On their release in February, they had no idea what their next move would be, except that they were sure they wanted no more dealings with the unreliable Monsieur Perez or his associates. Lacking an alternative, they went back to their old flat, where they discovered that the Paszkowskis, so far from being safe in Spain, were still being accommodated along with their baby by none other than Perez. There was nothing to do, nowhere to go, except while away the days eating lunch. Gustave Bertrand says that Langer and Ciężki ‘distinguished themselves’ in the bars of Perpignan.28 As Bertrand had vanished in January, his reportage may be suspect, or at best second-hand, as the only remaining link between him and the ex-prisoners was Captain Louis. Langer didn’t much care for Louis, who was, wrote the leader of the Poles, ‘disliked by everyone, an awful type’.29 One assumes that Captain Louis was not invited to participate in lunch.
A week after their release from prison, they were arrested again as they arrived home from another lunch. They were put in a windowless cell and told they were on their way to a concentration camp. After two nights, the door banged open, and, miraculously, they were released again, though obliged to report daily to the police station. Two days later there was a police round-up and once again the four found themselves in custody. This time there was a Commissioner from Vichy who was extremely sceptical, taking the view that all Poles in France were members of the Resistance. Even so, sympathetic and helpful people were all around: the lawyer who had been looking after their case since their first arrest six weeks before; several of the regular police; survivors of the old networks of French intelligence. The Commissioner was, reluctantly, convinced about the four Poles. They were free once more.
• • •
A third contingent of Polish code-breakers, led by Wiktor Michałowski, left Cannes the week after the Langer group. On reaching Toulouse, they learned of Langer’s arrest and Bertrand sent orders for them to return to Cannes. Their turn came around again two days after Zygalski and Rejewski had set off across the mountains. All the remaining code-breakers – Michałowski, Szachno, Suszczewski and the two Palluth cousins – were to make up the second group, except that Antoni Palluth was pulled out to set up the Ekspozytura F2 radio network. The other four were to follow the route pioneered by Rejewski and Zygalski: train to Ax-les-Thermes, then on to Latour-de-Carol for the mountain crossing. Michałowski didn’t like it. Captain Louis and the remnants of the French intelligence were far too trusting of the low-life people traffickers; the organisation was haphazard; everywhere was crawling with Germans. There was a Polish lieutenant at Ax who seemed far too close to one of the French fixers, who, it seemed, had a nice trading relationship with the people traffickers. Everyone in the chain was on the make. On arrival at Latour, the smuggler from the Spanish side was introduced to the four. Brazenly, in front of their French liaison, he demanded a supplement of $50 on top of what he’d already been paid. Reluctantly Michałowski handed over $25, with the rest to follow on safe delivery. No go, said the guide, full whack now or no service.30
Michałowski paid. The temperature fell to -15°C and the snow was deep. At the crucial point on the border the guide drew a revolver, ordered the four Poles to hand over all their valuables and abandoned them to their fate.
• • •
One thing was clear for Langer and his group: after three arrests, one prison term and two hair’s breadth reprieves the time was long overdue to make a concerted effort to leave France. Despite his unconvincing record, only Perez was still offering options and solutions. Perez’s number one choice was a trafficker called Gomez, who was quoting around ten times the going rate for regular evacuees.31 Perez, of course, knew that these would-be evacuees were anything but regular: these ex-convicts could be milked for every sou they possessed and it was clear that outsiders were providing an endless source of funds. Perez may have thought that this was just a financial matter and may even have been wholly straight with his charges, but one of the friendly policemen warned Langer that dealing with Gomez was another matter.32
Langer needed Bertrand to come and sort out the muddle, but Bertrand had disappeared. Captain Louis unexpectedly turned up in Perpignan one day, just as Langer and his colleagues were coming back from their daily reporting at the police station. Louis evidently did not expect to see them and certainly had not prepared to be met with a broadside of questions about the failed evacuation attempt in January, the crumbling French underground and the shady Gomez. Louis agreed to get fresh fake ID cards for the group, to meet Perez and to square things with Bertrand. Langer’s mistrust of Louis must have shown in the conversation. ‘Why doesn’t Bolek [Bertrand] come here at least once?’ he asked. Louis dissolved in a fountain of emotional blackmail, tears, incoherence. Nothing more was seen of Captain Louis, the ID cards did not materialise, nor did Bertrand, and Langer was left in the hands of the untrustworthy Toulouse team who had taken care of the Rejewski and Michałowski groups.
