Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Howdy One & All,

while viewing some original ULTRA material relating to Botenplatte in Dec 1944, I've come across a signal that clearly wasn't from an intercepted wireless transmission but from a "source" who was viewing original files. The dates and clarity of the reporting would, at first glance, seem to preclude a new Luftwaffe ot Wehrmacht PoW (in any case, such interrogation would hardly produce such clear info after only a hour or two following capture and wouldn't go through ULTRA channels anyhow).

Was there a case or cases of some ULTRA material physically being passed to the Allies by Luftwaffe (or Wehrmacht) personnel?

The ULTRA decrypt, which was passed to Churchill is dated 21/12/44 and the original signals cited by "the source" were dated 20/12/44 and 21/12/44.

Here is some of the wording, which obviously doesn't indicate who the source was, other than they had access to files:

"source later saw acknowledgements stamped early 21/12""

"two copies were seen by source. One of them stamped a few hours later came from a file marked Advanced Det JG 26."

There are also verbatim signals from the Luftwaffe Liason Detachment with C. in C. West. The source documents were clearly originals because it is noted in the ULTRA when the text was smudged and unreadable. These signals may've been captured rather than viewed by "the source".

Of course, the ULTRA signals passed to Allied Commands (HP 9981 for former; HP 9995 for latter) give no indication that they are anything but intercepted wireless signals.

Has anyone found similar cases in either ULTRA DEFE 3 or the HW 5 material?

Cheers

Rod

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

You come across it all the way through HW5 and there are numerous examples quoted on my website. In my view it is simply a device to obscure the true origin of the material, i.e. intercepted and deciphered wireless transmissions.

Breaks in reception are disguised as "smudge", "several words illegible", "badly tattered document" etc.

If you look at the front several pages of each HW5 you'll see a long list of the different German wireless networks a(nd their wavelengths) from which the intelligence was derived.

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Hi Nick,

thanks for the clarification. That makes perfect sense.

The few full examples that I have are from HW 1 (ULTRA passed to Churchill) and I think what threw me off is that in the main signal I'm interested in, this device wasn't so obviously used at all; broken words are simply denoted "illegible", which I took to mean either undecyphered or due to a brake in receiption.

Cheers

Rod

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Concerning the possibility of spying, it was great, after the war, some italian nd german personalities award some distinction from the allies, notably an italian captain/admiral, giving notices during the war about convoys for N.afrika,
further concerning Ultra, was the code "cracked", or "sold", or "found"/ case of the submarine/???

remi

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

The answer is not simple! Two very good books on this are "Seizing the Enigma" by David Kahn and "Enigma: the battle for the code" by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore.

The Allies broke into the day's Enigma settings by a variety of methods (including statistical analysis and computers) but even when you have done that, the message may still be in another code. The German Navy used a system of two-letter combinations ("bigrams") to denote weather, wind speed/direction etc. A lot of effort went into capturing the relevant code books.

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Nick is correct in that how Ultra was solved is a very complex matter. It was never consistently solved in the sense that every captured message was solved. This is especially true with German Naval coding.

Much of the initial breakthrough came from manual and primitive computer (these were actually banks of linked enigma machines, endlessly churning through key punched code for common links) analysis as Nick says along with learning how the enigma machine was used and set on a daily basis. Sometimes, rarely, they guessed right, but more often German operators were lazy and used settings that could be seen as repeats or matched up to other known settings and then guessed at. The Luftwaffe was nortorious for:

• Using the radio for almost everything, thus giving more opportunity for the British to see traffic and analyse it for repetitive groups that might be deciphered.
• Using girlfriends names or repeat settings that allowed for deciphering settings on the wheels on a daily basis. I.e., their radio discipline was poor, helping the British.

The German Navy was much more disciplined in changing settings, using random settings and eventually even added more wheels to the machine, making deciphering settings much more difficult. In fact while after 1940 Luftwaffe traffic was deciphered quite regularly, the deciphering the Navy traffic was a hit and miss affair until mid-1943 when the combination of Ultra, Huff-Duff, long range patrol aircraft and the beginnings of the escort carrier deployment finally did in the U-boats.

Ultra is a complex business. There are many excellent books out there, including the ones Nick mentioned. To understand how complex the accomplishment of deciphering was, you almost have to read them all.

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

I recommend having a look at this website :
http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/index.htm
Which at a time ran a challenge of deciphering vintage cripted enigma messages. You'll also find the enigma simulator there if you wish to have some fun with it.

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Over the past few months I have been working through HW 5 files at the PRO. there are many instances of "source" reading papers on people's desks and even taking documents out of briefcases, so there were definetely some spies at work here.

