Gustave Bertrand

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Gustave Bertrand

Gustave Bertrand (* December 17, 1896 in Nice , † May 23, 1976 in Toulon ) ( aliases : Barsac , Bolek and Godefroi ) was a French secret service employee who, in cooperation with the Polish Biuro Szyfrów (German: "Chiffrenbüro"), was essential to the contributed to the early breakage of the German Enigma key rotor machine .

Life

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.

The son of a French infantry officer, Gustave Bertrand began his military career at the beginning of the First World War in 1914. A year later, in the Battle of Gallipoli , he was wounded in the battle for the Dardanelles . From 1926 he worked for the French secret service and from October 1930, already with the rank of captain , was responsible for German encryption methods in the new section Décryptement et Interceptions . The tasks of his department not only included deciphering and intercepting material, but also obtaining it through theft, burglary or betrayal.

At an important meeting on November 8, 1931, the German Hans-Thilo Schmidt, spying for France under the code name HE ( Asché ) , gave him important secret documents on the German key machine, such as the instructions for use ( H.Dv. g. 13) and above all the Key instructions (H.Dv.g.14). Asché received 10,000 RM for the material  .

Towards the end of 1932, Asché delivered particularly sensitive documents that would prove to be the most valuable for the Allies, namely the secret keyboards of the Enigma for the months of September and October 1932. The Deuxième Bureau of the French secret service forwarded these documents to British and Polish authorities further. While it failed French and the British, in the encryption of the German machine break and they classified the Enigma as "unbreakable", succeeded the 27-year-old Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski still in 1932 in the State responsible for Germany Unit BS4 of Biuro Szyfrów in Warsaw the first break into the Enigma, in particular the uncovering of the wiring of the entry roller of the German machine (see also: QWERTZU ).

On July 26 and 27, 1939, shortly before the German invasion of Poland , Bertrand was one of the two French participants at the legendary secret meeting with British and Polish code breakers in the Kabaty forest of Pyry , about 20 km south of Warsaw, where the Poles were presented their stunned allies with their Enigma replicas and revealed their methodologies.

Bertrand resigned from the French secret service in 1950 with the rank of Général and shortly afterwards, in 1953, became mayor of the municipality of Théoule-sur-Mer , located in the extreme south-east of France near Cannes on the French Riviera . He held this office until 1971. In 1973, his book Énigma ou la plus grande enigme de la guerre 1939-1945 (German: "Enigma or the greatest riddle of the war 1939-1945") was published. It is one of the first publicly available sources, in which the Allied decipherment ( code name: "Ultra" ) of the Enigma used by the German military to encrypt their secret communications during World War II is discussed and in particular the Franco-Polish cooperation is described.

Works

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

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Krzysztof Gaj: Polish Cipher Machine -Lacida . Cryptologia . Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 16.1992,1, ISSN  0161-1194 , p. 74.
  2. ^ A b c Friedrich L. Bauer: Historical notes on computer science . Springer, Berlin 2009, p. 173. ISBN 3-540-85789-3
  3. ↑ OKW: Instructions for use for the Enigma cipher machine . H.Dv.g. 13, Reichsdruckerei , Berlin 1937. Accessed: March 24, 2015. PDF; 2.0 MB
  4. ↑ OKW: Key instructions for the Enigma key machine . H.Dv. G. 14, Reichsdruckerei , Berlin 1940. (Copy of the original manual with some small typing errors.) Accessed: March 24, 2015. PDF; 0.1 MB ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ilord.com
  5. ^ Hugh Sebag-Montefiore: Enigma - The battle for the code . Cassell Military Paperbacks, London 2004, p. 22. ISBN 0-304-36662-5
  6. ^ 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
  7. ↑ Simon Singh: Secret Messages . Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2000, p. 199. ISBN 3-446-19873-3
  8. ^ Marian Rejewski: An Application of the Theory of Permutations in Breaking the Enigma Cipher . Applicationes Mathematicae, 16 (4), 1980, pp. 543-559. Accessed: March 24, 2015. PDF; 1.6 MB ( Memento of the original from October 30, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / cryptocellar.web.cern.ch
  9. ↑ 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
  10. ^ Kris Gaj, Arkadiusz Orłowski: Facts and myths of Enigma: breaking stereotypes. Eurocrypt, 2003, p. 9.
personal data
SURNAME Bertrand, Gustave
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Barsac (alias); Bolek (alias); Godefroi (alias)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French secret service agent
DATE OF BIRTH December 17, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Nice
DATE OF DEATH May 23, 1976
Place of death Toulon