On 10 March 1943, a Toulouse contact came with cash, but it was 80,000 francs short of what Gomez had demanded. Now there was a stand-off: Langer voiced his opinion of Gomez, Perez said there was no evacuation without the cash. Then they spoke to a sympathetic inspector of police who had helped them after their recent arrests, who said he could provide a different, trustworthy guide across the border. Perez could see his milking machine was about to fall to pieces. The next day, the price had fallen to 35,000 francs for the four. They would leave on the night train for a village on the coast only 5km from the border and the guide would take them on from there.
They were all set to go, enduring the anxious wait for the train, when the form of Perez appeared with the unwelcome news that Gomez was going to escort them after all.
The group gave Gomez the slip and the new guide seemed to know his stuff. His agents were on the train and one of them sounded a discreet alarm as soon as the four Poles came aboard. The Gestapo were conducting a search, something which the agent had never seen before. The Poles stepped into the next carriage, then Ciężki nudged Langer. The Gestapo had followed them – time to get off.
On the platform was one of Gomez’s associates. It was back to square one. The agent from Toulouse came round the next morning. Langer said they would go by taxi instead of the train. The agent had a couple of French evacuees to add to the party as well, a businessman and a chemist, who had each paid 100,000 francs. For security, Langer was to sign a 20-franc banknote and rip it in half. On safe arrival in Spain, Langer would give his half to the guide, who would get paid when it was delivered up to Gustave Bertrand. Now, at last, something well organised was going to happen.
The agent came back as arranged, but now there were half-a-dozen changes of plan. The ever-present Gomez was back in the frame. Langer was in no mood to comply with any of this and was unpersuaded by the argument that Gomez’s contacts with the Gestapo allowed for their smoother transfer through the closed border zone. The two Frenchmen were the only guarantee that the thing was not a set-up. Perez gave way.
As dusk fell, the four Poles tramped out towards the periphery of the town. The car and the two Frenchmen were there. They got in, and the car went off. At the village of Elne, as planned, they got out. Gomez was waiting. Gomez bade them an insincere farewell and passed them over to the guide who was to take them to the next village, where the relay would be taken up by another guide to show them across the mountains. They traipsed through the snow, glad to be rid of the egregious Gomez.
After an hour’s walking the group heard the noise of motorcycle engines. At the same time, a group of men in Gestapo uniforms leaped out of the bushes and blocked their way, shooting to make their point. The group were surrounded, unarmed, incapacitated, there was no hope of escape – except for the guide, who mysteriously melted away into the landscape. The Poles were taken to the village of Argeles-sur-Mer, where all their belongings were seized, searched and interrogated, and their security – the torn-in-half 20-franc note – was taken along with their other cash. It
was pointless to try to dissemble, because the ID cards which they now had were in their real names. For Langer, Ciężki, Gaca and Fokczyński, it was the end of World War Two.
• • •
Maksymilian Ciężki had done his best to destroy every iota of documentation about his pre-war work before evacuating Poland in 1939. He was not alone. Colonel Stefan Mayer, head of the Second Department of the General Staff, had done likewise, checking that his subordinates had also burned their papers. So had Major Jan Żychoń, when he was head of Intelligence Station III at Bydgoszcz. The Abwehr had expected to find nothing, especially as Żychoń had left his business card on his empty desk, in his empty office, to welcome them.33
So it was with open-mouthed amazement that the Abwehr discovered an entire room near Warsaw full of secret documents. ‘Six trucks had to be fetched to transport the secret material from Fort Legionów and take it to the appropriate departments. The analysis resulted in the detection and arrest of more than one hundred persons who had worked for the Polish secret service.’34 Fort Legionów was the Polish military archives centre, to which standing orders decreed that copies of all paperwork be supplied. The Polish Army had, by its own efficiency, defeated its own secrecy.
