Antoni Palluth

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Antoni Palluth (before 1939)

Antoni Palluth (born May 11, 1900 in Pudewitz , Province of Posen , † April 18, 1944 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp ) ( code name : "Lenoir") was an employee of Department BS4 of the Polish Biuro Szyfrów (BS) responsible for Germany before the Second World War. (German: "Chiffrenbüro"). As early as 1934 he constructed a replica of the Enigma that was important for the success of the Polish deciphering and, four years later in 1938, the world's first electromechanical cryptanalytic deciphering machine, known as the Bomba , which was directed against the German machine , thus laying the foundations for the historically so important allies Enigma decipherments (code name: "Ultra" ) during the Second World War.

Life

Antoni Palluth worked in the Saxon Palace (Pol. Pałac Saski ) in Warsaw, the seat of the Biuro Szyfrów was

Antoni was born in the province of Posen, which was then part of the German Empire . After graduating from school in 1918 at the St. Maria Magdalena Lyceum in Poznan and the re-establishment of the Polish state , he served in various communication units of the Polish army, including in the citadel of the fortress in Poznan . There he met his future boss Maksymilian Ciężki and worked with him in the fields of amateur radio and cryptology . At the turn of 1925/26 he was the Unit BS2 of Biuro Szyfrów offset devoted to the radiolocation and their intelligence evaluation addressed. In 1929 he also became a lecturer in cryptology and together with Ciężki gave training courses at the University of Poznań for a group of young mathematics students, from which later members of the BS were recruited, namely Marian Rejewski , Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski . In the same year, together with Edward Fokczyński and the two brothers Leonard Danilewicz and Ludomir Danilewicz, he founded the Wytwórnia Radiotechniczna AVA (German: Funkechnische Fabrik AVA) , a small company that specialized in the manufacture of special electromechanical and radio-technical devices.

Also in the same year, on Saturday, January 26, 1929, Antoni Palluth came into physical contact with the Enigma for the first time when he and his colleague Ludomir Danilewicz were urgently called to the customs office in Warsaw. The trigger was an attentive Polish customs officer who was startled by a German embassy employee. He excitedly reported that an important parcel from Germany, addressed to the German embassy in Warsaw, had been sent by mistake via the normal post instead of diplomatic baggage and insisted that it should be given to him immediately or returned immediately. The Polish official reacted with presence of mind, pretending that there was nothing he could do over the weekend, but that he would take care of the matter and make sure that this obviously very important package was returned to the sender as soon as possible next week. After the German had left calmly, the BS was informed, which sent Palluth and Danilewicz to inspect the package. They opened the heavy wooden box and found, carefully wrapped in straw, a treasure more valuable than the Polish cryptanalysts could have dreamed of. It was a brand new Enigma machine. The two used the whole weekend to carefully examine the German machine and record its details. Afterwards, they packed them just as carefully as they found them before the package - as requested - was sent back on Monday. It was never known that the Germans suspected or noticed that their secret cryptographic machine had been subjected to such a careful inspection.

The findings of the BS were rounded off after the Poles received copies of the Enigma manuals in December 1931 from the French secret service agent Capitaine (German: "Captain") and later Général Gustave Bertrand . These were the instructions ( H.Dv. g. 13) and key guidance (H.Dv.g.14) of the German cipher. The Deuxième Bureau of the French secret service had received this from the German Hans-Thilo Schmidt, who spied for France under the code name HE ( Asché ) . In further meetings, Schmidt delivered top-secret keyboards for the months of September and October 1932 to Bertrand, which were also forwarded to the BS by return of post .

In the Polish Enigma replica, of which at least 15 were made in the mid-1930s, buttons (1), lamps (2) and sockets (7), like the German Enigma-C , were simply arranged alphabetically.

Although all this was not enough to break the encrypted German radio traffic  - the Enigma still proved to be "unbreakable" - the Poles at least managed to replicate the German machine and thus lay an important foundation for the subsequent successes in decoding. These began after the BS4 department responsible for German ciphers was relocated from Poznań to Warsaw in the Pałac Saski on September 1, 1932 . With him came the three young mathematicians Rejewski, Różycki and Zygalski. In the same year, Marian Rejewski and his colleagues succeeded in breaking into the machine used by the German Reichswehr to encrypt their secret communications.

The cryptanalytic successes of the BS4 could be continued continuously until 1939 , despite the cryptographic complications that were repeatedly introduced by the German side in the following years , while at the same time French and British authorities tried in vain to decipher the Enigma. In addition to the Enigma replicas , the Polish specialists, under the leadership of Antoni Palluth, had in the meantime also designed two machines specifically used for deciphering , called the cyclometer and bomba , which embodied two or three Enigma machines connected in series and each shifted by three rotary positions. Shortly before the German attack on their country and in view of the acute threat, they decided to pass on all their knowledge about the identified weaknesses of the machine and the German procedures as well as their tried and tested methods for their deciphering and deciphering results to their allies. On July 26th and 27th, 1939, the legendary secret meeting of French, British and Polish code breakers took place in the Kabaty Forest of Pyry about 20 km south of Warsaw, at which the Poles disclosed their methodologies to the amazed British and French. This laid the foundation stone for the historically significant Allied Enigma decipherments (code name: "Ultra" ) during the Second World War.

