Radio Defense (OKW)

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Radio defense (more precisely: radio defense of the OKW ; former abbreviation: OKW / WFSt / WNV / FU III) was the name of a department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) in World War II . It served the counterintelligence with the help of radiomonitoring , radio direction finding and radio evaluation .

Insinuation

Organizational chart (English) of the radio surveillance departments (FU) within the Wehrmacht communication links (AgWNV)

After radio defense was initially subordinated to the Foreign / Defense Office , i.e. the military secret service of the OKW, under Lieutenant Colonel (later Lieutenant General ) Franz Eccard von Bentivegni , under the direction of Corvette Captain Schmolinske, the radio defense was subordinated to the Department III “Counter-Espionage and Counter-Espionage” Detached from the defense in 1940 and subordinated to the OKW as an independent group OKW / WNV / Fu III "radio defense". The hierarchy was as follows:

history

Adcock antenna system as it was used by many radio direction finding stations during World War II

When the radio defense group was founded in 1940, it was headed by Hans Kopp. Their most important task was counter-espionage with the help of radio surveillance , wiretapping and, if necessary, deciphering of encrypted radio messages .

In July 1941, an Abwehr radio listening station in Cranz (in what was then East Prussia ) managed to intercept suspicious radio transmissions. As it turned out after the information was deciphered and analyzed by the intelligence service , it belonged to a Soviet ( NKVD ) spy ring , which the Gestapo later grouped under the code name “ Red Orchestra ”.

In 1944, after the Allies landed in Normandy on D-Day , the radio defenses managed to intercept and decipher radio messages from the American military police . So you could see the car - transport of the Allies in the reconquered by you French territorial track part. These indicated the direction of attack and the supply situation.

Beyond that, however - in contrast to its British counterpart ( Y Service and Bletchley Park ) - the radio defense did not succeed in breaking into the encrypted radio communication of the war opponents. Although the Germans captured British TypeX - rotor cipher machines , for example after the Battle of Dunkirk , after analysis and comparison with their own Enigma machine , which they considered "unbreakable", they came to the conclusion that an attack on it was possible Machine key is pointless.

literature

  • Nigel West: Historical Dictionary of Signals Intelligence. The Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Toronto and Plymouth, 2012, ISBN 978-0-8108-7187-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rudolf Staritz: Abwehrfunk - radio defense. Technology and procedures of espionage radio services. Unpublished book manuscript, editorial deadline in mid-1985, revised version 2018 ( PDF; 10.5 MB ), p. 12.
  2. ↑ TICOM DF-187A Organization of the Cryptologic Agency of the Armed Forces High Command , accessed: May 2, 2019
  3. ↑ ptx calls moscow 3rd continuation, counter strike of the German defense. Der Spiegel , June 10, 1968
  4. ^ Hans Coppi : The "Red Orchestra" in the field of tension between resistance and intelligence work. The Trepper Report from June 1943. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 3/1996 ( Online , PDF, 7 MB)
  5. ^ Nigel West: Historical Dictionary of Signals Intelligence. The Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Toronto and Plymouth, 2012, ISBN 978-0-8108-7187-8 , p. 100.