PRISM, Metadata and Unwarranted Spying

With my strong interest in cryptography and cryptanalysis I also follow closely what is happening in the signal intelligence fields and I am especially interested in what the big players, NSA and GCHQ, are doing. I have therefore found this week's revelations about NSA's PRISM program, their collection of phone companies so-called metadata and the Offensive Cyber Effects Operations (OCEO) to be both interesting and deeply disturbing. 

None of these programs really surprises me. I have seen it coming for a long time and there were sufficient indications over the years to fully expect such programs to be already running. However, that surprised me more was the scope of these programs. I have always expected that they would go after the bad guys and those under serious and warranted suspicion of being terrorists or national security risks. Now we learn that we are all suspects and that you are regarded as guilty until proven innocent. The problem is that as you do not know what they do with the data related to your modern, digital life and you have no idea of what tag they apply to you, terrorist, suspected terrorist, terrorist connections etc., you are not able to put up any defence to prove your innocence. You have just become a number, a pointer, a link in their anti-terrorist network and if your number, pointer value or link happen to reach any of the magic thresholds they have in their algorithms you will find that your life suddenly changes. You will suddenly receive extra attention in your daily life, traffic police will flag you down to check your papers and your car, when you fly it is always you that are pulled aside for extra screening etc. Some might fancy such attention but I do not. Because it might not just stop there, if you are really unlucky you might no longer be able to buy any airline tickets, your number has been elevated to inclusion in the very exclusive set, the no-fly list.

You will say it is very unlikely anything like this will happen to you. If you do nothing illegal you will not be targeted. The problem with this argument is that I don't know if I do something "illegal" when I am living my daily digital life, blogging like now, twittering like I did a moment ago and added a few new connections to my Facebook page yesterday evening. Today we make connections and new acquaintances by the dozen every week, how do you know that not one of them is a terrorist or has terrorist connections. In the last 20 years I have corresponded with a lot of people I don't know. I have been helping students in Pakistan, India, Irak and Egypt with information about cryptography for their school work. Were any of them connected with terrorists or criminals in any way? I don't know. To me they were just young students that I felt I should help with the same open door policy that I have given those coming from USA, Germany and England. Perhaps they were bad girls too, (yes surprisingly enough girls are also interested in cryptology). I don't know. But somebody knows and this somebody is sitting in front of a computer screen in an operation room at NSA. There they have just elevated my number, my name, onto one of the watch lists. The next wrong move and I creep a little higher until I hit one of the dreaded thresholds. Then the bell rings, the e-mails to the national security services are sent and the circus starts. And when it is started it might never stop. We all know how difficult it is to get removed from an electronic database, it is a never ending uphill struggle; and when those databases are secret ...

Now Obama and Mr. Clapper, his Director of National Intelligence, say it is only metadata we don't listen to your calls. Well, I think that is the real problem. If they had listened to my many calls to the "supposed terrorist" who has just sold me a used car, they would quickly understand that I am arguing about the price, especially after the transmission broke the week after I bought it. Instead my many and increasingly angry calls to the "terrorist" increases the connection counter on every call and the longer the calls are, the higher the weight they get. At then at the end of the week I am on the suspected terrorist watch list. You don't believe me; well try buying a used car from a terrorist and you will see the fun you will get. To get a better feeling for metadata have a look at this.

Am I paranoid? No, I don't think so, just worried. I don't like this way of collecting intelligence. Just because it is possible to do so now it does not mean it is should be done. 50 years ago all this would have been unthinkable. The only way the intelligence services then could have collected this kind of information would have been for every telephone switchboard to log all possible connections, all post offices taking notes of the addresses of all letters, parcels and postcards passing through their doors. The local police would have to visit everybody's home to search through their belongings, listing all the books on their shelves, all their records they own and carefully go through their diaries, agendas and photo albums. I doubt very much the population 50 years ago would have accepted this. It would have been a revolt and that is why there now has to be a revolt against this kind of unwarranted dragnet intelligence that sweeps up all and everybody in their nets. President Obama claims all this is legal because there is something called the Patriot Act. Perhaps it is time to look closer at this Patriot Act and see if it is as constitutional as it claims to be. To me it seem like the Patriot Act surreptitiously has rewritten the United States' Constitution.