There was nothing too obvious in the haul about Enigma decryption, but the materials which the Nazis had found contained enough evidence to suggest something had been going on. There were deciphered copies of messages sent from a German cruiser in Spanish waters during the Spanish Civil War. There was a cipher centre called ‘Wicher’ located at Pyry, which the Germans searched. There were staff lists of the Biuro Szyfrów which indicated that two young civilians, mathematics students from Poznań, were being paid disproportionately large salaries, which implied that they were doing something remarkably useful.35
German detectives began work to unravel a part of the mystery. Gwido Langer’s office manager in Warsaw was Zofia Pawłowicz. Her two brothers had senior positions in the army and distinguished service records, and she herself had worked for the Biuro Szyfrów since 1924. Pawłowicz knew everything that had been going on. Every document which passed under her boss’s nose had been through her own hands. She had not been evacuated with the others, but until the German offensive against the USSR she had been in south-eastern Poland on the Soviet side of the demarcation line. With the Germans in control everywhere, she had then come back to Warsaw, taking an anonymous job in a café.
Then someone denounced her and she was taken to the building in the Aleja Szucha where Jadwiga Palluth had been threatened, but in Pawłowicz’s case she was put in the ‘tram’ for softening up. The tram was a narrow room with benches arranged like a streetcar; prisoners were forbidden to communicate and forced to endure loud martial music, possibly to drown out the sounds of interrogations going on nearby. When it was Pawłowicz’s turn to be questioned, they took her upstairs. The room was nicely furnished and the interrogators were from the Abwehr and not the usual Gestapo thugs.
At first, they were very courteous and assured me that they wanted only to confirm known facts and to elucidate some less important details. They knew that for many years I had been an employee at the General Staff. Surely I would not be so unreasonable as to deny obvious facts. Otherwise they would be ‘forced’ to leave me to spend even longer in the hands of the Gestapo. I must have played my role well – the role of a not-too-bright but also not-too-dull grey office clerk, one of the hundred or more who had worked for the Polish General Staff and War Ministry.36
The grey clerk quickly realised that her interrogators were not cipher experts and she did her best to bore them with the details of office procedures. The dread subject of Enigma was avoided. But for Zofia Pawłowicz the end of her interrogation did not spell freedom. She had to do time in solitary confinement in the Pawiak prison before the Abwehr lost interest in her some time later.
It was not a coincidence that both Mrs Palluth and Mrs Pawłowicz had been dragged in for questioning. As the fortunes of war turned, the German authorities began to worry again about the security of Enigma: 1943 saw a reopening of the attempt to get to the bottom of what the Poles had known and how secure the Enigma machine might be. General Erich Fellgiebel, the German Army’s Chief Signals Officer (and later one of the conspirators in the ‘July plot’ to assassinate Hitler), ordered a further effort.37 The pieces were beginning to come together. Other interrogations had revealed that the Czechs had had some pre-war success against German hand ciphers and they had been cooperating with the French. Maybe the Wicher Poles had gone to France? The search of the Deuxième Bureau in Paris had not helped much, because the cryptographic service records had been spirited away. But what they could do is keep a good lookout for the men whose names had showed up in the files at Fort Legionów.
The Zentralfahndungsstelle, a branch of the German security police based in Paris, issued a Wanted List every month, with at least two updates in between. On the Wanted List of 1 March 1943 appeared some seven new Polish names, all emanating from Feldpostnummer 20803-89092/42g, where the ‘g’ stood for geheim [secret]. The seven were Ciężki, Graliński, Michałowski, Palluth, Rejewski, Różicki and Zygalski. The deaths of Graliński and Różicki in the Lamoricière disaster had not yet registered. Nor had the arrests of Ciężki and Palluth. But the net was closing in. Several of the code-breakers, including Palluth, Rejewski, Różicki and Zygalski, had their mugshots circulated by the Zentralfahndungsstelle in Meldeblatt [Information Sheet] number 130.38 It was only a matter of time before the people holding Ciężki and Palluth did their cross-checks.
