Bletchley Park

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The mansion ( english The mansion ) of Bletchley Park was the headquarters of the British code breaker and is now a museum (2017)

Bletchley Park (abbreviation BP ) is a country estate in the English town of Bletchley in Buckinghamshire and is located about 70 km north-west of London . BP was the central military department that in World War II successfully with the deciphering of the German dealt message traffic. Today it is home to the UK's National Computer Museum .

Government Code and Cypher School

Encrypted German radio messages were intercepted via the antenna of the formerly highly secret and now world-famous Station X.
The legendary Hut 6 ( German  Barrack 6 , photo 2004) in Bletchley Park, where work was carried out on the deciphering of the German Enigma under the direction of Gordon Welchman

The Government Code and Cypher School (GC & CS) ( German about "Government Code and Cipher School"; also known as Station X to the central located here radio listening station of the British Y service ) moved in 1939 to the mansion one of Bletchley Park. Here British were cryptanalyst ( English codebreakers ) the task of the secret communications of the German Wehrmacht to decipher . To do this, German encryption methods had to be broken , such as the Enigma key machine , the Siemens T 52 secret writer and the Lorenz key machine .

The reasons for choosing the location were:

  • BP was at the time of World War II with a railway connection both to Oxford and after Cambridge and to London connected. The scientists from these universities were therefore able to travel easily.
  • BP was also at a telecommunications hub. The lines there were able to transport a particularly large number of messages.
  • BP was relatively isolated. Strangers would have noticed there immediately.

By 1973, all activities were in and around BP as a classified document with the classification level Top Secret a strictly protected military secret of the British ( Britain's best kept secret , German: "Britain's best kept secret"). Only then did BP's activities and successes, which were important for the war effort, become publicly known.

The first GC & CS employees , such as Alastair Denniston and Dillwyn Knox , were veterans from the Admiralty's cryptology department , the legendary Room 40 . There were also outstanding mathematicians around 1939 , such as Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman , as well as historians , linguists and chess masters.

The British Codebreakers built on knowledge that Polish code breakers , such as Marian Rejewski , Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski , had been working on in the Polish Biuro Szyfrów (German: "Chiffrenbüro") since the early 1930s . At the end of July 1939, shortly before the German attack on Poland that triggered World War II, British and French cryptanalysts met for a secret meeting in the Kabaty Forest of Pyry , near the Polish capital Warsaw . At this secret conference, the Poles revealed to their astonished allies the methods and equipment they had successfully developed since 1932 , with which they had succeeded in deciphering the communications encrypted by the German Reichswehr and later by the Wehrmacht with the help of the Enigma rotor cipher machine . With this boost, the British code breakers were able to launch another attack on the German machine at the outbreak of war, which subsequently enabled them to decipher the encrypted German radio messages almost continuously.

In 1943 the tube computer Colossus , a forerunner of today's computers , was put into operation in BP . He served for deciphering the German teleprinter traffic, using the Lorenz machine (key accessory SZ42) was encrypted by the British Tunny ( German tuna called).  

The breach of the German encryption in BP from January 1940 provided the British with important information about the strength and locations of German air force units during the Battle of Britain . In connection with the location of the chain home radar system, the Royal Air Force could be given important information for the use of the British fighter squadrons. By intercepting the radio traffic of the German Africa Corps , several successes against the supply lines in the Mediterranean could be achieved; wiretapping also proved effective in the run-up to German offensives. On the German side, the suspicion arose that the key might have been cracked.

In the case of the attacks by the Kriegsmarine submarines on allied supply convoys in the Atlantic Battle , BP was able to transmit the encrypted radio communications from and to the German U- ands to the German U- ships with a delay of initially about four days and later usually less than a day. Read the boats. This gave the Allied naval command the opportunity to lead convoys around the German submarine packs and improve their own anti-submarine defense. Escort aircraft carriers , long-haul aircraft and ships equipped with sensors and radar for submarine hunting were brought to the submarine's installation rooms.

Through the long-term deception ( Operation Fortitude ), in which Bletchley Park used the deciphered expectations of Commander-in-Chief West and the defense in their radio communications with Berlin, the Allied side deceived a fictitious, many divisions strong, beyond the start of the landing in Normandy , 1st US Army Group stationed near the canal , which tied the German tank reserve and many other military forces in north-west France and Belgium at the start of the invasion , because the German side was expecting a second, even larger Allied landing near Calais .

Despite all British precautions, the Soviet Union had placed an agent named John Cairncross in Bletchley Park .

However, the British themselves also passed on important information from German communications, which they had deciphered in Bletchley Park, to Stalin when they concerned the Eastern Front. Since they did not want to reveal the source to their ally themselves, they first passed the information on to the Swiss intelligence service, which passed the findings on to Rudolf Rößler (alias Lucie ). This forwarded the information that he allegedly wanted to have received from an informant with the code name Werther on to Moscow via the Red Three . Since the information proved to be accurate again and again, Moscow soon trusted it unreservedly. In this way, the Soviets gained knowledge of German attack plans that helped them win the largest tank battle in World War II ( Operation Citadel ).

organization chart

Flow of information through the departments: from the radio message intercepted by the Y service to deciphering and analysis by the intelligence service
The Hat 1 (Image 2006) was built as the first barracks in the year 1939
In Hut 3 (photo 2009) the messages deciphered by Hut 6 were evaluated
Number of radio messages evaluated daily by Hut 3 .

The Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) was divided into different Huts ("barracks") at the height of the war in 1942 . The English term reflects the provisional character of the small wooden buildings in which the code breakers were housed in departments. The term hat for the individual departments was later largely retained even after the move to more solid stone buildings.