I am not against intelligence collection, even when I am the target, as long as there is a very good and lawful reason for the collection. And when I say lawful I don't mean any quickly cooked up anti-terrorist laws, but laws that respect international law and Human Rights. Anything else I would regard as unwarranted and unlawful. President Obama, I think you will have your hands full the next few months as this simply will not go away. Neither should it. It is too important for that. At the moment we are on a very dangerous and slippery slope. At then end is the horrors of 1984 and Dystopia. Some will say this is the just price to pay for eradicating terrorism. I think not, because terrorism can not be eradicated, only controlled and I am convinced Dystopia would just create more terrorism and this time of the homegrown sort. Take your pick, it will be hell either way.

So please high priests in the governments around the world don't push your intelligence agencies into this kind of quagmire. I have met many intelligence officials over the years and several I consider as very good friends. There are very few I have ever met who I think would enjoying targeting innocent people in the way it is done today. I think many intelligence officials are living increasingly difficult lives with their conscience bothering them for the rest of their lives. It was easy as long as the targets were Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and North Vietnam. When the target is the family down the street it quite another game. 

We need good and just intelligence to protect our democracies but we should be very careful not to undermine our democracies with unwarranted spying just because the tools are there. Today a major part of our lives are in the digital world. Any responsible government should do its utmost to protect and guard our digital souls and not trample on  them. We expect nothing else. Good and strong encryption should be mandatory for everybody in the same way as vaccination is a part of our health protection programs.

President Obama you have some serious work to do if you want to remain credible.

UPDATE.

As I expected this has now developed into a serious debate both in the USA and abroad. I am extremely happy about this turn of the events because I think it is very important that we are aware of what is happening in the surveillance fields and the directions it now takes. Previously the targets were governments and states. We, the citizens of these states, were nothing more than spectators to the spying games. When revelations would appear in the media from time to time it would only bring us some degree of awe or excitement in our daily life. Unfortunately, the targets are no longer only government and states, now also YOU are in the cross-hairs. The surveillance net has tightened its masks to catch also the single individuals all over the world.

The amount of information that is in the press at the moment is staggering and it is not at all easy to find your way between the truths, half-truths and the clearly wrong information. However, I have just found one article that I think is very well balanced and which I think is getting closer to the real situation. Therefore have a look at Marc Ambinder's article "NSA: Sucks in data from 50 companies."

I will quote one paragraph that I found illustrates the problem for us non-US citizens:

And the government insists that the rules allowing the NSA or the FBI to analyze anything relating to U.S. persons or corporations are strict, bright-line, and are regularly scrutinized to ensure that innocents don't get caught up in the mix. The specifics, however, remain classified, as do the oversight mechanisms in place.

At least the way it is presented here seems to suggest that non US persons or corporations will a priori not have the same protection with regard to innocence. I think we are regarded as fair game, which means that we can freely be scrutinised to whatever extent necessary to see if we are a security threat or not. We are all guilty until proven innocent. With a few strokes of the pen we have been stripped of all our privacy and rights.

Here is a great timeline: Timeline of NSA Domestic Spying

Railway Enigma and Other Special Machines

Recently my old friend David Hamer asked me a question about the Railway Enigma, the machines used by the German railways — Deutsche Reichsbahn. His question was: "Has anyone ever located a Railway Enigma — or is aware if one currently exists in a museum somewhere?" I was not able to answer his question because I simply don't know if any of these machines ever survived the war. So I decided to see what would happen if I could create some more interest for this machine and other, similar machines.

In 1998 David Hamer, Geoff Sullivan and myself tried to show that Enigma is not one single type of machine, but rather a family of machines built on the same cryptographic principle, by publishing the Cryptologia article Enigma Variations: An Extended Family of Machines. I think we were successful in establishing this fact but it is still the Army and Naval Enigmas that get most of the attention. This is understandable because these two models were the two main cipher machines used by the German Wehrmacht. The fact they they were broken, first by the Polish and then later by the British and American codebreakers, made them historic. The decodes provided intelligence that in many ways were crucial for the conduct of the war and as a whole signal intelligence is said to have possibly shortened the war by two years. However, the Army and Naval Enigma machines were not alone in supplying this intelligence. The greatest allied undertaking, Operation Overlord, the landing of allied forces on the continent, was heavily dependent on intelligence from two other systems, Tunny and the Abwehr Enigma.

