At Felden the exiled code-breakers settled in to new jobs with a new boss, and, after mid October, they were given formal commissions into the Polish Army as second lieutenants. Gone was the eccentric Bertrand and the ambiguous agenda which might have been serving Vichy. Now it was Polish Army routine. Except that the Polish intelligence service in exile was, if not entirely under British control, certainly under its influence. For the time being there was a diet of German police messages, similar fare to the poisonous SS material they had been looking at in France the year before. ‘The German 5-letter [code-group] telegrams that are currently intercepted … in Felden (Captain Zieliński) are, according to Commander D, very valuable.’20 Bletchley Park was not breaking this material, in part because the British did not have resources devoted to interception of the traffic in the first place. Nevertheless, for Bletchley Park, ‘police traffic is steadily gaining in operational importance,’ and the Poles were filling a gap in the picture. Via the ubiquitous Biffy Dunderdale came a message of thanks from Hut 6 filtering its way to Rejewski, of whose identity Bletchley Park remained utterly unaware.21
• • •
On Tuesday 7 March 1944, Langer’s diary recorded:
Cloudy … No assembly. Dreamed of Janka and Ilanka [Langer’s wife and daughter]. When will I have news of them. Lunch: soup, goulash and potatoes … After 2.30 I was taken to an office (private) where there was a commission. General inquiry about found documents. Later I sent C. Took ± 3 hours.
The Schloss Eisenberg was offering new experiences to its unhappy inmates. Langer’s ‘commission’ consisted of two cipher experts and a third man who was from one of Nazi Germany’s many security services, Langer guessed the Gestapo. The cipher experts belonged to Inspektorat 7/VI, the German Army’s signals intelligence service, and their names were Dr Hans Pietsch and Dr Walter Fricke.22
Dr Pietsch had been studying the security of Enigma for years and he knew exactly how vulnerable the system was. To be precise, the Germans had at first adopted a thoroughly insecure procedure for enciphering the ‘indicator’ on a message twice. The decrypts which had been found in Warsaw, and all the other evidence they had, pointed clearly to the Poles having exploited this weakness. The security officer started by telling Langer, not asking him, ‘you were working in the intelligence service.’ Langer observed, ‘He was looking at me in such a way as to make me think he must have known something.’23
It was another typical interrogation, another chance to turn an agent. With Russians clawing back their territory and Americans, British, Canadians, French and Poles grinding bloodily away at the Gustav Line in Italy, Germany needed to seize every chance to turn around her fortunes. The immediate question was whether Langer would see sense, put his Aryan ancestry and German language skills to proper use, and come and work for the Fatherland.
It wasn’t said explicitly, because as the captain was saying that he had already been in the process of recruiting others, I interrupted him immediately and said that one can die only once and [referring to a notorious Austrian spy of World War I] that I wouldn’t become a ‘Redl’.24
So that wasn’t going to go very far. The officer handed over to Dr Pietsch. Pietsch’s interrogation of Langer launched into technicalities.
When I was asked if we’d been breaking and reading any machine ciphers during the war I said that it became impossible after the Germans introduced the changes to the machines in 1939. Because I was speaking to cryptography experts and I wasn’t as familiar with the matter as Major Ciężki, in order to increase the likelihood of my interrogators believing my story I asked the commission to interview Major Ciężki himself … The reason they knew we had been reading their messages before the war was that somewhere in Warsaw they had found some messages we read from during the Spanish War … They also knew about Pyry.
The security service officer could not have cared less about the historical niceties of some obscure cipher process in use five years ago or more; the interview was over.
So then it was Ciężki’s turn. It may have seemed somewhat unfair to shift the interrogation to him, but the likelihood of discovery of the pre-war achievements had been foreseen by both Ciężki and his boss. So Ciężki, the cryptography expert, racked with tubercular disease, confirmed that the Poles had cracked the system before 1939 and how. Alas, the Germans had changed the machine and the procedure, and after that the Poles had been locked out. Indeed, an abrupt cessation of results is what the remnants of the paper record had shown, so Pietsch and Fricke were vindicated. After all, Inspektorat 7/VI had done the research back in 1939 which led to the change of indicator procedure and that had stopped the rot. Enigma was safe. And so were Langer and Ciężki.