German bureaucracy is renowned for its thoroughness, but under the Nazi régime many agencies competed to achieve success against recidivists, foreigners, non-Aryans and whoever else might be in their distorted sights. So cooperation was rare and Fellgiebel’s plan ambled along slowly. Rex, in his guise as Rodolphe Lemoine (alias Stallmann Rudolf alias von Koenig), had been on the Wanted List longer than the Poles and it took until many months after his arrest in February 1943 for the list to catch up with the fact that he had been found. Perhaps, instead of chasing after the elusive Poles, there might be something useful to be gleaned from Rex.
On 20 March 1943, Rex, the king of spies, was under interrogation in his comfortable apartment at the Hôtel Continental in Paris.39 The Abwehr was still hoping to turn Rex; their technique was quite different from the intimidations of the tramcar in Warsaw. Having seen how the cards had fallen, Rex was not going to resist. Hauptmann Georg Wiegand picked up his notebook and began to listen to the most incredible spy story of World War Two.
11
THE LAST PLAY
[A confused noise within.]
‘Farewell, brother!’
‘We split, we split, we split!’
ANTONIO: Let’s all sink wi’ the king.
William Shakespeare
The Tempest, Act 1, scene 1
Marian Rejewski and Henryk Zygalski crunched through the snow. The going was difficult in the dark, but after an interminable march the two friends were relieved to hear their guide tell them that they were now across the border. Their welcome to Spain was a demand for more cash, or else they would be abandoned right there, in the dark, on the mountains, directionless and in the middle of nowhere. They had no choice. They gave up what little they still had: a watch and Zygalski’s camera. Then they were shown the way down the hill. Eventually they lighted upon signs of civilisation – to be exact, the Spanish police. Their first night in Spain was spent in the cells of the Puigcerda village jail.
Wiktor Michałowski’s party met a similar fate.1 After being robbed, they too stumbled downhill and, like the two code-breakers who had taken the same road before them, soon found themselves arrested and sent off to the police station at Guardiola, a few miles south of the border. The day after, they were moved to Barcelona, and from there to a prison where they were kept in solitary confinement. It seemed that the war was now over for all the code-breakers of Ekspozytura 300.
Gwido La
nger kept a diary which starts on 15 January 1943, the date of his first arrest in Ceret in the south of France.2 It may be that the first few pages were written up some time after the events. It’s written in German, probably because he was writing it under the noses of his captors, and for the same reason it has very little in it beyond a record of the weather, the sparse food, and occasional petty excitements of prison such as the arrival of a food parcel. Gwido Langer also recorded his weight: it was 80kg when he was first arrested.
Following their arrest at Elne, Gwido Langer, Maksymilian Ciężki and Edward Fokczyński, were taken to Compiègne. There they were held in a camp, Frontstalag Number 122, which was for ‘civilian internees’ such as supporters of Charles de Gaulle. There they discovered Antoni Palluth, who was awaiting deportation to Germany. On 28 April 1943, Palluth and Fokczyński were sent off to work in Germany. Two weeks later, Kazimierz Gaca – who had belatedly been brought to Compiègne as well – followed them. Meanwhile, Langer and Ciężki were left behind in France.3
Compiègne was no holiday camp. Food was scarce. Shootings were not. Dogs were set on the prisoners. During an escape attempt by some inmates in early April, six prisoners were executed. Communication with outsiders was difficult and only likely to put the Gestapo on the trail of those whom the prisoners were trying to contact. But the departures of Palluth and then Gaca provided some opportunities to get back in touch with Bertrand, and Langer was able to re-establish links with the Polish Ekspozytura F2 network. Some food and clothing parcels began to get through. The only good thing, apart from the parcels, was that they were imprisioned with the civilian recidivists: so far, it appeared, nobody knew who they were. At least, not yet.
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