We should be grateful to Brigadier John Tiltman and Dr. William Tutte who made the initial break into Tunny, the Lorenz SZ42 on-line teleprinter machine, and to Dillwyn Knox who made the first break into the Abwehr Enigma, Enigma G. The importance of Tunny in supplying strategic intelligence for Operation Overlord is probably well known. The importance of Dilly Knox's section ISK, Intelligence Service Knox, in supplying the Double-Cross operation Fortitude with information is perhaps less well known. The D-Day deception operations were based on feeding the Germans truthful but false information through the use of turned Abwehr spies. However, these operations would have been nothing more than a lottery without the feedback the ISK and ISOS, Intelligence Service Oliver Strachey, sections provided.

Enigma G is one of the commercial Enigma machines. The other well known commercial machine is Enigma K. They both have their origin in the early commercial model Enigma D, which can be better seen in the Enigma Family Tree. The family tree shows that the Enigma G, which internally in the Enigma firm Chiffriermaschinengesellschaft Heimsoeth und Rinke (H&R) was called Ch. 15b, rather should be called G31. This is to better distinguish it from the earlier Zählwerk Enigma model A28, which was internally called Ch. 15. The Enigma K, internally Ch. 11b, has a similar history of previously being called A27. This machine first received the K designation in 1936. This curious history means that until 1931 the Zählwerk Enigma machines had serial numbers starting with A exactly like the early 3-wheel Heeres Enigma machines equipped with a Steckerbrett, plugboard. The commercial Enigma A27 also carried A serial numbers until 1936 when it became Enigma K and received K serial numbers; the first machine in the new series being K 201.

While the plugboard Enigma machines kept their wheel wirings intact throughout their existence the commercial models Enigma K and G were supplied with a large number of special wheel wirings, Sonderschaltungen. There are a few exceptions to this rule. Some 3-wheel Heeres Enigma machines that were used for special purposes received specially wired wheels. There are two categories of these machines, those equipped with Alpha and Delta wheels and those in the S-series. I have already described these machines in more detail in the Cryptologia article Spanish Enigma: A History of the Enigma in Spain. The machines with Alpha and Delta wheels had normal serial numbers in the A-series and externally they cannot be distinguished from a normal Heeres Enigma machine, while the S-series machines had a letter S attached to their serial number such as A 17245S. 

A very special version of the Heeres Enigma is the B-series machines. Apparently only 24 of these machines were made, B 201 to B 224. The machines have wheel and plugboard markings in red paint and Senior Engineer Willi Korn of H&R mentioned that it was their belief they were used at the Führer Headquarters. Hitler had a mobile communication unit that accompanied him on his special train (Führersonderzug) and this unit might have used some of these machines. So far only one B-series machine is known to have survived the war, B 207 manufactured in 1937, which is at the US National Cryptologic Museum (NCM) at Ft. Meade next to the National Security Agency, NSA. This unique machine was originally standing on a pedestal in one of the museum rooms and it was used as an interactive exhibit for the public to play with. I think his error has now been rectified and it is now on display in a closed and locked display case. Let us hope NCM takes good care of this priceless machine and gives it the a special place among their exhibits. As "Hitler's private Enigma" it might very well get the attention it deserves.

The 1937 manufacturing date is interesting. It shows that these machines were in use very early, long before Hitler built any of his many headquarters. However, its deployment fits with the date for the extension and modification to Hitler's home in the Bavarian Alps, the Berghof, which was finished in 1936. As Hitler then started using the Berghof more frequently it is possible this was the reason they wanted to have another secure communication channel that could not be intercepted and read by the normal Wehrmacht users. Another clue to the users of this machine can be found in a letter from OKW/Ag WNV/Fu II b to H&R dated 11 May 1942. The letter concerns the urgent repair of the Enigma machine B 201 that belongs to the cipher office (Schlüsselstelle) at OKW.

