee has doubled as well. Everything. It is a complete disaster. Theyre abandoned at the top of the mountains and it is the second week of january, 1943. There is a foot and a half of snow on the ground and minus heaven knows what. And theyre told spain is that way. Off you go. They make it. They make it across the border. And then they get arrested. They get to this village and they get arrested. And they spend the next six months in the spanish jail. Great. From which the red cross managed to get them out and back to the u. K. , which was great. So they could carry on doing code breaking in britain. So that is the significant. And there is another town there that some of the other polish code breakers, but guaido langer, the head of the team, was some sort of bunker story about being able to walk from there all the way into spain. It is about 15 kilometers and through the snow in the middle of the night and the mountains, it just wasnt going to happen. So they took a taxi, okay. That is what you do. They took a taxi. And they got most of the way there and then there was a road block and it turned out that once again the guide had it is people trafficking. So the guide was in cahoots with the gestapo and the gestapo had outbid the pols and they got arrested and ended up in a german prison camp. So what happened to the rest of them in the end. So i have told you about reshif scif. And we have a photograph of the schiff going down. Some people survive the ship wreck but he was not one of them. This is the eisenberg, which is now in the Czech Republic and this is where langer and his number two were sent after they had been arrested and after the whole rex saga, they were interrogated about what they had been able to achieve with enigma in the prewar period and it is only by dent of langer and his colleagues, subtle preparation for that interrogation that the enigma siekecret, the facts of enigma was kept secret and they did it in the most astonishing way. They said, well of course we broke the enigma. But you bastards, you changed the system. You add theed the extra rotors and changed procedures and you locked us out all of which was completely true. And it played straight into the hands of the germans because they known that they changed the procedures and the guys that were interrogating them were the experts that recommended the changes and so they felt vindicated in what they had been done and so the interrogation stopped where it ought to have begun. So well dong langer and shazski for keeping the secret secret. Reefski and zig owski escaped as i explained and eventually got released from the spanish jail. Reefski did the most extraordinary thing which was to when the war was over he decided to go back to poland. Most polish servicemen in intelligence during world war ii did not return to poland because it was too dang dangerous because poland was now a satellite of the soviet union and anybody, particularly these guys who, after they got back to britain were put on to decoding russian material. Of course russia was supposed to be an allys so this is dangerous so the idea they could go back to poland, knowing what they knew and having blank service records, and being able to escape investigation by the secret police. So reefski, the most unlikely character to be the spy, he did that brave thing and he got investigated by the polish secret police. And it was only once stalin was dead the sort of socalled reforms of communism took place in the mid 1950s that he was effectively free and able to pursue a normal life. Zig owski looked like a 1950s film star in this. It is a shame it is his bank behind him but never mind. Hes kind of a bit of a cool guy. He stayed in the u. K. For the rest of his life and he had a very nice family life and he became a imagine mattic professor and that is kind of you wouldnt have mind being taught math by this guy. Hes great. And proficient musician. So for him it was happily ever after. But the real star of the show, look at this french general up here, top right. Hes got his kp and look at all of the medals. That is Gustav Bertrand and taken on by general degol to head up the French Branch of military intelligence that is in particular associated with signals intelligence. So he finishes his career in the 1950s with that is good for the guy who started off as the captain who was photographing stuff in the bathroom. That is kind of a pretty cool culmination of a career. So hes there is something in it. When he stopped spying, he became the mayor of his village and has a nice commemorative plot to him in the village in the south of france. And bertrand probably gets all of the honors here. All right. So there we are. Im done. We promised you the opportunity for questions. So i would be happy to invite them. Perhaps we could have the house lights up and then we could start that process off. [ applause ] thank you. We have microphones at either side of the room and if youre trapped i could also try to get to you with the microphone if you have a question. Their stunned by you, dermot. We do have some questions. So i think the idea, if you have a question, come up to the there is a microphone there and there. And if you want to just make a line behind the microphone, then ill go left right and please, go ahead. You could just explain what the commercial use for machine was before it was converted to military. You said it was available to the public. What were they doing with that . Well, industrial secrets, i imagine mainly. But codes and ciphers have been used for all kinds of industrial purposes for centuries. In the old days when you had to pay by the number of words in telegrams then people would use codes to cut down the number of words they could use. So you could find that most companies have a code book and send stuff in code. This doesnt do that. Because this is a cipher machine. Because it doesnt cut down the number of characters youre going to send. But there are stuff you probably dont want people to know. Lets imagine that youre a bank and youre trying to arrange a letter of credit for international trade, your customers dont want everybody to be able to read how much theyre paying for whatever it is, a shipment for something