Frederick William Winterbotham

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Frederick William Winterbotham in 1917

Frederick William Winterbotham (born  April 16, 1897 in Stroud , †  January 28, 1990 in Blandford ) was Group Captain (equivalent to Colonel ) of the British Royal Air Force . His duties during World War II included distributing intelligence information extracted from Ultra . He became internationally famous in 1974 with his book The Ultra Secret ("The Ultra Secret"), with which it was published in English for the first time worldwide that the Allies had deciphered the German Enigma radio messages during the entire war .

Life

As Frederick William Winterbotham himself emphasized in an audio interview in 1984 (see web links ), he was born in England in the 19th century under the government of Queen Victoria (1819-1901). After training in Oxford , he served as a fighter pilot in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I and was shot down on July 13, 1917. He fell into German captivity and spent the rest of the war in camps , mainly in Holzminden . After the war he went to Africa for some time in what was then the British crown colonies of Kenya and Rhodesia . In 1929 he returned to the UK and joined the Royal Air Force . He was assigned to the newly established Air Force Section of the Secret Intelligence Service ( MI6 ) and was given the task of collecting intelligence information about enemy or potentially enemy air forces. To do this, he hired agents , controlled and coordinated them and evaluated their reports. So he learned that Germany had signed a secret agreement with the Soviet Union and, in breach of the Versailles Treaty, was secretly training its pilots in the Soviet Union. Through his agent William de Ropp , he also learned that the German National Socialists , although not yet in power , intended to establish their ideology in Great Britain as well. So it happened in 1932 to a meeting of Winterbotham with one of the then leading Nazi - ideologist Alfred Rosenberg . He accompanied him through the United Kingdom, of course without identifying himself as an MI6 man, and tried to obtain useful information from the German. Winterbotham played this role as a supposed sympathizer of Nazi Germany for many more years until the outbreak of World War II . He got in touch with the highest circles in Germany and even met people like Hitler and Göring , as well as leading officers of the German Air Force , like Erhard Milch and Albert Kesselring . He succeeded in collecting extremely valuable military knowledge about the Air Force as well as general tactical, strategic and political information for the British.

With the beginning of the Second World War, he concentrated in a leading position within MI6 on the information gained through the successful break of the secret German news traffic. As only a few knew at the time, British code breakers in Bletchley Park , England , were able to decipher, among other things, the Enigma rotor key machine used by the German military to encrypt their radio messages . The intelligence service knowledge gained from this was summarized under the code name Ultra . To Winterbothams duties included here is to ensure that the source of ultra-information, namely the successful breaking of the Enigma, remained absolutely secret ( Britain's best kept secret , German Britain's best kept secret ). For this he created Special Liaison Units (special connection units ), abbreviated SLU which to camouflage were mostly occupied by low-ranking officers in order not to attract undue attention or suspicion. They received the information extracted from Ultra in a prepared form for passing on to the commanding officers on site, so that they could be used strategically and tactically without endangering the “Ultra Secret”. Winterbotham solved this problem brilliantly. The Germans learned nothing about Ultra throughout the war and for many years afterwards .  

It was not until 1974 that Winterbotham went public with his book The Ultra Secret . This was the first publication on the break of the Enigma in English. Although Władysław Kozaczuk had already revealed the secret in 1967 with his book Bitwa o tajemnice ( German  battle for secrets ), which was published in Polish , it was hardly noticed at that time internationally, especially in the western world . It was not until the 1973 French book Enigma ou la plus grande enigme de la guerre 1939–1945 ( German  Enigma or the greatest riddle of the war 1939–1945 ) by Gustave Bertrand was noticed in the West. With The Ultra Secret , published a year later, the successful breach of the German encryption by the Allies during the Second World War was finally no longer a secret.

Fonts (selection)

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 .
  • Gustave Bertrand : Énigma ou la plus grande enigme de la guerre 1939–1945 . Librairie Plon, Paris 1973.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ German National Library life data of Frederick William Winterbotham. Retrieved February 17, 2016.
  2. ↑ Ted Enever: Britain's Best Kept Secret - Ultra's Base at Bletchley Park . Sutton Publishing Ltd, January 1994. ISBN 0-7509-2355-5 .
  3. ↑ Friedrich L. Bauer: Deciphered secrets. Methods and maxims of cryptology. 3rd, revised and expanded edition. Springer, Berlin et al. 2000, p. 411.
personal data
SURNAME Winterbotham, Frederick William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Winterbotham, Frederick W.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British colonel and historian
DATE OF BIRTH April 16, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Stroud
DATE OF DEATH January 28, 1990
Place of death Blandford