Figure 1. Hitler's private Enigma? Rare Enigma Machine B 207. Photo: David Hamer, NCM Foundation

Figure 2. B 207, close-up showing the wheels with red numerals. Photo: David Hamer, NCM Foundation

The mystery deepens with a Top Secret (Geheime Kommandosache) and very urgent order for two B-series machines in 1943. On 15 May 1943 H&R received a letter from OKW/Ag WNV/Fu II b with an order for two cipher machines for a very special connection (Sonderverbindung). The two machines with the serial numbers B 222 and B 223 were to be wired after the connections in drawing Ch 11 Tz 184 a-c for the wheels I, II and III respectively. Due to the exceptional secrecy surrounding these machines the reflector, (Umkehrwalze — UKW), could only be wired in the presence of an official from Ag WNV/Fu. Furthermore, the acceptance tests of the machines had to be performed with the standard Wehrmacht wheels and UKW because the special wheels could not be left with H&R after they had been wired. The secrecy was indeed exceptional. What happened in May/June 1943 that necessitated such a special, private communication link? The question is still open.

Figure 3. Order for special Enigma Machines B 222 and B223

Now that I perhaps have got you interested in Enigma machines with special wirings let us have a closer look at those machine. If you take a look at our article Spanish Enigma you will see that alone in Spain and Italy there were many commercial machines in use with special wiring and this was already before the start of the war. During the war the Enigma G and Enigma K machines were supplied to a large variety of government and official users almost all of them equipped with specially wired wheels. There are only a few Enigma G machines that we know about. We have the famous G 312 that was stolen from BP for so to be returned to Jeremy Paxman at the BBC, several that was used by the Dutch military and now are in closed museum collections there, the Hungarian G 111 that turned up at an auction in Germany and G 316 that was found in Spain some years ago. NSA and NCM are reported to have another two machines, G 194 and possibly G 215. So at present probably not more than 10 or 11 of these machines seems to have survived the war. Personally I find that very strange because there were many Abwehr offices throughout German occupied territories and also in the some of the neutral countries. For instance there must have been several of these machines in Norway but I have yet to hear that any have been found here.

The origin of G 312 has always been a mystery, but now we know it probably is connected with Spain in some way because the wiring of G 312 is the same as G 316. The wiring of G 316 is given in the Spanish Enigma article. This shows that knowing the wiring of a machine is very important when trying to identify the machine and trace its history. The A-series machines that clearly can be identified as Heeres Enigma will most probably have wheels with the well know wiring of these machines, but for all the Enigma G and Enigma K machines we can not be sure what kind of wheels they are equipped with. I would therefore urge all owners of such machines to have the wheels measured to see if their wiring correspond to what is expected for their machines. I am more than willing to help and give advice on how to go about measuring wheel wirings. 

Many of the Enigma K machine in public ownership are what we call Swiss Enigmas, which means they belong to the group of commercial machines that were sold to the Swiss before and during the war and which finally were sold to the public in 1994. Many of these machines are mentioned in the list of known locations of Enigma machines maintained by David Hamer. I might later try to compile a complete list of the serial numbers of the Swiss  Enigmas with information about when they were delivered when that is known. At the moment I am missing some of the information I need to make such a list.

Enigma K machines that are not Swiss Enigmas might be machines with special wirings. Let us now look closer at the Railway Enigma. This machine has some historic importance as it probably was the first German Enigma machine that BP recovered the wiring of during the war. Previously Dilly Knox had recovered the wheel wiring of the machines used by the Italians and Spanish during the Spanish Civil War. The process he developed for recovering  the wheel wiring was then well known and it is also described in detail by Turing in his Treatise on The Enigma. The initial break was yet again made by Brigadier John Tiltman who was an expert on working out messages in depth — messages that are encrypted on the same or very similar key settings. In theory it sounds easy but to succeed you need a very sharp mind and a lot of perseverance. After Tiltman had recovered the plaintext of the messages at the end of July 1940, Peter Twinn quickly recovered the wheel wiring using the boxing method developed by Knox. Peter Twinn started as Knox's assistant in 1939 and worked in the BP Cottage with Knox until early 1940 when he was lent to Hut 8 to work with Turing on Naval Enigma. Later the Railway keys were turned over to Hut 6 and Twinn returned to the Cottage to work with Knox on the Abwehr Enigma. The full story about the battle with the Railway Enigma keys is explained in our Enigma Variations article.