Shortly afterwards, in September 1939, after the German invasion of Poland , Antoni Palluth, like almost all employees of the BS and the AVA works, had to leave his country, fled via Romania and initially found asylum in France, where he, together with many others of his colleagues in " PC Bruno ", a secret Allied intelligence facility near Paris, was able to continue his successful work against the Enigma. With the German offensive against France in June 1940, he had to flee again from the advancing Wehrmacht and found a new location (camouflage name: "Cadix" ) near Uzès in the free southern zone of France .

In March 1943, while attempting to flee from France, which was now completely occupied by German troops, to neighboring Spain , he was captured and subsequently interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Antoni Palluth tragically died when the Heinkel aircraft factory , where he was forced to work as a concentration camp prisoner , was partially destroyed by an Allied bombing raid in April 1944.

Posthumous honor

By resolution of the Polish President Lech Kaczyński on September 1, 2006, Lieutenant Antoni Palluth was posthumously awarded the highest class, the Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta , “in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the independence of the Republic of Poland” . In his honor, a street in the south of Warsaw halfway between the city center and the Kabaty Forest was named after him, the Ulica Antoniego Pallutha (German: "Antoni-Palluth-Straße").

literature

  • Friedrich L. Bauer : Deciphered Secrets. Methods and maxims of cryptology. 3rd, revised and expanded edition. Springer, Berlin et al. 2000, ISBN 3-540-67931-6 .
  • Friedrich L. Bauer: Historical Notes on Computer Science . Springer, Berlin 2009. ISBN 3-540-85789-3
  • Gustave Bertrand : Énigma ou la plus grande enigme de la guerre 1939–1945 . Librairie Plon, Paris 1973.
  • Ralph Erskine : The Poles Reveal their Secrets - Alastair Dennistons's Account of the July 1939 Meeting at Pyry . Cryptologia. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 30.2006,4, pp. 294-395. ISSN  0161-1194 .
  • Francis Harry Hinsley , Alan Stripp: Codebreakers - The inside story of Bletchley Park . Oxford University Press, Reading, Berkshire 1993, ISBN 0-19-280132-5 .
  • David Kahn : Seizing the Enigma - The Race to Break the German U-Boat Codes, 1939-1943 . Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, USA, 2012, pp. 92f. ISBN 978-1-59114-807-4
  • Hugh Sebag-Montefiore : Enigma - The battle for the code . Cassell Military Paperbacks, London 2004, ISBN 0-304-36662-5 .
  • Gordon Welchman : The Hut Six Story - Breaking the Enigma Codes . Allen Lane, London 1982; Cleobury Mortimer M&M, Baldwin Shropshire 2000, ISBN 0-947712-34-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ IEEE Milestone Historical significance of the work. Retrieved April 23, 2015
  2. ↑ Chris Christensen: Review of IEEE Milestone Award to the Polish Cipher Bureau for `` The First Breaking of Enigma Code '' . Cryptologia . Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 39.2015,2, p. 185. ISSN  0161-1194 .
  3. ^ Hugh Sebag-Montefiore: Enigma - The battle for the code . Cassell Military Paperbacks, London 2004, pp. 22-23. ISBN 0-304-36662-5
  4. ↑ OKW: Instructions for use for the Enigma cipher machine . H.Dv.g. 13, Reichsdruckerei , Berlin 1937. Accessed: April 22, 2015. PDF; 2.0 MB
  5. ↑ OKW: Key instructions for the Enigma key machine . H.Dv. G. 14, Reichsdruckerei , Berlin 1940. (Copy of the original manual with a few small typing errors.) Accessed: April 22, 2015. PDF; 0.1 MB ( memento from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ^ Hugh Sebag-Montefiore: Enigma - The battle for the code . Cassell Military Paperbacks, London 2004, p. 22. ISBN 0-304-36662-5
  7. ^ Gordon Welchman: The Hut Six Story - Breaking the Enigma Codes . Allen Lane, London 1982; Cleobury Mortimer M&M, Baldwin Shropshire 2000, p. 210. ISBN 0-947712-34-8
  8. ^ Krzysztof Gaj: Polish Cipher Machine -Lacida . Cryptologia . Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 16.1992,1, ISSN  0161-1194 , p. 74.
  9. ^ Marian Rejewski: An Application of the Theory of Permutations in Breaking the Enigma Cipher . Applicationes Mathematicae, 16 (4), 1980, pp. 543-559. Accessed: April 22, 2015. PDF; 1.6 MB ( memento from October 30, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  10. ↑ a b Ralph Erskine: The Poles Reveal their Secrets - Alastair Dennistons's Account of the July 1939 Meeting at Pyry . Cryptologia. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 30.2006,4, p. 294
  11. ↑ Anna Stefanicka: Komunikat Instytutu J. Piłsudskiego w Londynie No. 130. (Polish and English), December 2018, ISSN 1369-7315, p. 48, pilsudski.org.uk (PDF; 650 kB), accessed on April 24, 2019 .
  12. ^ Hugh Sebag-Montefiore: Enigma - The battle for the code . Cassell Military Paperbacks, London 2004, pp. 327-330. ISBN 0-304-36662-5
personal data
SURNAME Palluth, Antoni
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lenoir (alias)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish engineer and cryptanalyst
DATE OF BIRTH May 11, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Pudewitz , Poznan Province
DATE OF DEATH April 18, 1944
Place of death Sachsenhausen concentration camp