• • •
One summer day in 1944, while V-1 pilotless bombs were raining down on London and the Poles were safely out of range in their hideout on the hill at Felden, the telephone rang. Polish HQ wanting an update, perhaps. Marian Rejewski answered and nearly jumped out of his skin when he recognised the ebullient voice on the other end. It was not Polish HQ; instead, it was the most bizarre update imaginable. For the voice belonged to Bertrand, and he was in town. The last Rejewski had heard of Bertrand was during the period of cache-cache with the Gestapo eighteen months before.25
Gustave Bertrand had pulled off one last conjuring trick. Now reincarnated as Lieutenant Colonel Michel Gaudefroy, he was in Britain and in some manner working for General de Gaulle’s Free French. Bertrand’s rebirth was, naturally, a cause for celebration. He came out to Felden, and there was a grand dinner, arrosé de nuits-saint-georges 1914, at the White Horse Inn in Boxmoor, where the survivors of Équipe Z relived their escape stories and reminisced about life at PC Bruno and PC Cadix.26
Bertrand’s own escape story was, possibly, the most remarkable of all. In January, Bertrand had agreed to act as Germany’s spy. The list of betrayals required of him was long: Bertrand was to hand over the cash, code books, names and addresses of officers of the Kléber network, and the locations of radio emplacements; to get from London details of which German ciphers were being read and of the forthcoming Allied invasion; to help infiltrate a German agent into Britain; to make contact with members of the network so they could be rounded up in France and Algeria; to deliver up the network’s radio equipment; and, finally, to hand over the files containing notes on interrogations of German agents arrested by the French. Bertrand agreed to everything. Somewhat jaded after a long night of torture and interrogations, Masuy was satisfied. Bertrand was free to go.
Then I made haste to retrieve my things and to give all suitable warnings. I next enciphered a telegram for London in order to cancel the rendezvous [arranged in his previous message sent under Masuy’s control] and to sort everything out. Finally, in the night, we left Vichy for Brioude, in order to withdraw a cipher and the [French] Intelligence Service funds (one million) from the Credit Lyonnais in order to send them on to my second-in-command, Captain Lochard. Then to Nîmes and the open arms of a refuge.27
Thus, once again, Bertrand conjured his own disappearance.
A serious question emerges against the background of Bertrand’s story. We do not know for certain what he told Masuy, who was executed on 1 October 1947 following a post-war trial.28 Did Gustave Bertrand buy his escape, by revealing some of the secrets he knew, or was he a master of guile? The British said of him that even Alastair Denniston was ‘no match for this experienced Frenchman’.29 The most informative judgement comes from the Germans themselves. Captain Wiegand – the interrogator of Rex – said, after the war, ‘I had the impression that Captain Bertrand had played a comedy and had had the intention to take flight when the time came.’ Bertrand had returned after one trip to Vichy and won the trust of Masuy; when he slipped away on the next occasion, Masuy and his operatives knew they had been played.30
The fact is that Bertrand had been working for the enemy of his Vichy employers for a long time. The enemy in question was the greatest threat the French government c
ould face: the Forces Françaises Combattantes, also known as the ‘Free French’, led by Vichy’s bitterest foe, General Charles de Gaulle. Since December 1942, when the emptiness and bankruptcy of the Vichy régime became apparent with its inability to prevent the occupation of the Zone Libre, Bertrand had realised where his loyalties should lie. Starting with the transfer to London of information on the Funkabwehr and their mobile radio detection vans, Bertrand had been growing closer to de Gaulle’s alternative administration-in-waiting.31 An airlift, to pick up Bertrand and his wife on 3 June 1944, had only been possible because he was known to be working on the right side. From 1 August 1944, Gustave Bertrand, now a lieutenant colonel, took over as chief of a new Deuxième Bureau, the intelligence division serving de Gaulle’s FFC.32
• • •
Antoni Palluth, Edward Fokczyński and Kazimierz Gaca were not interrogated by Inspektorat 7/VI or anyone else. They found themselves introduced into the slave-labour system at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There, they were put to work in the factory making Heinkel bombers for the Luftwaffe. Before long, Antoni Palluth found himself involved in a resistance group of Poles, and, since he was one of the more senior inmates (aged 43), a qualified engineer and a German speaker, he was soon in a position where it was possible to influence what was going on. In time, Palluth managed to subvert the quality-control system, arranging for the official checking stamps to be applied to aircraft wings with deliberately weakened ribs and other sabotaged parts. Under Palluth’s management, the Heinkel factory was working for the Allies.33
In one important respect, imprisonment at Sachsenhausen was better than life at Uzès. You could send stylised letters home. Indirectly, as usual, Antoni Palluth began to re-establish communication with his young family back in Warsaw. In return, the Palluths sent Antoni a bar of soap, something rare and prized in Sachsenhausen. Inside the soap was a picture of his sons, Jerzy (thirteen) and Andrzej (ten).34 Life outside was going on; the Nazi régime would not last forever.