By a stroke of luck we know exactly when the German Reichsbahn started to use the Enigma K. The first traffic that BP detected in July and decoded in August 1940 ceased on 27 August 1940 and new traffic was not detected before at the end of January 1941. Later the traffic increased and especially from regions in Eastern Europe, Russia and the Balkans.  It would therefore seem that the use of the machine started some time in early 1940. In the documents recovered from H&R at the end of the war there are three documents that refer to the Railway machines. The first document is a letter from Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH)/Chef HNV IV to H&R dated 22 January 1940. It concerns an order for 18 Enigma K machines for the Generaldirektion (administration) of the Eastern railway (Ostbahn) in Cracow. The document is shown in Figure 4. The 18 machines have the serial numbers K 448 to K 465 and the wiring diagrams have the drawing numbers Ch 11 Tz 271 for the reflector (Umkehrwalze — UKW) and Ch 11 Tz 272 a-c for the three wheels I, II and III respectively. Another document that gives an overview of a large number of wiring diagrams together with their creation dates give 17 January 1940 as the date for these drawings. This fits well with the handwritten note added by H&R that refers to them placing an order for these machines with their production firm Konski & Krüger (K&K) on 17.01.1940. Another interesting fact is that even if the order is for machines for the Reichsbahn the order is processed through the Army High Command (OKH). However, another handwritten note seems to indicate direct contact between H&R and the German Ministry of Transport (Verkehrsministerium). This probably explains how H&R was able to place their order with K&K before the arrival of the letter from OKH/HNV (Heeres Nachrichten Verbindungsabteilung).

Figure 4. The first order for Enigma K machines for the German Railways

On 18 April 1940 H&R receives another letter from OKH but this time from the Chief of Army Equipment and Commander of the Replacement Army (Chef Heeres Rüstung und Befehlshaber der Ersatzheeres) referring to the order 222-25-09/39 from 1939 concerning Enigma K machines. From the previously delivered K-machines OKH now wants H&R to rewire the wheels for the ten machines K 432 to K 441 with the Reichsbahn wiring. OKH stresses that the order is extremely urgent and they ask for speedy execution of the rewiring. The ten machines shall be delivered to the Reichsbahn administration in Berlin. In a handwritten note at the bottom of the letter the destination of the machines are indicated. Two machines were delivered to Berlin, while each of the following cities got one each: Essen, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Karlsruhe, Cologne, Mainz, Munich and Stuttgart. The letter also refers to the machines that were delivered in January but know they list the serial numbers as K 448 to K 467, 20 instead of 18 machines. If this is an error or if the order was subsequently increased to 20 machines is not known. It might be the order was increased because H&R was usually very quick to spot such errors and they would then normally make a note to this effect. The information in these two documents suggests that the Reichsbahn started to encipher their communications with the Enigma some time early in 1940. It appears that Enigma communications were already being conducted in April 1940 and that a realistic date for the start of these communications is probably late February or early March.

The last order for the Reichsbahn that I know of arrived at H&R on 17 June 1943. The order was from OKW/Ag WNV/Fu II b and it concerned 20 Enigma K machines with the serial numbers K 893 to K 912. The wheels were to be wired exactly as the other Reichsbahn machines. The delivery of the machines were programmed to start on 1 October 1943 with a delivery of 10 machines per month. Unless there were other orders that I don't know about we know that the German Reichsbahn had at least 50 machines and that their serial numbers are: K 432 - K 441, K 448 - K 467 and K 893 - K 912.

So let the hunt start. Who will be the first to find a Railway Enigma machine? What is there to gain? Perhaps not very much apart from some fame and being the proud owner of a relatively rare Enigma specimen. The other benefit will be that we will know the German wiring of this machine. In our Enigma Variations article we gave the recovered wiring of the wheels based on the information in Turing's Treatise on The Enigma. Unfortunately, I did not read Turing carefully enough and therefore the wiring we gave are not for the wheels in their neutral position, Ringstellung A, but rather for ring position Z. Furthermore, BP happened to wrongly identify the wheels such that wheel I and wheel III are swapped, but even then the wiring will not be exactly as the German original wiring. When recovering wheel wirings cryptanalytically you are free to select which pin you label as 1, hence there are 26 possible ways to number a given pin. This is called an offset or clip difference, but there is yet another problem and that is called twists. After you have found the connections between the pins on one side of the wheel and the pads on the other side you still don't know how the pads are physically related to the pins. If you imagine a wheel as two disks with pins on one and pads one the other with flexible wires in between it is clear that you can rotate one disk freely with respect to the other. This is the wheel twist. Here you also have a freedom of 26 twist positions, such that totally you have 26 x 26 = 676 possible equivalent wirings of which only one is corresponding to the German wiring. Unless you have access to a lot of other information such as many messages with exact indicators etc. you are not able to identify the German wiring from the 676 possible choices. Today the only way to identify the German wiring is probably to find one of these machines.

