Wilhelm Fenner

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Wilhelm Siegwart Fenner (born  April 14, 1891 in Saint Petersburg , †  July 25, 1961 in Bad Godesberg ) was a German cryptanalyst who was the main group in the cipher department of the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW / Chi) before and during the Second World War Directed cryptanalysis , which was entrusted with the deciphering of the opposing message traffic.

Life

The Annenschule in St. Petersburg (1912)

Wilhelm was born on April 14, 1891 in Saint Petersburg . He was the sixth of seven children of his parents Heinrich Gottlieb Fenner (born January 16, 1832; † November 21, 1900) and Charlotte Georgine Fenner, b. Michaelsen. His older brother was the future Gestapo officer Heinz Fenner . His father was the "arranging editor" of the St. Petersburg newspaper , a German-language daily newspaper that appeared in what was then the Russian capital . After two years of home tuition , he attended the Evangelical Lutheran Annenschule from 1899 (see picture) and finally passed his high school diploma there in May 1909 with distinction. In the autumn of 1910 he enrolled at the Royal Technical University of Berlin (TH) in Berlin-Charlottenburg and studied structural engineering. In the summer of 1914 he passed his candidate exam there.

When the First World War broke out , he had to break off his studies and worked for Siemens for a short time before he was called up for military service on December 1, 1914. After the end of the war, now with the rank of lieutenant , he remained in the military until February 9, 1920. A little more than a year later, his professional career took a decisive turn when, in the spring of 1921, he met Peter Novopaschenny , a former Russian sea ​​captain in the tsarist navy and professor of applied tactics . Novopaschenny asked him for help with the planned move to Berlin and confided to Fenner that he had worked successfully against the German Baltic Fleet during the war as director of the Russian cryptanalytic service and that he intends to make his experience available to the German general staff. In the same year, Fenner established the connection and thus came into contact with cryptanalysis for the first time . He was now working, under the guidance of his “master” Novopaschenny and together with him, successfully breaking Russian / Soviet military ciphers. Fenner made use of his excellent language skills of German and Russian, while Novopaschenny, an excellent cryptanalyst , hardly spoke any German.

As a result, Fenner introduced uniform and clean technical terminology , thus laying the first important cornerstone for the further success of his new employer. In the autumn of 1922 he and Novopaschenny were not only officially taken over as employees of the cipher station (Chi -stelle) of the Reichswehr , but Fenner was also entrusted with the management of the cryptanalysis with eleven employees. Over the next few years, Fenner changed the way his group worked significantly. From a somewhat chaotic heap of creative “geniuses” he formed an analytically thinking, systematically working and disciplined unit of more and more experienced code breakers . His measures were fruitful and the number of successfully "cracked" cryptograms rose steadily. The number of staff also grew and Fenner insisted on training newcomers himself and passing on his own cryptanalytic knowledge, which has since grown enormously, to them. At the same time, however, he lost more and more contact with the actual deciphering work due to his managerial tasks .

The American strip pusher M-138-A embodies one of the methods that OKW / Chi was able to break successfully

On April 1, 1927 he was appointed to the government council. In addition to his management tasks, he intensified contacts and cooperation with befriended foreign encryption centers in Austria, Hungary and Finland, and later also with Italy, Spain and Estonia. He also trained their employees, and wrote two treatises on cryptanalysis, namely "Basics of deciphering" and "Contribution to the theory of sliders". In addition, he dealt with the Enigma , which was already being used on a trial basis by the Reichswehr , showed cryptographic weaknesses and the resulting deciphering possibilities, and made suggestions for improving the machine.

After the National Socialist " seizure of power " in January 1933, times became increasingly restless for the encryption station as well. She now felt the competition from newly founded rival institutions, such as the " Research Office " (FA) , which had been in existence since April 1933 . At this, first as a "private intelligence service" of the shortly after the Reich Air Minister appointed Hermann Goering founded office, Chiffrierstelle lost many capable employees who were hoping for in the new organization better career opportunities. Fenner felt compelled to fill the gaps in staff with newcomers, whereby the term “attitude” became more and more important. After Fenner had already been appointed to the Upper Government Council in the summer of 1933, he was promoted to the Ministerial Council in the summer of 1938, shortly after the High Command of the Wehrmacht was set up and the associated renaming of the cipher station " Cipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht " (OKW / Chi) . He succeeded in counteracting the recruitment, which was harmful to OKW / Chi, by creating a career as "higher Wehrmacht officer" for his most capable and loyal employees. This had to be approved by the head of the Wehrmacht High Command , Wilhelm Keitel , which happened at the turn of the year 1938/39.

The number of staff in the encryption department had risen to around 200 by 1939, after having only been around 40 two years earlier. In the war years that followed, up to 1944, it quadrupled to 800. For Fenner and his staff at OKW / Chi, the war was initially comparatively calm and successful. The raw material, in the form of intercepted radio messages , gushed abundantly and they had material in more than sufficient quantities, often several hundred messages a day, so that they had to concentrate on the most important projects and ignore comparatively unimportant sources. They achieved important deciphering successes, for example against France, which in 1940 contributed significantly to the rapid victory of the Wehrmacht in the West ("Fall Rot"). Polish, Russian and Yugoslav procedures could also be deciphered.

