Ultra (cryptology)

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A radio telex sent encrypted from Berlin to Army Group Kurland on February 14, 1945 using the Lorenz key machine , which was deciphered and evaluated in BP as a Tunny message and thus became part of Ultra .

Ultra (from Latin : beyond; spelling occasionally: ULTRA ) was the cover name for the intelligence information that the British military was able to obtain during the Second World War , beginning in January 1940, from the deciphering and evaluation of the encrypted secret German communications. These mainly included the Wehrmacht's Enigma radio messages, which were intercepted by the British radio eavesdropping stations (Y Stations) and deciphered in Bletchley Park (BP), and their SZ42 radio telex, which were also broken there, with strategic information that was partly important for the war effort.

The name Ultra was also adopted by the American secret service and is derived from the consideration that this information was to be assessed as extremely important and had to be kept secret under all circumstances and thus a level of secrecy above the Most Secret (German: "Streng secret ") had to be created. They were therefore classified as "ultra-secret". For their part, the Americans referred to material extracted from the Japanese as magic .

See also: Top Secret Ultra

literature

  • Peter Calvocoressi : Top secret ultra . Baldwin Publ., Cleobury Mortimer 2001, ISBN 0-947712-41-0 (reprinted from London 1980 edition).
  • Frederick William Winterbotham : The Ultra Secret . Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1974.
  • James & Suzanne Pool: Hitler's trailblazers to power: The secret German and international sources of money that made Hitler's rise to power possible , Bern / Munich 1979, pp. 267 ff., 291 f. DNB