You can download the Railway Enigma Documents here. Good luck with your hunt and please keep me posted about what you find.

Sources: Personal research notes and documents from the TICOM files T1715, T1716, T1717 and T1718 in the TICOM collection at the German Foreign Office, Bestand Rückgabe TICOM, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Berlin.

The Workers Who Built the Enigma

We know quite a few details about the history of the German cipher machine Enigma. Today I think we can safely say it is world famous and that most people have heard something about the machine. Unfortunately not all of the publicly available information is correct, but this is something I hope to correct with time. Some of the wrong information will probably take quite some time to correct, because it has been repeated so long and frequently, and other information is only partially wrong, which might mean it can be even more difficult to correct. However, this is not what I want to talk about today. 

Today I want to pay my respect to the so far unknown Enigma workers, the men and women who built the machines; the men who machined the pieces and assembled the machines and the women who wired the rotors, performed acceptance tests and prepared the machines for shipment. I will not talk about the engineers and the draughtsmen who designed the machines, only the simple workers who toiled to build the machines. These people are usually those that history forgets. I want to change that.

When writing history one should always try to tell the truth and not shy away from also presenting the ugly and less favourable aspects, but one should also be careful not to defame neither dead nor living persons. Privacy laws are very different in different countries and it is not always easy to decide how to deal with the identities of people who do not occupy an official or public position.  To avoid problems it is a common practice to anonymise peoples names when a person is part of the story but his or her identity do not add significantly to the story. This would also normally have applied to the story I present now. The identities of the Enigma workers will not change significantly the history of the Enigma, but I want to turn the history on its head and say that the Enigma changes the history and memory of these people. Most, if not all of them are probably now dead, but they will have family and descendants who probably today will be proud to learn that their father, mother, uncle or aunt built the famous Enigma machine.

Some of you will perhaps say that these people were aiding the German war industry and that their work prolonged to war. First of all I should like to stress that the workers I present for you were employed in the early to mid 1930s, long before Germany went to war. Some of the workers had been with the Enigma company since the very beginning, such as Max Reichenbach, who worked for Gewerkschaft Securitas and Chiffriermaschinen Aktiengesellschaft at least as early as from 1923. If you still think they helped prolong the war I can only say that every single living soul in Germany who simply went to work and payed their taxes, were aiding the war industry. The Enigma workers did not make bombes and grenades and the materials that went into the production of the Enigma was at least not used to kill people. I might even go so far as to say that we should thank these people that they managed to produce so many Enigma machines for the Wehrmacht. That they managed to build all these machines and to deliver them on time only increased the Wehrmacht's dependance on the Enigma. It made it less likely that the Germans would change the machine for a much more secure machine such as Cipher Device 39 (Schlüsselgerät 39). This machine, which was in development since 1939, used Hagelin type pin-wheels to control the transport of the wired wheels or rotors similar to those used in the Enigma. I doubt the British or American cryptanalysts would have managed to break and exploit this machine in the same way as they did with the Enigma. So in a sense, we can safely say the Enigma workers helped to shorten the war by two years; if we can believe the estimate that has been made about the importance of breaking the Enigma.

Letter to Heimsoeth & Rinke from OKW about the
use of foreign workers at their factory Konski & Krüger.

When the war broke out the production firms were put under additional stress. Some of their workers were called up for war duty and others volunteered for war service.  The Enigma firm Chiffriermaschinengesellschaft Heimsoeth und Rinke (H&R) and their  main production firm Konski & Krüger (K&K) tried throughout the war to shield as much as possible their work force from military service. However, the firms also needed more workers to cope with the increased production. Male workers were in short supply and they had to rely more and more on female workers and soldiers that were ordered to help with the production. There is also some indication that in 1942 K&K were allowed to employ foreign workers. Previously this had not been done due to the security involved with the Enigma production. These workers were probably forced labour from some of the European countries Germany had occupied. There is no indication that any concentration camp prisoners were directly used in the Enigma production, but some of the subcontractors used concentration camp prisoners. 