or other. So it would be wise to encode that kind of stuff and cipher it. And so that before military uses, all of the military started getting excited about the machine when it came on the market. Looking for ways to adapt it to make it for military purposes but it was originally conceived as an office thing. Please. I have two questions. That is all right. Youre you have the floor. So when who got the first working german enigma machine and did it play a role in the development of bomb . Or was it purely theoretical from the instruction booklets. It was purely theoretical from the instruction booklet. The brits were excited to have one of the polish fakes given to them in 1939 which is something that happened after the warsaw meeting. It was the first time theyd got their hands on it wasnt a real enigma machine but it was a functioning equivalent to the enigma machine. Sooner or later it was bound to happen that one got captured in a combat situation. Of course the germans were winning the war for the first few years and so the likelihood of a capture was actually quite low during that period because it wasnt the case that the british or the french were winning battles. But there were some ships that were sunk and some that were boarded which enabled the british to get ahold of some naval enigma machines. Some didnt manage i think it wasnt until 1941 they got a complete set of rotors to go with the machines that they got, so really the breakthroughs were mostly dependent on the theoretical analysis and later on in the war when the germans adapted their enigma machines, again were relying on information that was given about the adaptations rather than actual captures of the pieces of kit. So ill ask my other question. So my other question is do you think that alan turring read the reefski paper or a translation of it. No. Because that paper wasnt written until 1967. So reefski, what i showed you was reefskis memoirs saying these are the equations that i constructed and so he explains them. But certainly what was explained in that meeting in warsaw, which turring was not present at that meeting, but the explanations given there to knox and denniston were relayed back in the u. K. And knox in particular was quite skeptical about whether the polish breakthrough could have been done by pure mathematical analysis and he felt the pols had cheated in some way, they have stolen some information and done something through spying or whatever. And so turring said, no, no, i could see how reefski did it. It is permeation theory. And if you look at the back of the book and see the answer, it is a lot easier. So, yeah. So, but he did meet turring and reefski did meet in paris in january 1940. So quite how good the conversation would have been i dont know because in those days reefski didnt speak any english. Reefski would haveburn beginning to speak a little bit of french. He spoke fluent german. German was as bad as mine. Good enough to order in a restaurant but it is not great to talk about code breaking. But they sort of but of course all mathematics graduates in the 1930s, the lingual for mathematics was german and all of the good mathematicians were in german. Some of them were in french but most wristen in german. So if you wanted to keep up with what was going on, the cuttingedge of mathematic thinking you have to be good enough to read a technical paper. So i think the german language is what would have been spoken around that table. Its intriguing there. Okay, please. Youve been very patient. What do you think, first, what do you think the German Military reaction was when they found out that allies had control of a real enigma machine and knew exactly what they said. Well this is almost like a history in its own right. So youve got a great question there. How much hours have we got. You dont want dinner, do you . No. That is fine. So, the initial reaction as i explained earlier, when they found out about the polish successes was that they their own developments had been vindicated. And, in fact, quite a few historians have been quite sniffy about the way that the germans reacted to security scares. There were a number of them. At least a dozen scares during the course of world war ii, which in the opinion of historians ought to have told the germans that the enigma machine was not secure or at least not secure in the way they were using it. And they ought, therefore, to have changed things and ho, ho, we anglo americans are so much cleverer than they were because they didnt make those silly mistakes. I think that story slightly b biased and slightly unfair. The germans were constantly investigating the security of enigma. What they didnt foresee was that the quality of the code breaking devices that were available to the allies would be so superior to what they had. So they were as were the allies, using punch card polo graph Type Technology to do code breaking on their side, so were we on our side but we have things like bombs and the colossal machine which are more sophisticated and modern than what they had. So, okay. Then did they so did they actually know at any stage that the enigma had been broken other than this success that the pols have done. I think they probably didnt. They probably should have done but they didnt. And many of the senior polish code breakers were in denial about it until many decades after after the war. So when the enigma code breaking story broke in the public in the mid 1970s, some of those german code breakers were still alive. And they said, this is nonsense. This is fiction. This is spy stuff. And they read the first books that were written about it were full of rubbish any way, so not very accurate so it was easy to say the enigma is perfectly secure and this is rubbish and dont believe these popular books that you can find in station book stores. That is not how it is. Of course, now, weve got more detail and we know what the truth is. So i think it is quite interesting that there was still denial about it in the 1970s. Okay. Let me take you, sir. One of the slides you showed was a replica enigma machine that the pols built with the a. B. C. Keyboard. What are the outcomes of the july 39 warsaw conference is that the pols gave