Wilhelm Tranow (born 1891) was a German cryptanalyst, who before and during World War II worked in the monitoring service of the German Navy and was responsible for breaking a number of encrypted radio communication systems, particularly the Naval Cypher, which was used by the British Admiralty for encrypting operational signals and the Naval Code for encrypting administrative signals.[1][2][3] Tranow was considered one of the most important cryptanalysts of B-service. He was described as being experienced and energetic.[4] Little was known about his personal life, when and where he was born, or where he died.
The American historian David Kahn underscored the war-historical significance of this cryptography and cryptanalysis success of Tranow, citing an anonymous source:
If one man in German intelligence ever held the keys to victory in World War II, it was Wilhelm Tranow.[5]
Life
Wilhelm Tranow initially worked as a radio technician aboard the battleship Pommern. In 1914, he received a coded message, while on watch, from the cruiser Breslau which he forwarded to fleet command, who reported they could not read it. Tranow, who was interested in codes and cryptology, broke the encipherment on the coded messages and forwarded the broken message back to fleet HQ. Showing a lack of urgency and understanding, Fleet HQ issued Tranow a stern warning to keep away from secret matters, instead of trying to improve the code.[1]
With the loss of the war and the Treaty of Versailles, the code-breaking unit at Neumünster was shut down. On 28 April 1919, a new agency was created in Berlin, with eight former cryptographers, Tranow being one of them.[6]
In late 1919, Tranow reconstructed Britain's enormous Government Telegraph Code which was used by the Admiralty to carry reports about warships. Later in the 1920s it used the broken code to enable the Germans to track British gunboat activity on the Yangtze.[6]
In 1932, he followed the movements of a British convoy in the Atlantic, by breaking the current 4-letter naval code. These early successes led gradually to the growing strength of his unit, which was now called B-Dienst (German: Beobachtungsdienst). By the mid to late 1930s, up to 80% of French exercises could be read.[7]
In mid-1935, Adolf Hitler, who still considered Britain a potential ally, ordered the whole naval staff to redirect their operational readiness planning against France and ordered the main code breaking effort at B-Dienst to transfer to France. The Kriegsmarine, who considered their major potential opponent to be Britain, viewed the order with suspicion. Tranow, who laughed when he heard the order, stated:[8]
I don't want to delve into high policy, but I want to say one thing: You know the English report their worldwide ship movements through these codes. Suppose their Mediterranean Fleet pours through the Straits of Gibraltar, and moves in to the Atlantic, or the Channel or even into the North Sea. Don't you want to know this in advance?
The Kriegsmarine reconsidered their position and allowed Tranow to continue, in violation of Hitler's order.
In September 1935, Tranow and his assistants made a major advance in breaking the Royal Navy's most widely used code, the 5-digit Naval Code (German Code Name: München (Munich)), using the method of comparing the routes of a merchant vessel, which were published in Lloyds Weekly Shipping Reports (Lloyd's Register), with the coded reports.[2][8][9]
Tranow's growing influence and the increasing importance of his specialty ensured his rise within B-Dienst and eventually, sometime after 1936 he was charged with running the complete cryptanalyst section, even though he was not a Nazi.[10]
At the start of the war, Tranow knew the locations of all the major Fleet Forces. On 11 September 1939 this bore immediate fruit when the B-Dienst read a British message which indicated the assembly points of z convoy. This enabled the Kriegsmarine to dispatch a U-boatU-31 to torpedo the steamerAviemore on 16 September 1939.[11]
Tranow started working on Naval Cypher No. 1 in 1938 and by spring 1940, Tranow's work on British Naval Cypher No. 1 had progressed sufficiently well, that B-Dienst was able to read everything of importance in the lead up to Operation Stratford and with messages revealing plans for the Anglo-French expedition against Norway under the cover name Operation Stratford.[13] Germany seized the initiative and invaded Norway on 9 April 1940. The code was read concurrently during the campaign. Exact data on British counter-measures such as landing fields, and the arrival of transports at Harstad were known in advance, enabling German Armed Forces to take appropriate action. The breaking of the cypher enabled Tranow to read the bulk of British naval traffic until 20 August 1940, when British Naval Cipher No. 2 (German Code Name: Köln (Cologne)) (Naval Cypher) was introduced. From September 1941, Tranow reconstructed the codebook of Naval Cipher No. 2.[12]
In February 1942, the B-Dienst cryptanalyst team broke the 4-digit US-British-Canadian Convoy Cipher, Naval Cipher No. 3 (German Code Name: Frankfurt). Around the same time, the Kriegsmarine introduced the 4-wheel version of the Enigma which immediately rendered the Naval Enigma unreadable to Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS)Bletchley Park staff of Hut 8.[12] Later in 1942, Tranow compromised the British and Allied Merchants Ships code (BAMS). In March 1942, the capture of a Naval Cipher No. 4 codebook from a merchant vessel in northern waters[14] enabled Tranow to make limited penetrations of British Naval Cipher No. 4[12] by October 1942. The introduction of Naval Cipher No. 5 in June 1943, and later the introduction of the unbreakable Typex cipher machines in November 1943, ensured Tranow and his B-Dienst team could no longer penetrate Allied ciphers.[15]
After the war, Wilhelm Tranow was such a high value individual that he was picked up by the Allied TICOM organization and interrogated at Flensburg by TICOM Team 6 on 24–25 May 1945.
