Regenerate Lewis

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Regene "Jean" Lewis (* approx.  1922 in England ), now Jean Nissan , is a British former employee of Bletchley Park ( BP ) and later a cryptanalyst in the BP branch of the British Foreign Office in London .

Life

Shortly after the outbreak of war, the then 18-year-old married Bernard Lewis (1916–2018), who was only a little older and whom she had met in Cambridge . Both the London School of Economics (LSE) , which she attended, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) , which Lewis attended, had been evacuated from the British capital, which was permanently endangered by German air raids, to the relatively safe Cambridge. Far from home, the two young people quickly got closer and married.

A little later, towards the end of 1941, she started her work in BP , which is the central military service, as located seventy kilometers northwest of London where the British during the Second World War, the encrypted communications of the Wehrmacht successfully deciphered . She got a job initially as an assistant in Hut 4 ( German  Barrack  4 ). The radio messages deciphered by the neighboring group Hut 8 were evaluated here. The two hats together formed the Naval Section , one of whose tasks was to decipher the code used by the German Navy . This used the rotor cipher machine Enigma-M3 and from February 1942, especially with the German submarines , the Enigma-M4 . While Hut 8 carried out the deciphering of the radio messages until September 1941 under the direction of Alan Turing and then under Hugh Alexander , it was the task of Hut 4 to "interpret" the "raw" plaintexts .

The “ interpretation ” of the radio messages initially included the “de-mutilation”, i.e. the correction of incorrect or missing letters. Signal corruption is almost inevitable in practice. They arise, for example, from typing errors or typing errors on the German side, atmospheric disturbances such as thunderstorm lightning during radio transmission, or from hearing errors or careless mistakes on the British side. The next step is to take into account German practices when formatting text (see also the radio message section in the Enigma article ) and to recognize and correctly interpret German technical or military terms , abbreviations , spelling aids , aliases, etc. After all, the now “pure” plain text had to be translated into English as precisely as possible .

The young woman worked in Hut 4 under the direction of Walter Ettinghausen (1910-2001), who was born in Munich, had emigrated from Germany as a toddler during the First World War , had long since had British citizenship, and was an important Israeli after the Second World War Should be a diplomat . Regene Lewis, in his own words, got a very simple and boring task, she had to number incoming messages.

During this time her husband, who also worked at BP , was able to provide valuable cryptanalytic assistance. It was about a deciphered text for which the underlying language was unclear. Neither French nor German nor Italian nor other “common” languages ​​fit. The then Colonel ( Colonel ) and later Brigadier John Tiltman (1894-1982), to whom the message was then presented, suspected Hebrew . After a few difficulties, her husband, who had a doctorate in oriental studies, was not only fluent in Arabic and Turkish , but also spoke Hebrew, to understand the plaintext.

After this success he took over the Palestine department within BP and headed it for the remainder of the war. Shortly afterwards, in the first half of 1942, the Diplomatic Section was moved from Bletchley to London, and with it the Lewis couple. However, their feelings for each other cooled noticeably and they separated. In order to avoid encounters with her "ex", which she now found embarrassing, she thought about quitting the service, but then decided to speak to her boss, Commander ( frigate captain ) Alastair Denniston (1881–1961) . She explained the situation to him and asked him to see that she no longer had to work in the same building as Bernard Lewis. He asked: “Why?” She replied: “Because then she could meet Bernard in the stairwell, for example, and such an encounter would be embarrassing for her.” Her boss only replied that it would not be embarrassing for him.

Shortly thereafter, Regene became a cryptanalyst when Italian ciphers that could previously be "read" suddenly no longer broke . The situation was critical and the Codebreakers feared they would have to start over. However, Regene could not imagine that the Italians would find the resources to radically change the encryption system. Overnight she had the saving idea and guessed the "complication" that the Italian side had introduced. It was an " offset " of the key using the calendar date . From then on she was the “ girl for everything ” in the Italian section and became a valued colleague in the code breaking team . For a moment she thought about switching to the Wrens , the Royal Women's Navy Service, because, unlike those around her, she was not allowed to wear a uniform. But her boss brought her back from this "crazy idea", for which she was very grateful in retrospect.

Towards the end of the war she switched to the Hungarian section and also dealt with secret texts in languages ​​such as Russian and Czech . After the war, at the still very young age of 23, she retired from the State Department and emigrated to the United States in 1947 . She met an Israeli who was born in Russia, who became her second husband, and with whom she went to the newly founded Israel around 1950 . There she gave birth to a son and then a daughter, then went back to England and had a second daughter.

Like Joan Clarke (1917–1996), Mavis Lever (1921–2013) and Margaret Rock (1903–1983), Regene Lewis is one of the few female codebreakers .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The transcript of the interview says "It was now around 1948, and I was about 25."
  2. ^ Gordon Welchman: The Hut Six Story - Breaking the Enigma Codes . Allen Lane, London 1982; Cleobury Mortimer M&M, Baldwin Shropshire 2000, p. 11. ISBN 0-947712-34-8
  3. ↑ Roll of Honor Mrs Regene "Jean" Lewis (Nissan) (English), accessed on June 13 of 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Lewis, rain
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nissan, Jean (current name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British cryptanalyst
DATE OF BIRTH around 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH England