Wladyslaw Kozaczuk

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Władysław Kozaczuk (born  December 23, 1923 in Babiki , † September 26, 2003 in Warsaw ) was a colonel (Polish pułkownik ) of the Polish land forces and a military and cryptology historian .

Life

Władysław was born in the small Polish village of Babiki near Szudziałowo , about 20 km northeast of Białystok , now in northeastern Poland in the Podlaskie Voivodeship . In 1944, still during the Second World War , he joined the Polish army and was promoted to lieutenant (Polish podporucznik ) in 1945 . Even after the end of the World War he remained in the military and fought against the Ukrainian insurgent army , among other things . In 1950 he was assigned to KBW (Polish Korpus Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego ), the internal security service, to Warsaw.

In 1954 and 1955, after the Korean War , he served as part of the peacekeeping mission in Korea before serving in the Polish Ministry of the Interior from 1955 to 1958 , and for the last two years also with the International Control Commission in Vietnam . From 1958 to 1969 he worked for the Polish military police WSW (Polish Wojskowa Służba Wewnętrzna ). His tasks also included counter- espionage and counter-espionage .

Kozaczuk studied philology (graduation in 1956) and received his doctorate in history in 1978 at the Felix Dzerzhinsky Military Academy (Polish Wojskowa Akademia Polityczna im. Feliksa Dzierżyńskiego ) in Warsaw.

In his book Bitwa o tajemnice ( German  battle for secrets ), published in Polish in 1967 , Kozaczuk was the first in the world to reveal Enigma ou la plus grande énigme de la guerre 1939–1945 ( German  Enigma or the largest Rätsel des Krieg 1939-1945 ) by Gustave Bertrand and The Ultra Secret ( German  Das Ultra -kret ) by Frederick William Winterbotham , the successful breakage of the German rotor key machine Enigma by the Allies (see also: Meeting of Pyry ). At the time, however, its publication was hardly noticed internationally. Only after the publications of Bertrand and Winterbotham and his further book on the subject, which was then published in English, entitled Enigma: How the German Machine Cipher Was Broken and How It Was Read by the Allies in World War Two , did Kozaczuk enjoy international attention.

Władysław Kozaczuk was honored with the Order of Polonia Restituta . He died, after his wife, shortly before his 80th birthday, leaving behind a daughter and a stepdaughter.

Fonts (selection)

  • Enigma: How the German Machine Cipher Was Broken and How It Was Read by the Allies in World War Two . Praeger, 1984, ISBN 0-313-27007-4 .
  • Under the spell of Enigma . Military publishing house, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-327-00423-4 .
  • Secret Operation Wicher . Bernard et al. Graefe, Koblenz 1989, Karl Müller, Erlangen 1999, ISBN 3-7637-5868-2 , ISBN 3-86070-803-1 .
  • with Jerzy Straszak: Enigma - How the Poles Broke the Nazi Code . Hippocrene Books, 2004, ISBN 0-7818-0941-X .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ German National Library life data of Władysław Kozaczuk. Retrieved February 16, 2016.
  2. ↑ Friedrich L. Bauer: Deciphered secrets. Methods and maxims of cryptology. 3rd, revised and expanded edition. Springer, Berlin et al. 2000, p. 411.
  3. ^ Friedrich L. Bauer: Historical Notes on Computer Science . Springer, Berlin 2009, p. 180. ISBN 3-540-85789-3 .
personal data
SURNAME Kozaczuk, Wladyslaw
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish colonel and historian
DATE OF BIRTH December 23, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Babiki
DATE OF DEATH September 26, 2003
Place of death Warsaw