Maksymilian Ciężki

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Maksymilian Ciężki

Maksymilian Ciężki [maksɨˈmiljan ˈt͡ɕjɛ̃ʂki] , listen ? / i (born November 24, 1898 in Samter , Province of Posen ; † November 9, 1951 in London ) was deputy head of the Polish Biuro Szyfrów (BS) (German: "Chiffrenbüro") and head of the special for Germany before the Second World War responsible department BS4 . Through this and through his role at the secret meeting of French, British and Polish code breakers at the end of July 1939 in the Kabaty forest of Pyry (see Meeting of Pyry ), he made a significant contribution to the British code breakers in Bletchley Park in England being defeated by the German Wehrmacht deciphered encrypted communications using the Rotor Enigma key machine . Audio file / audio sample

Life

Maksymilian Ciężki worked in the Saxon Palace (Pol. Pałac Saski ) in Warsaw, the seat of the Biuro Szyfrów was
Employed at Biuro Szyfrów (before 1928). On the far right is Maksymilian Ciężki, next to him is Jan Kowalewski .
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.

Maksymilian was born as one of nine children in the province of Posen, which was then part of the German Empire . According to his father's wish, he should take over his parents' farm one day and was therefore sent to an agricultural school. When the First World War broke out , he was only 15 years old. Three years later, in June 1917, he was called up for service in the Imperial Army and deployed on the German Eastern Front. Most recently, after the Peace of Brest-Litowsk , he worked from February to November 1918 in a news department in Ohrdruf, Thuringia . After the war he returned to Szamotuły , his native town, which soon became Polish .

From 1919 he attended the telecommunications officers school in Zegrze , about 30 km north of Warsaw , and from 1921 served in a communications unit of the Polish army and in their central radio station in the Polish capital before he was assigned to the general staff in 1923. In January 1929 he was sent to the University of Poznań , which was the Royal Academy in Poznan until 1919, for training in cryptology . Here he met his future colleagues, the three young mathematicians Marian Rejewski , Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski . In the autumn of 1930, a branch of the BS was set up in Poznań for eight students who had completed the course with the best results, and on September 1, 1932, it was relocated to the Saxon Palace (Polish: Pałac Saski ) in Warsaw . His employees Rejewski, Różycki and Zygalski managed to break into the Enigma machine used by the German Reichswehr to encrypt their secret communications in the same year under his direction in BS4 .

The cryptanalytical successes of the BS4 could, despite the repeatedly introduced cryptographic complications from the German side, be continued continuously until 1939, while at the same time French and British authorities tried in vain to decipher the Enigma. In addition to Enigma replicas , the Polish specialists also constructed two machines specifically used for deciphering, called cyclometers and bombs , which embodied two or three Enigma machines connected in series and each shifted by three rotary positions. Shortly before the German attack on their country and in view of the acute threat, they decided to pass on all their knowledge about the identified weaknesses of the machine and the German procedures as well as their tried and tested methods for their deciphering and deciphering results to their allies. On July 26 and 27, 1939, the secret Pyry meeting of French, British and Polish code breakers took place in the forest of Pyry about 20 km south of Warsaw, at which Maksymilian Ciężki and his colleagues exposed the Polish methodologies to the amazed British and French.

Shortly afterwards, in September 1939, after the German invasion of Poland , Major Ciężki, like all BS employees , had to leave his country, fled via Romania and initially found asylum in France, where he and many of his colleagues in the " PC Bruno " , a secret Allied intelligence agency near Paris, was able to continue its successful cryptanalytic work against the Enigma. With the German offensive against France in June 1940 he had to flee again from the advancing Wehrmacht and found a new location (camouflage name: "Cadix" ) near Uzès in the free southern zone of France .

In March 1943, while trying to escape from France, which was now completely occupied by German troops, to neighboring Spain , he was captured and interned by the SS . Despite intensive interrogation, he managed to keep his knowledge of the Enigma and its breach a secret. After the war, which he luckily survived, he shared the fate of many Polish heroes who did not return to their country after 1945. In 1946 he was even stripped of his Polish citizenship by Poland, which was now under communism . Ciężki settled in Wales disappointed and bitter . He died of lung cancer at the age of 53.

Posthumous honor

Memorial for Maksymilian Ciężki in Szamotuły

His citizenship and honor were only restored after his death. On November 23, 2008, his remains were transferred to his native Szamotuły, where a memorial was erected in his honor.

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 .
  • Friedrich L. Bauer: Historical Notes on Computer Science . Springer, Berlin 2009. ISBN 3-540-85789-3
  • Gustave Bertrand : Énigma ou la plus grande enigme de la guerre 1939–1945 . Librairie Plon, Paris 1973.
  • 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, pp. 294-395. ISSN  0161-1194 .
  • Francis Harry Hinsley , Alan Stripp: Codebreakers - The inside story of Bletchley Park . Oxford University Press, Reading, Berkshire 1993, ISBN 0-19-280132-5 .
  • David Kahn : Seizing the Enigma - The Race to Break the German U-Boat Codes, 1939-1943 . Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, USA, 2012, pp. 92f. ISBN 978-1-59114-807-4
  • Gordon Welchman : The Hut Six Story - Breaking the Enigma Codes . Allen Lane, London 1982; Cleobury Mortimer M&M, Baldwin Shropshire 2000, ISBN 0-947712-34-8 .

Web links

  • Maksymilian Ciężki's CV (English). Retrieved April 21, 2015

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. ^ Marian Rejewski: An Application of the Theory of Permutations in Breaking the Enigma Cipher . Applicationes Mathematicae, 16 (4), 1980, pp. 543–559, cryptocellar.org (PDF; 1.6 MB), accessed on May 27, 2019.
  3. ↑ a b 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
personal data
SURNAME Ciężki, Maksymilian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish cryptanalyst
DATE OF BIRTH November 24, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Samter , Poznan Province
DATE OF DEATH November 9, 1951
Place of death London