Jan Kowalewski

Jan Kowalewski, here as a major

Jan Kowalewski (born  October 23, 1892 in Łódź , †  October 31, 1965 in London ) was a lieutenant colonel (Polish podpułkownik ) of the Polish armed forces as well as a cryptanalyst , secret service employee , engineer and journalist . He was one of the first employees of the Polish "Cipher Office" BS (Polish: Biuro Szyfrów ) , or its forerunner organization, the "Cipher Department" (Polish: Sekcja Szyfrów ). During the Polish-Soviet War (1919–1921) he succeeded in deciphering intercepted encrypted radio messages from the Red Army . This contributed to the Polish victory in the decisive battle of Warsaw in 1920 . The so-called “miracle on the Vistula” can therefore be traced back to the successful deciphering work of the then lieutenant (Polish podporucznik ) Jan Kowalewski.

Life

The Piotrkowska (Petrikow road) lived in Lodz (1900), in January during his school days.

Group of Polish officers during the Third Silesian Uprising (1921) in front of Slawentzitz Castle . Front left (in the middle of the picture) Jan Kowalewski.

Jan was born in the Weichselland , at that time the westernmost province of the Russian Empire . After his school education in Łódź, he studied chemistry at the University of Liège from 1909 and completed his studies there in 1913. He returned later that year to his homeland and was only a year later, with the outbreak of the First World War as a soldier in the Imperial Russian Army convened. He fought as an officer in the telecommunications force in Belarus and Romania . After the World War, in December 1918, he was able to join the 4th Polish Rifle Division, newly formed by the Polish General Lucjan Żeligowski, and became an intelligence officer there. During the Polish-Ukrainian War (1918-1919) he worked as a code breaker in General Józef Haller's staff . He succeeded in breaking encrypted radio messages from the then West Ukrainian People's Republic and the White Army under General Anton Denikin , which earned him the attention and recognition of his superiors. In May 1919 he came to Poland, which had since been re-established, and was transferred to Warsaw in July with the task of setting up an intelligence service cipher unit for the Polish General Staff . To this end, he recruited a number of employees from the universities of Warsaw and Lviv , including outstanding mathematicians such as Stanisław Leśniewski , Stefan Mazurkiewicz and Wacław Sierpiński . Together they succeeded in further successful deciphering in the Polish-Soviet war, which in 1920 contributed to winning the Battle of Warsaw, the “miracle on the Vistula” , and finally in 1921 to the Polish victory in the war.

After the victory, he served as chief of intelligence on the Polish staff during the Third Silesian Uprising . In 1923 he was sent to Tokyo , where he trained Japanese officers in intelligence. For his services he received here the Japanese Military Merit Order of the Rising Sun . In 1928 he graduated from the French Military School Saint-Cyr and was then promoted to major . From 1929 he then served as a military attaché at the Polish embassy in Moscow . There he fell into disrepute and was declared a persona non grata . He moved to the Polish embassy in the Romanian capital Bucharest and stayed there until 1937 before returning to Poland. For a short time he headed a department of the National Unity Camp (Polish Obóz Zjednoczenia Narodowego ) founded by Adam Koc in the same year and became director of TISSA (Polish Towarzystwo Importu Surowców Spółka Akcyjna ), a special import company operated by the Polish secret service, and its purpose was to procure rare goods in Poland for the Polish arms industry from abroad. In the meantime he had been promoted to lieutenant colonel (Polish podpułkownik ).

After the German attack on Poland in September 1939, he fled - like many other Polish secret service employees and cryptologists - via Romania to France . In January 1940 he joined the Polish army in exile there. After the successful military offensive of the German Wehrmacht in May and June 1940, he had to leave the zone in northern France now occupied by the Germans and fled to Portugal via the unoccupied zone Libre and Spain . After briefly staying in Figueira da Foz , he went to Lisbon , an international melting pot and gathering point for spies from all over the world. There he met his old friend Ioan Pangal, a Romanian politician and former Romanian envoy to Portugal. Although Pangal was dismissed from office in 1941 by his pro-German “leader” Ion Antonescu because of his “pro-Allied” attitude , he remained in Lisbon as an opponent of the National Socialist German Reich and its war allies Romania, Hungary , Finland and Italy . Pangal now worked with Kowalewski for the Polish secret service.