Tony

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Intelligence officers tell lies, it's a big part of the job! If the Germans ever got to see one of the items that are now in HW5 then they would have tied themselves in knots looking for spies in their own ranks while still happily broadcasting in their breakable code.

As I said the front of each file has pages cross-referencing the various messages to the communications nets they were received from (see attached sample) each of which was given a code name by Beltchley Park.

Re John's comment. I saw recently that there is a book coming out from someone who worked on the Luftwaffe traffic at Bletchley:

http://fm.greenhillbooks.com/greenhi...d=33921&-find=

Every other one I've read devotes most space to the U-boat war, so this could be interesting.

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Hello One & All,

Nick's answer is ultimately just common sense. The simple fact is that if information was coming via humint it would not need to be decoded at Bletchley Park and would have been processed via other channels.

That is not to say that information from a variety of sources was not analysed to aid the code breakers. As Nick points out, even the decrypted messages weren't neccessarily cleartext and thus messages had to be further decoded. Sometimes the information was on hand to do this, sometimes it couldn't fully be done for weeks (if at all).

In terms of protecting the ULTRA secret, an example is with Operation Gisela; the British first learnt of this operation in December 1944 but it wasn't until after the capture of aircrew personnel who 'spilled the beans' a month later that lower Commands were warned and defensive measures taken.

Cheers

Rod

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

There's another humint that's not mentioned too often, I just ran across a great example today reading Impact - the history of Germany's V-Weapons in World War II.

The following quote is from the book:

"On March 22, 1943, MI recorded a conversation between German Generals Ritter von Thoma and Ludwig Crüwell, who had been captured in Africa. The two men, obviously aware they were being monitored, spoke in hushed tones, and parts of their conversation went unheard even by the sensitive microphones in the room. Crüwell had been captured in May 1942 and von Thoma in November. In bringing Crüwell up to date, von Thoma told of a large rocket he had seen tested, presumably at Kummersdorf, with F.M. von Brauchitsch. The weapon, according to von Thoma, went into the stratosphere and had unlimited range."

And that reminded me of the classic from "The One that Got Away", where the two German POW pilots leaned out of the window to have a discussion -- there was a microphone under the window sill!

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

There are thick files of these transcripts in the National Archives, both in the original German and in translation. They are called the CSDIC (UK) SRA reports and I quoted from some of them in Kampfflieger Vol. 4 (Classic Publications, 2005).

For examples, look at the online NA catalogue from about AIR40/3069 to AIR40/3101. Plus there are other files on Army and Naval personnel, Italian servicemen and so on.

Another sneaky trick was apparently to install one microphone that could be found with a bit of effort and a second that couldn't. After they'd found the first one, prisoners felt secure and talked freely.

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Interesting that the original post refers to Dec 1944 ULTRA decrypts related to Bodenplatte, yet the Bodenplatte attack still maintained the element of surprise (while recognising the detection of some of the attackers by conventional means). Does this point to the limitations of UlLTRA?

As mentioned earlier, it is interesting to compare the ability of the codebreakers to successfully attack Luftwaffe Enigma, compared with the complete failure to break Gestapo Enigma messages, or the Kreigsmarine's Barracuda Enigma cypher:

http://www.uboat.net/technical/enigma_ciphers.htm

No doubt the Gestapo/Kreigsmarine attitude to radio security was different from the Luftwaffe's.

Cheers

Boomerang

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Actually there are several signs of the impending attack from about November 1944 onward - provided you know, as we do now, what they mean.

The Allies realised that a lot of fighter units were being moved to the western front and wondered why. They speculated that a big strike against airfields might be one reason and there is a mention (can't find it now!) of "Ein scharfer Einsatz".

There were other signs too. For example HP 8689, issued at 01.03 hours on 6 December 1944. Part of this long signal is from Jagdkorps I to Jafue Mittelrhein on the evening of the 4th about the allocation of two night fighters and crews…

"to ensure the assembly of strong day fighter formations in bad weather conditions…"

HP 8620 is a similar message.

HP 8624 is about the convening of a conference of all day fighter Geschwader and Gruppe commanding officers (except JG 300 and JG 301) on the afternoon of 5 December at Flammersfeld, 30 km north of Koblenz.

However Bodenplatte didn't happen at the outset of the Ardennes offensive and so (I'm guessing) the Allies assumed that the moment for such an operation had passed, all those German fighters must have been assembled in direct support of the ground offensive.

ULTRA's inherent limitation was that not every German message was sent by radio and even then not all of it was picked up, let alone deciphered. (And some of what was sent by radio was not exactly of strategic importance: could someone bring back the gas mask that someone else left behind, for example).

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Hi, guys.

It has been my understanding that the HW 5 stuff in fact is mostly humint, and not decrypts. I have thousands of signals (remember, the humint stuff came via radio mostly, and was received and transcribed at some central unit which I do not know) that seem to corroborate this, and signals like:

"Source saw unit strength return addressed to Lfl 5 HQ stating:

14./JG 77"

etc etc etc

was just that, namely a report from some person that relayed this to the intelligence unit they worked with. There are also numerous examples of these starting with "Source saw partially torn document bla bla bla" and one can clearly see (by comparing to contemporary documents from the units in question) that this is correct. Several of the documents referred to were also not transferred by any kind of link, but were ordinary paper documents transferred by courier or ordinary service mail.

In my opinion most of these humint people were working for the Wehrmacht in different types of 'civilian' jobs, office personnel, cleaning personnel etc.

Regards,
Andreas

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Hi Andreas,

I agree with Nick about the source of the material in HW 5. It is mostly from decrypts, not humint.

The official title of the HW 5 series is as follows: 'Government Code and Cypher School: German Section: Reports of Germany Army and Air Force High Grade Machine Decrypts'.

If it was humint, then that means the Allies had men working for them in every Gruppe, Geschwader, Fliegerkorps, etc. in the entire Mediterranean, and I don't think that is possible.

And would someone risk his or her life to send a signal to the British about a German document noting the lack of toothbrushes in II./Sch.G. 2 in June 1943?

In HW 5 you will occasionally come across something that is not a decrypt, for example reference to Y-Service material or agent reports, but the vast majority of HW 5 is decrypts, in my opinion.

I'll be back at the National Archives for all of September, and one thing I'm really looking forward to going through again is the HW 5. It's a great source, especially for the Mediterranean theatre.

All the best,
Andrew A.

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Hi.

It must then definitely be a mix. Will check and come back with some examples later.

I wonder if my impression might be because I have mostly worked with the early part, and the files from that period contained more humint... will check... working off memory, and the brain can do tricks to you...

Regards,
Andreas

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

I'm sorry but I'm just not persuaded that these are anything other than intercepted radio traffic:

1. As Andrew says, the files are classed "machine decrypts."

2. GC&CS did not run agents, that was done by two separate British organisations, MI6 (aka the Secret Intelligence Service) and the Special Operations Executive (replacing Section D of MI6 and promoting sabotage and subversion in the occupied countries, but the resistance movements it supported also fed back intelligence on German forces).

3. An SOE radio operator reportedly had a life expectancy of a few weeks before capture or wihdrawal yet there is material in HW5 coming day after day from the same units for months on end.

4. What is more, usually that material is somehow reaching Bletchley Park and being decoded, translated and commented on within 24 hours or less of the message's time of origin. The "spies" Andreas believes are responsible would have needed to be free use their radios almost any time they wished.

5. The comments and notes attached to the HW5 messages do not indicate that the Bletchley Park staff had seen other intelligence: e.g. prisoner interrogations, the Y-Service (e.g. radio traffic to and from German aircraft) or technical intelligence from crashed or captured machines.

6. In the front of each file, as I've said, you find pages after page of data, referencing each paragraph and item to its source and each has a network name and a radio frequency. (See the attached example).

7. Implying a human source is a great cover story. If anyone saw one of the items and the word got back to the Germans, they would start hunting imaginary spies. It even seems to have worked on one or two people on this board! Please note that the document I have attached was copy No. 25, so there were apparently several in circulation and so a leak was a possibility.

8. It may be that the Official History of British Intelligence in the Second World War could shed more light on this if anyone has those volumes available.

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Sorry, this is the attachment for my last post:

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Hi, Nick

So - what you are saying is that the headings of virtually all the documents in the HW 5 files are to be discarded, and that they are to read:

Intercepted coded enemy radio traffic says that....

Instead of:

Norse and Danish sources report

On 20/6 source was able to see

etc etc etc

as shown in the following documents:

Example 1:
http://www.ahs.no/discussion_images/HW5-1-001.JPG

Example 2:
http://www.ahs.no/discussion_images/HW5-1-002.JPG

Example 3:
http://www.ahs.no/discussion_images/HW5-1-003.JPG

Example 4:
http://www.ahs.no/discussion_images/HW5-21.JPG

There are hundreds (or more) like these, and I would really like to see a confirmation that none of these messages came from humint sources.