both the british and the french each a copy of those machines. Now another chronicler of the enigma story claims that when the french and polish in france before it was totally occupied were cooperating with the british, at blatchely park, the only secure means of communication they had was using those replica enigmas, any further embellish to the claim was the fact that the french operator always started his messages with hail hitler. That would mean no message would ever start with the letter h and i want to know if your records could substantiate a claim like that. I believe this to be true. This story comes from ory brokenrai who is bertrands number two. Ill come back to that in just a second. But explain about the machines. So Gustav Bertrand had one polish fake machine given to him in warsaw in july 1939. Obviously it was crucially important to build more of these fake enigma machines. When the polish team reached him later in 1939, bertrand requisition or put in on order at his Favorite Manufacturing Company in paris for some additional enigma machines and hed just got the quote for and it is very expensive for what he was ordering and in april of 1940, that was like three weeks before the germans arrived. Somehow miraculously bertrand managed to convince the Manufacturing Company to keep on with its work and he managed to find some way of paying them, even though they were doing this work in the Occupied Zone of france. And by the early part of 1942 hed begun to take delivery of parts of fake enigma machines that were being made by this factory and was smuggling them back into the unpoOccupied Zone bits at a time where they were being reassembled by the pols in the south of france. This meant by the summer of 1942 the pols had managed to create a fully operating enigma machine and, yes, they were able to communicate with well people were very scared about the secure thing, not on the account of the hail hitler thing but there was a series back and forth that said does your machine have a plug board and how are we going to know what the key were using it and that kind of thing. But they figured this stuff out. So by september of 1942 the british and the pols in south of france and the french in south france were communicating using the enigma machine. Now, your question about hail hitler is brokenrai said they were using the way to shield from the germans, the irony of this just he said just to rub it in, we signed off our message hail hitler. He doesnt say that we signed off every single one hail hitler but i think he did it occasionally. But i dont believe that i dont think there is any evident that the germans were aware that the brits and the franco pols were trading messages using enigma. And the reason for that, and i this is quite likely they never knew because it was such a shortlived thing. They managed to get the protocol agreed by the end of september, 1942. The operations in the south of france came to an end the beginning of november 1942 when the germans invaded the south of france. So it was only a month where they were actually doing this. So i think it is probably just it wasnt long enough for anything significant to happen. Ill come back to you, maam, in a minute and, sir. Was the design of turs on polished bomba or did he [ inaudible ]. Good question. This one will take about four hours and i need a blackboard, please. All right, so while theyre getting the blackboard let me give you the quick answer. So at the heart of both machines is the idea that youre gel t youll get the machine to do the brute force, crank through the 7,000 settings of the three rotors and then stop when it comes up with a plausible setting of the combination of the three rotors. The pols were doing a logic test based on the indicator, that is the first part of the the metadata part of the message in the preamble and the germans have changed that which is why the polish bomba was of no practice cal use after may of 1940. Alan turrings design doesnt depend on the preamble process that the germans have been using before that date. And what it was doing was testing for a probable word in the body of the message. So if you think that the message contains the word weather forecast. Well a lot of the messages contained weather forecast, you could test that against your intercepted morse code, qkqwab, and find a place where that turned into the gobbledygook and if there is a rotor setting which consistently transformed all of the letters in the observed fashion then it would stop. So his machine is more sophisticated in it is doing what it called the probable word test but also testing from one of the plug board settings as well which the polish machine wasnt able to do sand that is why his design was clever and that is the imaginative bit and that would take me four hours to explain that so im not going to do it. But buy the little booklet and when you go and look at the bomb replica then you get the full on story there. Please. So my question was how does alan turrings contribution compare with the spies in the polish code to crack well i wouldnt tuft alan turring with a dead letter drop or even the right kind of hat. He didnt wear a hat. Fellows wore hats all of the time. So wear a hat and you cant be a proper spy, can you. Clearly. So its really hard to compare the contributions. There is lots of without this, then it is difficult to imagine how the next stage. So without the oldfashioned spying being done by rex and schmidt and the bathroom photography of bertrand, would the pols have actually made their breakthrough in the 1930s, it is possible but reefski said he was helped by giving the operating instructions given to him and he said later in life he thought he could have figured it out without the operating instructions. So maybe that wasnt as crucial but we know it was in the chain of causation. Would the brits have got there without the polish contribution . I think they would have done. Again, they were capable of doing the mathematical analysis once they hired the mathematicians. So they were ten year as head of the game. So i think the brits would have gotten there but later so what would the consequences of that have been particularly when you think about