↑ Bauer, Friedrich L. (2007). Decrypted Secrets: Methods and Maxims of Cryptology (4th, revised and extendeded.). Berlin: Springer. p.472. ISBN978-3-540-24502-5.
1 2 3 Faulkner, Marcus (1 August 2010). "The Kriegsmarine, Signals Intelligence and the Development of the B-Dienst Before the Second World War". Intelligence and National Security. 25 (4): 521–546. doi:10.1080/02684527.2010.537030. S2CID154666062.
↑ Bauer, Friedrich L. (2007). Decrypted Secrets Method and Maxims of Cryptology 4th Edition. Springer. p.202. ISBN978-3-540-24502-5.
↑ Kahn, David (1978). Hitler's Spies - The extraordinary story of German Military Intelligence. Reading, Great Britain: Arrow Books Ltd, Hutchinson Publishing Group. p.203. ISBN978-0099217206.
Bauer, Friedrich L. (2007). Decrypted Secrets: Methods and Maxims of Cryptology (4th, revised and extendeded.). Berlin: Springer. ISBN978-3-540-24502-5.
Bonatz, Heinz (1981). Seekrieg im Äther: die Leistungen der Marine-Funkaufklärung 1939–1945[Naval warfare in the ether: the achievements of the German Naval Radio Intelligence 1939–1945] (in German). Herford: Verlag E. S. Mittler & Sohn. ISBN978-3-8132-0120-8.
Kahn, David (2012) [1991]. Seizing the Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-Boat Codes 1939–1943. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN978-1-59114-807-4.
Wrixon, Fred B. (1998). Codes, Ciphers & Other Cryptic & Clandestine Communication: Making and Breaking Secret Messages from Hieroglyphs to the Internet. New York, NY: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers. ISBN9781579120405.
The Enigma machine is a cipher device developed and used in the early- to mid-20th century to protect commercial, diplomatic, and military communication. It was employed extensively by Nazi Germany during World War II, in all branches of the German military. The Enigma machine was considered so secure that it was used to encipher the most top-secret messages.
Ultra was the designation adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by breaking high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. Ultra eventually became the standard designation among the western Allies for all such intelligence. The name arose because the intelligence obtained was considered more important than that designated by the highest British security classification then used and so was regarded as being Ultra Secret. Several other cryptonyms had been used for such intelligence.
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The Cipher Bureau, in Polish: Biuro Szyfrów ([ˈbʲurɔ ˈʂɨfruf], was the interwar Polish General Staff's Second Department's unit charged with SIGINT and both cryptography and cryptanalysis.
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The B-Dienst, also called xB-Dienst, X-B-Dienst and χB-Dienst, was a Department of the German Naval Intelligence Service of the OKM, that dealt with the interception and recording, decoding and analysis of the enemy, in particular British radio communications before and during World War II. B-Dienst worked on cryptanalysis and deciphering (decrypting) of enemy and neutral states' message traffic and security control of Kriegsmarine key processes and machinery.
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Erhard Maertens or Eberhard Maertens was a German Vizeadmiral of the Kriegsmarine during World War II. From 16 June 1941 to 5 May 1943, he was Chief of Office of Naval Intelligence, Naval War Command in the Oberkommando der Marine. Maertens was known for underestimating British intelligence, and specifically, overrating the security of the Naval Enigma cipher machine. In 1941, he held a naval enquiry into the strength of Naval Enigma security after the capture of U-boat U-570, and attributed all the suspicious losses in U-boats at the time to the British Huff-Duff. In the second enquiry, ordered by the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy Karl Dönitz, in May 1943, he investigated a number of areas, which exculpated Enigma security in the end, for the second time, incorrectly blaming British 9.7 centimetre centimetric radar for the massive losses in U-boats by mid 1943.
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