But then I guess I have been tricked by the british intelligence. I am also confused as to how the codes were solved if the transmissions were incomplete (as hundreds of these mesages imply that parts are missing...), for one I thought that the sign on sign off signals or "cribs" were a vital part when breaking the codes, and that once the settings for the code machines were known, the entire message could be decoded? I am also the curious to why the british are constantly misidentifying units (especielly when regarding roman vs arabic numbering), as the germans usually (have been through more original german messages than I would like to remember...) used the designation röm for roman in their messaging. Did the codebreakers miss that?? Does an archive that contain the decrypts as they really looked exist?

As I know that norwegians were using radio transmissions to send information to the allies during the war, could someone then please relay information here on where that intelligence material are in the archives?

Regards,
Andreas

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Not discarded but (I believe, anyway) understood as a "human" analogy for a "signals" reality so that "in a file marked Luftflotte 2" means "in a signal from Luftlotte 2" and "smudge" means "reception unclear."

I guess that incomplete transmissions are just a function of the radio equipment then available and the range over which some of it was picked up. Also, I don't know if more Germans were transmitting than British people were listening!

I'm not sure of the process to get back into an interrupted message. You would have the daily key and the individual message setting but I'm not sure what you did from there: test a few thousand possibilities? However there was an upper limit on transmission length after which you broke the message into two or more parts, so maybe they just missed a whole part sometimes?

I am familiar with «ROEM. EINS JG 2» and so on in German signals and sometimes that appears in the decrypts but elsewhere the analysts comment on an "obvious mistake" by the sender. Many senders seem to think that NSG 1 and NSG 2 were Geschwader, for example, rather than Gruppen. Also, by late 1944, the Germans aren't using plain language in their original messages. In 1944–45 they started using invented words to denote units or classes of unit: GAMOZ for Luftwaffenkommando West, GAMPY for Luftflotte 4; GEKEM for a Jagdkorps, GEPAX for a Flak Division, GAUTA for a Chief of Staff; GEKAT IX is IX. Fliegerkorps. I keep finding new examples down to Staffel level.

Material HW1 is as close to the original as I know but the story is that most of the material was burned in about 1946 to preserve the secret. I would like to have had the "German Books" reference volumes compiled about people, units and airfields etc. from information in the decrypts.

I would imagine that MI6 or SOE would have had these. AFAIK the files of SOE have been released but (and this is true!) it's only about 10 years since Britain even officially admitted to having a Secret Service. Some files have now been released I think but I don't know if they have reached 1939–45 yet.

Andreas[/quote]

P.S. it was interesting to see your material from 1940–41. They had changed the presentation a lot by 1944–45 (which I have been working on).

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Hi Andreas,

from looking at the JPEGs, IMHO, all of the information could be explained as being from Enigma signals - operational orders/operational reports etc.

I will endeavour to post an example of a message in its original format (i.e. full text) as these exist in HW 1.

I completely agree with Nick as it is illogical that humint would go through Bletchley Park.

The reason why some unit IDs are wrong is probably because the Enigma transmissions weren't fully in cleartext. References to sender/recipient and units were coded and these had to be decoded even once the Enigma message was decyphered. As an example,

NABBE 4 = NJG 4
NABCI = I./NJG 4
BABUC = III./NJG 4
GENRO 3 = 3 Jagd Division
GEDNA = Luftflotte Reich

Cheers

Rod

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Hi Andreas

Some years ago now I wrote an article for a local history publication in which I used material from HW5/2 and HW5/3, calling the article "Red Enigma, Boniface and the Y service - events of 27th June to 1st July 1940", in Channel Islands Occupation Review No.28, p31-41.

Red because this was the name used by BP for the first Luftwaffe enigma codes broken. These messages had a very selective distribution in Whitehall, and as the Admiralty at the time was the most closely tied with BP they insisted this had to be in a undisguised form. Problems arose because the material passed on to Military Intelligence and Air Intelligence went via the SIS who to protect sources said it originated from an agent called Boniface. From both MI and AI's perspective this meant it was a Humint source and not as was the reality Sigint, so accordingly was not given the full benefit of being highly reliable intel. Later on the true value of the "source" was properly appreciated and this led to the material being more clearly labelled with the CX indicator.

I hope this reads clearly and helps explain why being air material it refers to sources, but with the added rider of being CX material, i.e. Luftwaffe Enigma.

Kind regards
Pierre

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Hi, Pierre

Thanks a lot for the information. Important that this discussion brought a clarification about the origin of this material.

Not strange then that they had to stop making the summaries - must have kept a couple of typists busy just with inventing where the stuff should be labeled as coming from! (It's a joke!!)

I know that Bletchley Park (at least it says so in written sources) never were 'found out' by the germans, how much of this stuff seeped back from other sources that saw it? Anyone got an idea about that?