Towards the end of 1943, however, the working and living conditions in Berlin deteriorated noticeably for all OKW / Chi employees as the bombing war approached the German capital. Most of the work rooms were destroyed and many employees also lost their homes to the bombs. They now had to spend the night temporarily and work unprotected outdoors during the day, which of course caused the performance of OKW / Chi to suffer extremely. Fenner describes that they could barely do a third, sometimes only a quarter of their usual workload. Towards the end of the war, Fenner even had to fend off personal attacks when he was accused of participating in the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt . In February 1945 working conditions in Berlin had become so catastrophic that OKW / Chi was relocated to Halle an der Saale in Saxony . Only two months later, in mid-April, it was no longer safe here either and general dissolution began.

Werfen an der Salzach was the last location of Fenner's group

While his department head, Colonel Kettler, as well as the head of main group A, Major Mettig, and also one of his most capable employees, the head of group IV , Hüttenhain , turned north (see also: Retreat of OKW 1945 ), Fenner fled with one of them Part of his staff to the south. On April 23, 1945 OKW / Chi was officially dissolved and the staff was subordinated to the General of Intelligence (GdNA). Shortly before the American army reached its location near Werfen (about 40 km south of Salzburg ), they burned their documents or threw them into the Salzach . With the surrender of the Wehrmacht on May 8, 1945, the employment relationship for all former OKW employees expired. Fenner moved to Landshut and found a job as a bicycle and car mechanic in neighboring Straubing .

In July 1946 he was summoned to the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal as a witness and in August transferred to "Haus Alaska" , an establishment of the US Army in Oberursel (near Frankfurt am Main ), where high-ranking Germans were interned. Fenner was interrogated intensively by the Army Security Agency (ASA) and wrote a number of reports on his life and activities, including an autobiographical treatise, the translation of which is in the TICOM archive (see also: Weblinks ) under DF-187 The Career of William Fenner was filed with the note TOP SECRET . These documents have only been publicly available for a few years.

Wilhelm Fenner had been married to Elise Sophie Katharine von Blanckensee since January 11, 1922, a daughter of the former Prussian Major General Peter von Blanckensee . They had two children, a son, Siegwart Heinrich (born January 28, 1923), who fell as a lieutenant on February 19, 1945, and a daughter, Ilse Fredericki (born July 24, 1928).

Fonts

  • The history of the encryption department. Report on behalf of the head of the Ag WNV , January 1945.

literature

  • David Alvarez: Wilhelm Fenner and the Development of the German Cipher Bureau, 1922-1939 . Cryptologia . Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 31.2007,2 (April), pp. 152-163. ISSN  0161-1194 .
  • Friedrich L. Bauer : Deciphered Secrets. Methods and maxims of cryptology. 3rd, revised and expanded edition. Springer, Berlin a. a. 2000, ISBN 3-540-67931-6 .
  • Randy Rezabek: TICOM and the Search for OKW / Chi . Cryptologia. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 37.2013,2 (April), pp. 139-153. ISSN  0161-1194 .
  • Frode Weierud and Sandy Zabell : German mathematicians and cryptology in WWII. Cryptologia, 2019, doi: 10.1080 / 01611194.2019.1600076 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Frode Weierud and Sandy Zabell: German mathematicians and cryptology in WWII. Cryptologia, 2019, doi: 10.1080 / 01611194.2019.1600076 , pp. 5–6.
  2. ^ Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels , Adelige Häuser A volume XIV, page 185, volume 66 of the complete series, CA Starke Verlag, Limburg (Lahn) 1977, ISSN  0435-2408 , p. 45.
  3. ↑ a b PDF; 7 MB , Army Security Agency: DF-187 The Career of Wilhelm Fenner with Special Regard to his Activity in the Field of Cryptography and Cryptanalysis , Dec. 1949, p. 1, accessed: April 2, 2015
  4. ↑ PDF; 7 MB , Army Security Agency: DF-187 The Career of Wilhelm Fenner with Special Regard to his Activity in the Field of Cryptography and Cryptanalysis , Dec. 1949, p. 7, accessed: April 2, 2015
  5. ^ David Alvarez: Wilhelm Fenner and the Development of the German Cipher Bureau, 1922-1939 . Cryptologia . Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 31.2007,2 (April), p. 157. ISSN  0161-1194 .
  6. ↑ PDF; 7 MB , Army Security Agency: DF-187 The Career of Wilhelm Fenner with Special Regard to his Activity in the Field of Cryptography and Cryptanalysis , Dec. 1949, pp. 10-11, accessed: April 2, 2015
  7. ↑ Randy Rezabek: TICOM and the Search for OKW / Chi . Cryptologia. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 37.2013,2 (April), p. 149. ISSN  0161-1194 .
  8. ↑ Randy Rezabek: TICOM and the Search for OKW / Chi . Cryptologia. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 37.2013,2 (April), p. 151. ISSN  0161-1194 .
personal data
SURNAME Fenner, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fenner, Wilhelm Siegwart (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German cryptanalyst during World War II
DATE OF BIRTH April 14, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Petersburg
DATE OF DEATH July 25, 1961
Place of death bad Godesberg