• • •
The toehold established by the expeditionary force in Normandy in June 1944 spelt the beginning of the end of the war in Western Europe. For Marian Rejewski, it was the beginning of a problem. To be more precise, it was the absence of a problem: the absence of any interesting cryptological problems to work on. Three weeks after the landings, Dunderdale let it be known that the Allies no longer had any need for the intercepts of German police messages which, the previous year, had been so useful.35 Eight weeks later, the German police changed their encipherment system. Rejewski was locked out and even his intellect was outmatched. There was nothing he could do. He was bored and he was very fed up.
If the British would only share their current know-how, maybe the Poles could get back on top of the German ciphers. Rejewski picked up his pen and composed a proposal for his superiors in London.
Before the war, there was a Polish-British-French cooperation in the field of ciphers, in the course of which, it should be emphasised, that the side which gave, and gave generously, was exclusively Polish. It would be advisable to remind the British now of their debt of gratitude which they have towards the Polish Cipher Bureau, and that without the help of the Poles they would have been unable to read even one German telegram cipher during the Norwegian or French campaigns or subsequently …
It would seem the point to specify once again what the Polish cryptographers expect and demand of their British colleagues. In the first place, they should be asked to return the German Enigma machine that had been given to them … Next, they should be prevailed upon to share the experience they have gained in the field of German ciphers these last five years. The best way would be via direct contacts between the Polish and British cryptographers concerned. And finally, an attempt should be made to persuade them to supply their intercepted material …36
Rejewski’s long, closely argued paper was sent off on 1 October 1944. Polish Headquarters was sympathetic and asked Dunderdale to see what he could do.37
It’s not recorded how the British replied, but it is possible to imagine how unrealistic Rejewski’s request may have seemed at Bletchley Park. Enigma code-breaking had changed dramatically since the X-Y-Z cooperation during the Norwegian and French campaigns. The modern Turing–Welchman Bombes were operating in hundreds and were managed in the style of a factory. Whereas PC Bruno had processed 8,440 messages of all types over a period of six months in 1940, by 1942, Bletchley Park was dealing with an average of 1,995 Enigma messages a day. And that was just Army and Air Force, i.e. not counting police, railways, or the all-important Naval Enigma, or indeed any other type of cipher.38 The familiar structure of the old Government Code & Cypher School, whose representatives Rejewski had met in 1939 and 1940, was gone forever. Dilly Knox had died in 1943. Alastair Denniston was no longer in charge at Bletchley, having been moved over to focus on diplomatic ciphers. Alan Turing was now working at a separate establishment at Hanslope Park on voice encipherment. Nobody who knew him was at Bletchley to vouch for Rejewski. In this massive system, this tiny group of Polish experts was simply irrelevant.
