Luftwaffe Personnel spying for Allies?

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by Andreas Brekken

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…

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 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...)

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 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??

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.

Does an archive that contain the decrypts as they really looked exist?

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.

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?

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).