the operational use being made of enigma intelligence quite early in the war. So i think there is whose contribution was more significant. Would the brits have been able to invent a machine of the quality of the british bomb without alan turring is again yes, because if you look at the other technology it was not involved in the col osas and if you look at what joe deshs bomb machine and indeed the u. S. Army bomb machine were doing, they were completely different designs. Okay, they were relying on some of the ideas that had been shown to them by alan turring but these are very sophisticated pieces engineering so im fairly sure that someone might have come up with a similar thing but later in the war. I dont know. If this hadnt happened, it could have all been terribly different, that is clear. But whose contribution was more significant . I dont know. Ill tell you whose contribution was more fun. Were going to the casino right now and were going to smoke some of those cigars and were going to go to the soap factory to pay homage to do real Money Laundering. So i mean that stuff is just it is just so good. The character couldnt have ruined it. Please, who is next. Okay, sow mentioned earlier on that the polish code breakers had enough information to know when the invasion of poland was going to take place, were they able to use this information in any way so it is actually not the pols that got that information, it was the french that got the information from schmidt. And the interesting thing about all of the priceless information that schmidt gave was the highest quality human intelligence that you could get, it was all obstinately ignored. And you have to ask yourself why that was . Why, when the french was given this stuff, when it proved time and again to be 100 accurate, in a why were they not paying more attention. There is this problem with human intelligence. You say that your spy is really good. And hes 100 accurate and i say my spy is really good and 100 accurate all of the time. And somebody else out there is saying their spy is really good and 100 accurate all of the time and you have conflicting noise coming at you, the job of a good Intelligence Department is to sift through that and work out what the consensus story is. Because all of the spies are doing it for dodgy reasons which dont stack up morally. And frankly human intelligence is very, very difficult to rely on. So i think the french could be forgiven for ignoring hans schmidt, he was just one of the number of people and it is just hindsight that proved that he was right. I think there is a more difficult and possibly more interesting question which is why the french didnt make more serious operational use of the enigma intelligence that bertrand was giving them during the battle of france. So, for example, bertrand is almost crying through his pages of his memoirs and langer who was working with bertrand in the chateau at the same time expressed exactly the same emotions. The attack on paris in during the battle of france was foreseen in immense detail through enigma decrypts which were given to French Military planners. So they knew how many german aircraft, they knew exactly what direction theyd be coming from, they knew what time the attack was coming so it was perfectly possible for the French Air Force to intervene and they did not. They just let them come. It wasnt because they didnt have any aircraft to retaliate with, why didnt they do it . I dont know the answer to that question. Bertrand said it was like feeding sweeties to the swine, is what he described it as. We gave them in priceless perfect information and they didnt know how to and i think very early in the war, the generals didnt know how to use signals intelligence and we have the same problem in britain with the royal navy, the admiralty didnt know how to use signals intelligence and they were being told pieces but it is another piece of intelligence and treat it the same way as we do all of the other stuff and they didnt realize that you could treat the intelligence on a higher plain than human intelligence and i think that is what went wrong. But those generals are not here to answer for their conduct. Most of them disappeared into obscurity after the fall of france and i dont think they were regarded as National Heroes and nobody really wanted to speak to them. So we dont know. You could possibly explain in more detail how and when the polish contributions became known to general pub and what was the role of the historians such as [ inaudible ] and his personal interaction. Ill call on this gentleman to answer that question. Okay. Um, its easy to answer your question in the negative sense. T there was a polish historian who was writing about polish military intelligence in between the wars period and he was researching, and this is in the 1960s, he was so opposed to communism and researching in the polish military archives in warsaw and came across a paper written by a mathematician called marion reefski. And this is quite interesting because reefski claimed that the germans have been using a machine called enigma forr enciphering their ooern stuff and he said they would read their enigma messages and was on the team that broke them. Because after they tracked down reefski, he was still alived and caused him to write up his story, which is how we have the account, reefski mem areas written in the late 1960s and early 70s, but i told you that poland was still a communist country then and we folks in the west knew there was this thing called the iron kurton. There were none to speak of that could make claim of polish. And in a language called polish meant it was still a very well kept secret. As far as we were concerned. But gradually the story leaked out. Bertrand wrote his memoirs in the 1970s because he was very keen that some misinformation had gotten out there probably by someone who got ahold of this book because two and two made 10567 so bertrand was trying to set the record but he wrote in an obscure language called french which nobody could read except one or two alarmed brits got ahold of it and thechb eventually there was an official sort of semi sanctions book written by a guy who probably knew roughly what