Dillwyn Knox

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Alfred Dillwyn "Dilly" Knox (born July 23, 1884 in Oxford , † February 27, 1943 in Hughenden , Buckinghamshire ) was one of the first British code breakers in the central military office of Bletchley Park , in which during the Second World War the Germans with the Enigma machine encrypted radio messages were deciphered . Bletchley Park is about 70 km northwest of London .

Life

In this building (English: The Cottage ) in Bletchley Park, Dilly Knox worked with John Jeffreys and Alan Turing on the deciphering of the Enigma.
In the Polish ENIGMA replica, buttons (1), lamps (2) and sockets (7) were simply arranged alphabetically , as in the German Enigma-C .
The Abwehr's ENIGMA G had a special set of rollers and a rotating reversing roller

"Dilly", as almost everyone just called him, had already gained experience in the cryptanalysis of German radio messages during the First World War , when he successfully deciphered German submarine messages in the famous " Room 40 ". After the war, it became the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) and finally Bletchley Park (BP). Together with Nigel de Gray and William Montgomery, he deciphered the Zimmermann telegram on January 17, 1917 , which triggered the American entry into the war against Germany .

Knox was already working as a cryptologist on the deciphering of Enigma radio messages during the 1930s . His analytical work got a significant boost when, on July 26th and 27th, 1939, shortly before the German invasion of Poland, there was a legendary secret Pyry meeting of British, French and Polish code breakers in the Kabaty forest of Pyry , near Warsaw, came. The Polish cryptanalysts around Marian Rejewski revealed all their knowledge to Dilly Knox and his boss, Commander Alastair Denniston .

In doing so, Dilly obtained a piece of information that was fundamentally important for the intended breakdown of the German machine after he had asked Rejewski the question (probably in French): "Quel est le QWERTZU ?" (German: "What is the QWERTZU?"; What is the wiring sequence for the entry roller? ”). Rejewski's answer was: "ABCDEFG ..."

The Poles also presented the English with their Enigma replicas (see picture) including all five reels and explained their successful methods for deciphering German radio messages. With the help of this information, the British succeeded in successfully continuing the work of the Poles and deciphering the German radio messages encrypted with the Enigma from the spring of 1940 almost without interruption during the entire Second World War. In total, there were over two and a half million "cracked" messages .

One of the outstanding achievements of Dilly Knox was to break the Enigma model G (with rotating reverse roller) used by the German defense , together with his colleagues Margaret Rock and Mavis Lever (see also Women in Bletchley Park ), and thus make a decisive contribution to it that German agents could be intercepted as soon as they entered the country. Dilly directed all the fame of this important cryptanalytic breakthrough to his employees, who were highly regarded in BP as "Dilly's girls", and praised them with the words "Give me a lever and a rock and I will move the universe." : “Give me a lever and a rock , and I'll move the universe” as a pun with the surnames of his two employees ( Lever German lever and Rock German rock) to read as “Give me a lever and a rock , and I'll move the universe "with unquestionable reference to the quote attributed to Archimedes on his law of levers " Give me a fixed point and I will turn the world off its hinges ").

The unmasked German agents were then not simply eliminated, but the British domestic secret service MI5 succeeded in "turning around" many of them and using them as double agents within the framework of the Double Cross system (German: "Doppelkreuz") . Together with the information deciphered from ENIGMA-G slogans, the MI5 received such a detailed and accurate picture of the plans and the level of knowledge of the defense that every single German agent still operating in Great Britain was precisely known and could be specifically controlled and manipulated. This was also used to disinformation for the German leadership (see also: Operation Fortitude ) and, among other things, contributed significantly to the Allied success on D-Day , i.e. the successful landing of the Allies in Normandy ( Operation Overlord ).

Dillwyn Knox never lived to see that success. He died of lymph gland cancer while the war was still at the age of 58 . Mavis set him a literary memorial in 2011 with the biography "Dilly - The Man Who Broke Enigmas" (German: "Dilly - The man who broke enigmas "; but can also be read as: "The man who solved riddles ") .

literature

  • Mavis Batey: Dilly Knox - A Reminiscence of this Pioneer Enigma Cryptanalyst . Cryptologia , Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 32.2008,2, pp. 104-130.
  • Mavis Batey: Dilly -The Man Who Broke Enigmas . Dialogue, 2011. ISBN 1-906-44715-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alfred Dillwyn Knox in Spartacus Educational (English). Retrieved February 2, 2017.
  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. ↑ 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
  4. ^ Mavis Batey: Dilly Knox - A Reminiscence of this Pioneer Enigma Cryptanalyst. Cryptologia, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 32.2008,2, pp. 104-130.
  5. ↑ Peter Twinn: The Abwehr Enigma in Francis Harry Hinsley, Alan Stripp: Codebreakers - The inside story of Bletchley Park . Oxford University Press, Reading, Berkshire 1993, p. 126. ISBN 0-19-280132-5
  6. ^ Hugh Sebag-Montefiore: ENIGMA - The battle for the code . Cassell Military Paperbacks, London 2004, p. 42. ISBN 0-304-36662-5
  7. ↑ Stephen Pincock and Mark Frary: Secret Codes - The Most Famous Encryption Techniques and Their History . Bastei Lübbe, 2007, p. 109. ISBN 3-431-03734-8 .
  8. ^ Mavis Batey: Dilly Knox - A Reminiscence of this Pioneer Enigma Cryptanalyst. Cryptologia , Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 32.2008,2, p. 124.
  9. ↑ Michael Smith: ENIGMA decrypted - The "Codebreakers" from Bletchley Park . Heyne, 2000, pp. 190ff. ISBN 3-453-17285-X
personal data
SURNAME Knox, Dillwyn
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Knox, Alfred Dillwyn (full name); Knox, Dilly (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British code breaker during World War II
DATE OF BIRTH July 23, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Oxford
DATE OF DEATH February 27, 1943
Place of death Hughenden , Buckinghamshire