Regards,
Andreas

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

There seem to be a lot of N.A. research buffs involved in this discussion and I wonder if they can help me with the following; in “Sea Eagles” by Francis L. Marshall the author frequently refers to the British radio interception Service A.I.4. The book gives no source for this information but I think this must be the National Archive in Kew.
One of the things I would be interested in would be the intercepts of Luftwaffe night fighter radio communications for 8/9-3-1945.
I wanted to ask if anyone of you has com across these intercepts an knows in what folder they are stored?

Thanks in advance,

Dennis

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Hi Dennis,

I have never seen the original intercept logs at TNA so I don't now believe that the raw data exists. However, there are a range of reports compiled from the raw data -

1. In AIR 14/3745 - Interception & Tactics Col. VIII (these are typically several pages long and contain a route map).

2. In AIR 40/2370 - Bomber Command: signals intelligence and radio countermeasures reports (these are typically two pages of text and one large map)

3. AIR 22/503 - Air Ministry W/T Intelligence Service Daily Summaries: nos. 1948-2076 Vol.28 (these are several pages long, covering a 24 hour period. The last 1-2 pages covers reaction to night raids)

Cheers

Rod

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Hello Rod,

Thanks for the tips!

The reason for asking is that Marshalls information is rather detailed i.e. for Sunday September 26 1943:
Several patrols undertaken by Jasta Hegoland were heard by the British radio interception Service A.I.5 Some time after one o’clock in the afternoon four fighters set off from Hegoland on a patrol, apparently for convoy protection. Later, at 16.25 hours, three more aircraft set out, followed twenty minutes later by a single Bf 109T.
I will be in the NA next month, and will follow your leads,

Thanks,

Dennis

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Dennis
I have checked AIR 22/503 - Air Ministry W/T Intelligence Service Daily Summaries: nos. 1948-2076 Vol.28 (these are several pages long, covering a 24 hour period. The last 1-2 pages covers reaction to night raids) and it is probably the file you are looking for.
What is inside? A variety of information, unfortunatelly not quoted verbatim. Comparing to the intensity of combats (I was interested in Normandy), there is very little and often not very detailed. Sometimes there are gems, like 'at 20.13 a German formation believed to be JG27 took part in combat. One pilot heard to be on fire.', but usually it only an information about activity in general.
Nonetheless, if only possible, have a look at the file, it is definetelly worth of it.

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Hello Franek,

Thanks for the tips. One can find the jackpot, or things one is not looking for, but are bloody interesting just the same.
I just hope I can stick to my search plan and not wonder of.

Thanks again,

Dennis

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Another file:

AIR40/2375: "GAF Fighter Activity on the Western Front – April Ops 1945"

This all seems to be based on radio traffic to and from night fighters.

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Hi Nick,

thanks for the info. The online catalogue only showed the date range for this file (as least a year ago) as being "1945" so when I requested docs from Jan-Mar I was told that there were no such docs on file!

Now I can put in another request for Apr...

Cheers

Rod

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Good luck, Dennis!!

I know the feeling you describe, and the first few visits to the Bundesarchiv was a tough struggle not to ask for files that were a bit off the current topic but were extremely tempting (especially with regards to the description in the Findbuch) to look at!

I will ask Francis about the radio intercepts.

Regards,
Andreas

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

I've just started sifting through HW5 series on my two previous visits to NA and it is going to be a long trip considering the amount of material. It is quite an improvent on DEFE3 as well, not only it is more eye friendly than bloody microfilms, but it also fill some of the gaps on top of DEFE3 material.
I still didn't catch the meaning of those B% and C% signs, I suppose they are placed instead of missing digits, but sometimes they turn up where you don't expect them. I also noticed map references in form 'letter letter digit letter', I am not sure I've sen them before

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

They are the equivalent to DEFE3's "strong indications" and "fair indications" respectively, showing a degree of uncertainty about the digit, letter or word that follows.

Re: Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?
 

Hello Nick, Andreas an Schenk,
Thank you all for your input!

Nick;
I had AIR 40/2375 on my list as a possible candindate, thank you for the confirmation.
For now I will focus on;
AIR 14/3378 Interception and tactics: night and day reports 1945 Jan.- May
AIR 14/3745 Interception and Tactics Vol. VIII 1945 Jan.- May
AIR 22/503 Air Ministry W/T Intelligence Service Daily Summaries: nos. 1948-2076 Vol.28 1945 Jan.-May
AIR 40/2375 RAF signal intelligence reports 1945




Andreas;
I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one suffering from these symptoms:D
Till now I have been aprehesive to go to Freiburg, my Deutsch is not verry good.


Dennis