was going on, at least some of it, of it, Frederick Winterbottom who had a significant role in exploiting the intelligence. Sold more copys about enigma codebreaking. Thats full of nonsense. Gradually the story was coming out. I think i havent answered your question. I probably told you all that i know that pertained to what you asked. His books were translate. That was recent. It was detailed about enigma. Its called enigma in germengl right. Its conflicting accounts. I believe that british account was first. They took credit. Thats mismanagement. For those of you not of polishipolish origin. It gave no credit to the poles for their achievement, which i hoped explained was central to the allied achievement. Theres a reason why the poles were given no credit. Its not a conspiracy against poland. Its simply that the people who were involved personally in the early stages of the enigma story were just not around at the time the official history of signals intelligence was written in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Lets go through the list of people who we know about. Dennisson was sacked in 1942 and died in the early 50s. Knox died in 1943. We know what happened after the war. Those were the guys who had personal contact with the polish codebreakers. There was another guy called john jeffries. He died in 1942 or 41 even. So those guys were the ones who knew personally what the poles had done. Everybody else who was involved and who was around to write official accounts and be interviewed by the official historian had only hearsay knowledge about what the poles had done. Interestingly, the british gave british names to all the polish techniques. For example, clock method was rechristened banbarisma. They just gave british names to things. They were the same thing. They were in imperial units not metric units. They were called jeffrey sheets. You had to call them different things. All this meant that what the poles had done were lost to memory. Because of the iron curtain problem this is a struggle for poles to understand. Because they assume were open and loving in the west. Were not. We keep our secrets seriously keep our secrets. I have been in the National Archives. I wanted to look at files on enigma that were put in the National Archives in 2010. They are still classified. I was not permitted to look at the files. Still classified in 2020. Thats how obsessive we are about the enigma secret, even 75 years after the war ended. This stuff was a secret. People were not allowed to know. While they were free to write books in communist poland, people were not free to write books in the west on the subject. These half truths and mistaken accounts were just all that was available. Frankly, it took until probably midway through the 1980s when they put a counterblast about what had happened because he was still alive and still in a position to do so. The record began to get corrected. The perception in the polish mind has been the brits have been trying to whitewash the poles out of history. Its not true but we understand how you think that way. Can we let somebody else have a go . We can carry on this conversation later. I just have a quick question. Whatever happened to schmidt who delivered all the goods . I told you about and his brother. I told you about his brother. That was slightly less traumatic than what happened to him. There was a reason why rudolph got relieved his command. His brother was arrested. We dont know exactly what happened to him. But we know that he never made it out of jail. We know that his dead body was found in his cell in september 1943. Theres enough circumstantial evidence to indicate that he probably took his own life. Thats a rather sad ending for somebody okay, he betrayed his country and did it for the most deplorable of motives. Many people say thats just desserts, really. Im disappointed because he never got to write his memoirs which would have been such fun to read. I think its rudolph who im kind of like feel very sorry. Why did he get relieved his command because his brother betrayed his country . I dont have a brother. But if he betrayed his country shouldnt i be allowed to stand up and talk to you . Thank you. Pete would like a drink or dinner or go and buy a book or whatever it is. They might want you to sign your book. You will be doing in the hallway. It will be a pleasure. Wonderful. Thank you, dermot. Its been amazing. [ applause ] you are watching a special edition of American History tv, airing weekdays featuring programs on the battle of okinawa. We begin with the fleet that came to stay, a u. S. Navy film assembled from aerial and ship combat footage by hollywood filmmaker and navy ensin bud bonniker. And then bulletin on the okinawa operation, which was filled by combat photographers. It covers the first 50 days of the invasion. And okinawa, keystone of the pacific, which looks at the history of okinawa, how it devolved from a battle site to a Korean War Air field to an overseas American Military base in the 1950s. Every saturday night, American History tv takes you to College Classrooms around the country for lectures in history. Why do you know who lizzy borden is . Have you ever heard of the jean harris murder trial . The deepest cause where we find the true meaning is in the transformation that took place in the minds of the american people. Were going to talk about both of these sides of the story. The tools, techniques of slave owner power. We will talk about the tools and techniques of power that were practiced by enslaved people. Watch history professors lead discussions with their students on topics ranging from the American Revolution to september 11th. Lectures in history on cspan3 saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on American History tv. Lectures in history is available at a podcast. Find it where you listen to podcasts. 75 years ago from april 1 to june 22, 1945, the battle of okinawa raged in the pacific. Over the course of the 82 days, the japanese laufrnched kamikaz attacks. Nesh this u. S. Navy film opens with dramatized scenes on a ship but was assembled from aerial and ship combat footage by hollywood Filmmaker Bud baudiker who directed many lowbudget westerns