I have not tried to trace the personal histories of any of these workers, but as far as I can tell they were all of German descent. If anybody has some more information on any of these people I would be more than happy to learn more about them. These workers are not all of the people who built the Enigma. The lists I have are only of workers that were employed in the main Enigma factory, Konski & Krüger  at Chausseestrasse 117, Berlin-Charlottenburg.

19 March 1930. The workers engaged in building Enigma II — the big printing Enigma machine, Enigma H. It concerned the Reichswehr order for the machines H 201 to  H 210.

1. Frau Hedwig Berndt, Neu-Lichtenberg, Eitelstrasse 55a
               Wiring of the cipher wheels.
2. Felix Larson, Mechaniker, Schöneberg, Kolonnenstrasse 45
               Subassemblies.
3. Richard Pohl, Mechaniker, Charlottenburg, Havelstrasse 7
               Wiring of the transport wheels.
4. Max Reichenbach, Mechaniker, Berlin, Böttgerstrasse 24
               Last adjustments, control and registration of the machines.
5. Alfred Recke, Mechaniker, Berlin, Raumerstrasse 34
               Subassemblies.
6. Herbert Siewert, Mechaniker, Bln.-Neukölln, Walterstrasse 8/9
               Electrical circuit control and total assembly of the machines.
7. Paul Sternkopf, Mechaniker, Berlin, Reichenbergerstrasse 74a
               Subassemblies.
8. Hans Schneider, Mechaniker, Kremmen, Ruppinerchaussee
               Subassemblies.

06 October 1931. Workers in the factory rooms of our fabrication firm Konski & Krüger, Berlin N.4, Chausseestrasse 117. Concerning: Nr. 86.6.31 Na B 1 IIb, order no. 12523 of 04.07.1931.

Abendroth	Erich	Eichwalde	Kaiser-Friedrich. 11
Aethner	Herbert	Mahlow	Fliederweg
Berndt	Hedwig	Neu-Lichtenberg	Eitelstr. 55a
Deul	Hans	Borsigwalde	Siedlung Stadtpark
Gabron	Otto	Frohnau	Barbarossastr. 31
Göricke	Erna	Berlin	Stettinerstr. 30
Hartwig	Liesbeth	Berlin	Spenerstr. 18
Jaworski	Franziska	Berlin	Koppenstr. 8
Kaufmann	Eberhard	Berlin N.	Ackerstr. 54
Kriegel	Edmund	Berlin	Chodowieckistr. 17
Lotze	Erich	Berlin	Kopernikusstr. 33
Musolf	Elise	Berlin	Bergstrasse 18
Müller	Otto	Berlin-Pankow	Wollankstr. 4a
Myohl	Robert	Berlin	Leuthenstr. 18
Niclas	Eugen	Berlin-Neukölln	Steinmetzstr. 79
Paesler	Rudolf	Berlin-Tempelhof	Schönburgstr. 5
Pigard	Gertrud	Berlin-Neukölln	Böhmischestr. 16
Pohl	Richard	Berlin-Grünewald	Hubertusallee 43
Recke	Alfred	Berlin N	Raumerstr. 34
Reichenbach	Max	Berlin N.	Böttgerstr. 24
Runge	Otto	Berlin N	Chausseestr. 90
Schulz	Paul	Berlin	Perlebergerstr. 50
Siewert	Herbert	Berlin-Neukölln	Walterstr. 8/9
Strutz	Rosa	Berlin N.	Gartenstr. 66
Tümpel	Frieda	Berlin	Britzerstr. 10

11 May 1932. Workers in the factory rooms of our fabrication firm Konski & Krüger, Berlin N.4, Chausseestrasse 117. Concerning: Nr. 503.2.32 Na B 1 IIb, order no. 12596/31 of 17.03.1932. This concerns an order for 100 Enigma I, Ch 11 f, Heeres Enigma machines.