This collaboration proved very fruitful for the Allies. Kowalewski managed to convince his superiors, General Władysław Sikorski and Minister Stanisław Kot , to establish a Polish espionage center in Lisbon on January 15, 1941. This was given the code name Placówka Łączności z Kontynentem ( German  Continental Communication Center ) and was under Kowalewski's direction. This center quickly developed into a control center for a widespread spy network. From here dozens of espionage and sabotage groups in the various German- occupied European countries were coordinated and the Polish resistance was also supported and supplied.

Kowalewski's spy network also benefited the British. His intelligence findings were regularly forwarded to the British SOE ( Special Operations Executive , German  special task force ) or the Ministry of Economic Warfare . For example, the British obtained the date for Operation Barbarossa a good two weeks before the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. Kowalewski also succeeded in eliminating a secret German radio station that was used to communicate with the submarines in the Atlantic . After the abdication of the Romanian King Carol II on September 6, 1940, he also ensured his safe passage via Spain to Lisbon.

Towards the end of the war, in 1944, Kowalewski was dismissed from his post in Lisbon on March 20 and transferred to London on April 5, under pressure from the Soviet Union, who disapproved of his strong influence in Eastern Europe as a damage to Soviet interests. Stalin himself had achieved this against Churchill at the Tehran Conference at the end of 1943 . Kowalewski received in London the new post of head of the Polish Operations Bureau at the Special Forces Headquarters ( German 'Polish operations staff at the headquarters of the Special Forces " ), an impressive title, but without much influence. In fact, he was "sidelined".  

After the war, like many of his countrymen, he remained in exile in Britain and began his new life as a journalist . He was the editor-in-chief of the monthly magazine East Europe and Soviet Russia ( German  Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia ), where he worked with Radio Free Europe . He remained mentally active and agile into old age. In 1963, at the age of more than 70, he achieved another remarkable cryptanalytic success. He cracked the code that the Polish general Romuald Traugutt had used during the January uprising (1863-64). Lieutenant Colonel Jan Kowalewski died of cancer at the age of 73.

Honors

Kowalewski's merits remained a secret for decades. Nevertheless, during his lifetime (1922) he received the highest Polish Order of Merit Virtuti Militari .

Posthumously he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the independence of the Republic of Poland by resolution of July 4, 2012 . This was presented to his family at a festive ceremony on August 15, 2012. On October 23, 2014, his 122nd birthday, in his hometown of Łódź , in the presence of his grandson Hugo Ferreira Kowalewski, he was the mayor of the house in Ulica Piotrkowska 132 (Petrikauer Strasse 132) where he had lived during his school days Hanna Zdanowska unveils a plaque dedicated to Jan Kowalewski.

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 .
• Jan Bury: Polish Codebreaking during the Russo-Polish War of 1919-1920 . Cryptologia , 28: 3, 2004, pp. 193-203.
• Władysław Kozaczuk , Jerzy Straszak: Enigma - How the Poles Broke the Nazi Code . Hippocrene Books, 2004, ISBN 0-7818-0941-X .

Web links

• Photo of the ceremonial unveiling of the memorial plaque for Jan Kowalewski in Ulica Piotrkowska in Łódź. Retrieved February 19, 2016.
• Report on the solemn unveiling of the memorial plaque for Jan Kowalewski in Ulica Piotrkowska in Łódź (Polish). Retrieved February 19, 2016.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Jan Bury: Polish Codebreaking during the Russo-Polish War of 1919–1920 . Cryptologia, 28: 3, 2004, p. 194.
2. ^ Jan Bury: Polish Codebreaking during the Russo-Polish War of 1919–1920 . Cryptologia, 28: 3, 2004, p. 200.
3. ↑ Report in Urząd Miasta Łodzi (Lodzer Stadtanzeiger) ( Memento of the original from February 19, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. October 23, 2014. Retrieved February 19, 2016.