  • Hut 1 was the first barrack to be built in August 1939 under the direction of Captain Hubert Faulkner, a local builder and owner of the site. As a 40 x 16 foot wide wooden barracks, Hut 1 was home to the first attempts at intercepting Morse code. The Bletchley Park Sick Bay First Aid Post was located here when the first Turing bomb Victory was tested on March 18, 1940 . The First Aid Post was relocated to room 36 of the mansion in mid-March 1943. In the same month the Transport Office was relocated to Hut 1 and opened in July 1943. At least 1945 the fire station was also housed in Hut 1 .
  • Hut 2 , also built in August 1939 under the direction of Hubert Faulkner, sold groceries to employees and, from February 25, 1943, also beer at certain times. Until May 1942 Hut 2 contained a lending library. From mid-1942 onwards , one hour per week lessons about the nautical language of the Germans and Italians took place in Hut 2 . In June 1942, the building was used as an emergency room during exercises called Bletchley Park in danger . Hut 2 was demolished in 1946 and the site was used as a car park from then on.
  • Hut 2A was supposed to house the transport office in July 1941, but this was housed in Hut 9 . Since there is no further evidence of Hut 2A , it is speculated that it was never built and was instead taken over entirely in Hut 9 .
  • Hut 3 , also built in August 1939 under the direction of Hubert Faulkner, was the headquarters for evaluating the Enigma radio messages from the army and air force. The codes were forwarded to Hut 6 and also to the Fish deciphering system . In contrast to other telecommunications rooms, Hut 3 was under the direction of Group Captain Winterbotham of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and almost all of the staff also belonged to the SIS. Hut 3 was under the leadership of Commander Saunders from January 1940, and from the beginning of 1942 under Wing Commander (later Group Captain ) Eric Jones, who acted as section head. Even after the entire section moved to Block D in February 1943, the title Hut 3 was retained and the previous Hut 3 was renamed Hut 23 .
  • Hut 3A was probably a wooden hut used by Nigel de Gray in 1940 , where the results of Hut 3 were studied, and this was probably later adopted by the Intelligence Exchange. In February 1943, Hut 3A was renamed Hut 23A . Hut 3A was supposed to be rebuilt in mid-1943 and made available for engineers, but this did not happen.
  • Hut 3B was the place of work of the subsection for non-German aerial radio messages at the beginning of May 1942, but this had to move to Hut 10A so that the 6 Intelligence School from Beaumanor could work in Hut 3 . Presumably Hut 3B was renamed Hut 23B in February 1943 .
  • Hut 3E was to open the 6th Intelligence School in March 1942 . With no further details known about Hut 3E , it is speculated that it was included in the 15 series.
In Hut 4 (photo 2005) the decipherments from Hut 8 were evaluated militarily and tactically. Today the Bletchley Park Museum restaurant is located there.
  • Hut 4 took over the decipherments from Hut 8 and evaluated them militarily and tactically.
  • Hut 6, under the direction of Gordon Welchman and his deputy Conel Hugh O'Donel Alexander, worked on deciphering theradio messages encryptedby the army and air force with the Enigma I. After Alexander switched to Hut 8 in October 1941, Stuart Milner-Barry succeeded him as Deputy , before he finally succeeded Welchman in the fall of 1943 as Chief of Hut 6.
  • Hut 7, under the direction of Hugh Foss , dealt with Japanese naval encryption
  • Hut 8 under the direction of Alan Turing and from October 1941 his deputy Hugh Alexander dealt with the deciphering of radio messages of the Kriegsmarine , which used the Enigma-M3 and the Enigma-M4 for encryption.
  • Hut 10 housed the meteorological department.
  • Hut 11 was the site of the first "Turing bomb" in 1940 and, from 1943, the seat of Newmanry , a department headed by Max Newman that dealt with the deciphering of telex messages encoded with the Lorenz key suffix SZ42 (English Code name : Tunny ).
  • Hut 14 was the building in which the most important telegraph connections, in particular to the Foreign Office in London, were located.

In addition to the Huts , i.e. the wooden barracks, some brick buildings were later erected, which were called blocks . These were:

  • Block A : Naval Intelligence
  • Block B : Italian and Japanese sections (Italian Air and Naval, and Japanese code breaking)
  • Block C : punch card archive (punch-card index)
  • Block D : Enigma in addition to Huts 3, 6 and 8
  • Block E : radio surveillance and Typex .
  • Block F : Newmanry and Testery
  • Block G : Traffic analysis and distraction measures
  • Block H : Tunny and Colossus (now home to the National Computer Museum)

Women in Bletchley Park

Due to the high staffing requirements, more women were recruited from 1939/40 until they finally made up 75% of the workforce. Many of the women only did auxiliary work, but some also worked as code breakers to decipher encrypted messages.

Cinematic reception

The situation and atmosphere in Bletchley Park are essential components of the novel Enigma by Robert Harris from 1995 and the feature film Enigma - The Secret from 2001 based on it.

The 2014 film The Imitation Game is largely set in Bletchley Park, but was shot in Chicheley Hall , about ten kilometers away .

The crime series The Bletchley Circle , which was broadcast by ITV between 2012 and 2014, is also set in Bletchley Park between 1952 and 1953. The protagonists are four former code breakers who use their skills to solve crimes.

literature

Web links

Commons : Bletchley Park  - album containing pictures, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ 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
  2. ↑ Ted Enever: Britain's Best Kept Secret - Ultra's Base at Bletchley Park. Sutton Publishing, 1994, ISBN 0-7509-2355-5 .
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g Part I: Huts. In: History of Bletchley Park Huts & Blocks 1939-1945. Bletchley Park Trust. New Edition. Report No. September 18, 2009. pp. 8-23.

Coordinates: 51 ° 59 ′ 49 ″  N , 0 ° 44 ′ 31 ″  W.