Abendroth	Erich	Eichwalde	Wienerstr. 7
Berndt	Hedwig	Neu-Lichtenberg	Eitelstr. 55a
Budach	Anna	Friedrichsfelde	Alt-Friedrichsf. 25
Hanke	Kurt	Berlin	Gr. Frankfurterstr. 12
Musolf	Elise	Berlin	Bergstrasse 18
Pohl	Richard	Berlin-Grünewald	Hubertusallee 43
Rathke	Klara	Berlin	Müllerstrasse 168
Recke	Alfred	Berlin N	Raumerstr. 34
Reichenbach	Max	Berlin N.	Böttgerstr. 24
Siewert	Herbert	Berlin-Neukölln	Walterstr. 8/9
Steinhöfel	Maria	Berlin	Heckmann Ufer 2

24 May 1933. Workers in the factory rooms of our fabrication firm Konski & Krüger, Berlin N.4, Chausseestrasse 117. Concerning: Nr. 68.2.33 Na B 1 IIb, order no. 12590/32. This concerns an order for 182 Enigma I, Ch 11 f, Heeres Enigma machines.

Berndt	Hedwig	Neu-Lichtenberg	Eitelstr. 55a
Larshon	Felix	Berlin	Goltzstrasse 26
Musolf	Elise	Berlin	Bergstrasse 18
Pohl	Richard	Berlin-Grünewald	Potsdamerstr.  70
Rost	Joh.	Hoppegarten	Siedel. Birkenstein Parzelle 137
Reichenbach	Max	Berlin N.	Böttgerstr. 24
Siewert	Herbert	Berlin-Neukölln	Walterstr. 8/9

Furthermore, we have newly employed two engineers in our technical office in Steglitzerstrasse 2. The two engineers

Schiele	Reinhold	Berlin-Neukölln	Wildenbruchstr. 91
Schröder	Willi	Bln.-Charlottenburg	Schlüterstrasse 25

are employed as part designers.

28 June 1934. Additional workers employed in the factory rooms of our fabrication firm Konski & Krüger, Berlin N.4, Chausseestrasse 117. 

Bailleu	Selma	Spandau	Ondenarderstr. 26
Biczkowski	Max	Schönow	Lessingstrasse 32
Frass	Eugen	Berlin	Gottschedstrasse 41
Konrad	Wilhelm	Berlin	Driesenerstrasse 30
Kraus	Martin	Spandau	Wehnelt Steig 6
Rost	Johannes	Dahlwitz-Hoppegarten	Siedlung Birkenstein Mittelstrasse 137
Staar	Hermann	Wittenau	Oranienburgerstrasse 219
Timmler	Willi	Lichtenberg	Scharnweberstr. 61

These workers are all from the pre-war years and we do not know how long they continued to work with the Enigma machines or being employed by Konski & Krüger. In fact we know very little about these workers exact duties. As previously mentioned Max Reichenbach was H&R's old mechanics and as such he was a highly esteemed and trusted person. Two other persons who were highly trusted were Mrs. Hedwig Berndt and Miss. Rosa Strutz. Both were working on the 4th. floor of K&K where the secret work of wiring the Enigma wheels were done. They were among the very few people who had access to the real Enigma secrets, the secret wheel wirings. Another important worker was Herbert Siewert who later got more important responsibilities at K&K.

There probably were many more people involved with the Enigma production at K&K. Other people that are sometimes mentioned are the mechanic Krah and a female worker named Johanna Kliche. They are both mentioned in July 1938 and Johanna Kliche is said to have worked at K&K for many years responsible for individual acceptance tests of the machines.

As already mentioned, during the war K&K had some difficulties in keeping their workforce intact. An example of this is the note from September 1940 that explains that they have lost two of their mechanics, Gerhard Wuttke and Erich H. Gerhard Wuttke, who was born in 1920, was called up for war service in the Army while Erich H. had volunteered for several years of service in the SS.

It is my hope that perhaps we will be able to learn something more about these people who built the Enigma machines. Their own histories they probably carried with them to their graves, but perhaps did they nevertheless tell their families something about what they did at K&K. Only the most trusted workers would have had access to the rooms on the 4th. floor where the rotors where wired and the machines were assembled and tested, but probably most of them had an idea about what they were manufacturing. Konski & Krüger made a variety of electrical equipment both for the authorities and for consumers, such as they Membra loudspeakers. Their electro-accoustic works is mentioned in this post-war B.I.O.S report. Therefore the people who manufactured the parts of the Enigma might not always have known what they were making.

Sources: Personal research notes and documents from the TICOM files T1715, T1716, T1717 and T1718 in the TICOM collection at the German Foreign Office, Bestand Rückgabe TICOM, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Berlin.