We all know that the German “Enigma” coding machine was capable of being decoded. Efforts started with the Polish Army Intelligence, then the British (Bletchley Park) succeeded in decoding the messages. But what about the Russians? As I understand it, Russia had excellent intelligence-they had spies in the top levels of the German Army, and were able to access war plans in real time. So did they also crack the Enigma coding? Or did they not need it at all? I read that at the time of the battle of Kursk (July 1943), the Russians had complete information-the German order of battle, plans, names of commanders, etc. Also, did the British share the codebreaking secrets with Russia?
The russians had spies in the UK as well-did they divulge the secrets?
The British were primarily concerned with decrypting Kriegsmarine (Navy) and Luftwaffe messages. Each of the German services used slightly different versions of the Enigma machines with different numbers of rotors, and the Kriegsmarine version was the most complex and difficult to decipher. The Abwehr and Army mostly used landlines for their Enigma traffic, so it could not be intercepted anyway.
As far as I can tell, the British did not provide codebreaking information to the Soviets. They were loath to share it even with the US at first, since if the Germans had even a hint that their traffic was being deciphered they would have switched to an entirely new encryption method.
The US Navy captured one from a submarine, did they not?
Eventually (in 1944), but the Royal Navy had already captured 12 before that and there was nothing more to be learned about them by then. That was why the film U-571 was so controversial in the UK.
The British were sharing intelligence with the Soviets whether they liked it or not. The Soviets had infiltrated the British at the very top levels. Check out Kim Philbyand The Cambridge Five.
Philby turned over some of the Enigma decrypts to Stalin, but not the actual decryption methods. Probably too much information to put into the communication methods his handlers set up.
You would think that the Germans would consider it compromised with that many possible captures.
Kriegsmarine officers had standing orders to destroy all encryption stuff if they were under threat of capture, and their equipment was designed to be difficult to salvage (water-soluble ink and the like). And Karl Donitz was apparently pretty stupid, so they seem to have assumed that their security protocols worked every time.
When there’s one on every ship, sub and military unit as large as a … division maybe? there must have been at least hundreds out there, any one of which might be captured. But the Germans were very confident that even if some were captured they wouldn’t be useful. They were reconfigured every day, so it wasn’t really a single code. It was a new encryption daily.
And the British had to break what amounted to a new code every single day.
I see, many combinations with the rotors.
However it my understanding that human lazyness on the part of the Germans made this easier than it should have been. The coders were instructed to put a few random letters at the start of the message to make it harder to find the initial settings, but a fairly large precentage of the time the coders would just start the message with “AAA”, actually making it much easier for the British to crack.
Similar to setting your admin password to “12345”
Spying was perhaps the one thing that the USSR was always much better at than anyone else, but I do not recall hearing of any top level WWII German Army personnel being spies, nor anyone else able to access German war plans in real time.
Perhaps they had Russian Mistresses.
I do not know if the “Rote Kapell” was still in business in 1943, but General Zhukov recounts that he knew exactly what the German generals had planned for Kursk. That is what puzzles me-Kursk was a huge defeat for Germany (the end of offensive operations in Russia). nobody seemed to realize that the Russians anticipated every move.
Well, Kursk was an obvious place to attack.
Remember that the British kept the very existence of Bletchley Park a secret for 30 years. It would seem pretty likely that had the Soviets broken the German codes, they would have been boasting about it, especially if they had any details of what Turing and Flowers had achieved during and shortly after the war.
They didn’t have to be top level. Relatively low level people printed up, encoded and disseminated the High Command’s orders. And after orders got sent out by radio, the Allies had them, and decoded them sometimes faster than the German units that they wre intended for.
That’s sort of correct, but what the Bletchley Park team looked for was what they called ‘cribs’ - commonly used phrases or sentence fragments, such as “Keine besonderen Ereignisse” (“Nothing to report”) or “An die Gruppe” (“To the group”). That, along with some weaknesses with the Enigma machine itself (for example, a letter couldn’t be encrypted as itself), allowed the team to make some guesses as to what the coding was for the day. They also used to do some clever tricks to force some known data to be encrypted - such as getting the Navy to lay some mines in a specific area and then use those coordinates as a crib for when the German forces inevitably reported these locations back to high command.
And they did.
In the later stages of the war, they would usually have the Luftwaffe codes cracked before breakfast. 