Yet there was plenty for Rejewski to do other than focus on Enigma. Ever since the Ekspozytura 300 Poles had turned up in Spain, the Polish General Staff in London had wanted to turn their attention to the USSR. In March 1944, the Polish General Staff held a cryptology conference, which was all about Russia.39 In this context it made sense to redeploy Marian Rejewski and Henryk Zygalski, who, together with Sylwester Palluth, had formerly been known as ‘team N’ – specialising in Niemcy, or Germany – to ‘team R’ – directed at Rosja, or the USSR. Team N was closed down in November 1944 and from that point the reports Dunderdale received were all about what the Russians were doing.40 And there was more. Starting from nuts and bolts (among other stationery supplies for Felden, the Poles needed maps of Russia and a Russian typeface typewriter), the March conference had concluded that a step-up in interception and decryption activity in the Middle East was needed. Czesław Kuraś, who had led the anti-Soviet decryption effort in Britain since 1940, was now in the Middle East and needed reinforcement. ‘Kuraś is to keep this mission top secret … Kuraś’s task: set up the interception station … choose and initially select candidates as cryptologists.’41
Everything was directed at the Russian threat and all the work was being done in close liaison with Biffy Dunderdale. Major Wiktor Michałowski, veteran of Ekspozytura 300, was also sent to run the operation based in Cairo and it seems that Henryk Zygalski was also placed there for a while. The British also had a Special Communications Unit there. The unit was part of MI6’s network of communications facilities that were primarily engaged in direction-finding and interception, but it also performed mysterious work to convert typewriters into cipher machines. One visitor became intrigued in their project; he was Polish, and he was, apparently, Henryk Zygalski.42
• • •
As the food parcels arrived at the Schloss Eisenberg, Maksymilian Ciężki regretted his previous remark about his weight. ‘You need to know that I find it very difficult to eat the food items you send me, knowing how crucial they are for you and the children’. He was wrong. Maksymilian Ciężki was on the Wanted List of the German security services, and, like her friend Jadwiga Palluth, Bolesława Ciężka had experienced an encounter with the Gestapo. On 5 June 1942, her sons Zbigniew and Henryk had been arrested while visiting friends. Bolesława tried to bribe or bail them out with her jewellery. The jewellery was taken, but only Henryk, aged 13, was released. Zbigniew was 16 and old enough to go to Auschwitz. He could receive parcels there, for a while. By 1944, the last parcel had been returned by the postal service. There was no prisoner named Zbigniew Ciężki at Auschwitz, not any more. His fate was the same as his older brother Zdzisław, who was arrested and in 1944 shot by the Nazis for sabotage. Stuck in Eisenberg, Ciężki knew nothing of this. Of his three sons, only Henryk was still alive, and desperate to join in the fighting in Warsaw.43
In the city, where the G
ermans still clung on, Jerzy Palluth and his mother received a visitor who wanted to interview them. It was October 1944 and the occasion was a visit from an officer of the Home Army, the underground force which had stolen and captured and manufactured its own weapons and improvised its way into the history books. The Polish resistance army had attempted to recapture Warsaw from the Wehrmacht but was in desperate straits. After an unimaginable two months since the uprising began, the Home Army was still holding out, despite having no appreciable assistance from outside and absolutely none from the Soviets on the other side of the river. Jadwiga Palluth was not an easy person in an interview, as the Gestapo had previously discovered. The Home Army officer was approaching Mrs Palluth in order to recruit young Jerzy. At this stage in the combat, the Home Army was out of ammunition and out of personnel and almost out of hope. To join up was a 99 per cent guarantee of a death sentence. As he was only just 14, Jerzy knew she would say no, as mothers are supposed to do. ‘Your decision,’ said Mrs Palluth. Jerzy joined up.44
The Home Army surrendered on 3 October 1944.
The Poles left in Warsaw were marched off to captivity: to Germany if they were wearing the armband of the Home Army, or to a camp at Pruszków, on the outskirts of Warsaw, if they were not. Jerzy’s spell in the Home Army had been too short for him to be in the armband group, so with his mother, brother, a small packet of letters from his father Antoni, a minute dog and nothing else whatsoever, the camp at Pruszków was their destination. From there the Poles were herded on to trains by German soldiers. They had no idea where they were headed. Irena Rejewska and her two children also found themselves at Pruszków.45 The trains, they discovered, were to transport Poles to Germany to work. The Home Army of Warsaw had been disarmed and the Russians were nowhere to be seen.
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