Jerry Roberts

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Captain Roberts during his time at Bletchley Park (1941-1945)
Jerry Roberts speaks in 2012 (about 30 seconds) about the Lorenz 42 , called Tunny : "... and the Germans were totally convinced that nobody would ever break it." ("... and the Germans were completely convinced that nobody would ever break it." could ever break. ")

Raymond C. "Jerry" Roberts (born November 18, 1920 in London - Wembley , † March 25, 2014 in Liphook , Hampshire ) was a British cryptanalyst , linguist and officer. During the Second World War he worked in the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) (German: "Staatliche Code- und Chiffrenschule") in Bletchley Park (BP), the military service that successfully deciphered German communications concerned.

Life

Jerry was born in the London borough of Wembley to Herbert Roberts and his wife Leticia and went to Latymer Upper School in the neighboring borough of Hammersmith from 1933 to 1939 . He then attended University College London until 1941 . He studied French and German . His tutor , Prof. Leonard Willoughby, who himself in the First World War in Room 40 , the former code breaker had worked -Central the British, recommended that the 20-year-old Jerry Roberts as linguists for the GC & CS .

In the fall of 1941, after his interview with Colonel John Tiltman , he was in a then newly created small group of cryptanalysts displaced, whose job it was first Playfair - encryption to break as the time of the German police were used. On July 1, 1942, the task changed. From now on, it was a matter of deciphering the important military radio traffic that was encrypted with the German Lorenz key machine. The Wehrmacht used this highly complex key machine (own name: Schlüsselzusatz 42; short: SZ 42) to encrypt their strategic telex connections , especially between the Wehrmacht High Command based in Wünsdorf near Berlin and the army headquarters in cities such as Rome, Paris, Athens, Copenhagen, Oslo , Königsberg, Riga, Belgrade, Bucharest and Tunis. The British gave him the code name Tunny ("tuna"). After Bill Tutte managed to break into Tunny for the first time in the spring of 1942 , Roberts, under the direction of Major Ralph Tester , was supposed to take over the deciphering work in the so-called Testery and continue it routinely. This succeeded, with Roberts being the senior codebreaker shift supervisor for one of three shifts that worked around the clock until the victorious end of the war in Europe . The number of staff at Testery had meanwhile increased to 118 employees.

Jerry Roberts in 2009

After the war he was a member of the War Crimes Investigation Unit , a special organization that sought to investigate German war crimes using illegal methods such as torture in the now infamous London Cage . Roberts himself worked as an interrogator mostly in the then British occupation zone in northwest Germany .

From 1948 he started a new job as a market researcher . Until 1954 he worked for the London company Market Information Services (MIS) . He later founded his own companies, such as Roberts Research Ltd. and Euroresearch Ltd. , both of which were adopted by the National Opinion Poll (NOP) in 1993 . In retirement, he worked for the BP Codebreakers , especially for his former colleagues from the Testery , whose war-important achievements were in danger of being forgotten. In particular, he honored the memory of three important heroes of Bletchley Park, Alan Turing , the naval Enigma "cracked" , Bill Tutte , the first break- managed in the Lorenz cipher, and Tommy Flowers , the Colossus , the first programmable computer of World, built.

In contrast to almost all of his colleagues, who, due to the strict secrecy of their military achievements, no longer received any public recognition during their lifetime, Jerry Roberts died as the last codebreaker of the Testery, honored at the age of 93.

Fonts

  • Major Tester's Section in Jack Copeland : Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers . Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006, pp. 249-259. ISBN 978-0-19-284055-4

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  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. ^ BP Roll of Honor (English). Retrieved December 27, 2016.
  3. ↑ Jack Copeland: Colossus: Breaking the German 'Tunny' Code at Bletchley Park . The Rutherford Journal. Retrieved December 27, 2016.
  4. ↑ Bletchley codebreaker Raymond 'Jerry' Roberts appointed MBE (English). Retrieved December 28, 2016.
  5. ↑ Bletchley Park codebreaker Jerry Roberts dies, aged 93 . Retrieved December 27, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Roberts, Jerry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Roberts, Raymond C.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British cryptanalyst, linguist and officer
DATE OF BIRTH November 18, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH March 25, 2014
Place of death Liphook