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Breaking German Navy Ciphers
U-534 was a German type IXC/40 submarine (U-boat) of the German Navy
(Kriegsmarine) that serviced during WWII. The ship was built in 1942
by Deutsche Werft AG in Hamburg-Finkenwerder (Germany) and was designated
'werk 352'. It was launched on 23 September 1942 and commissioned on
23 December 1942. It was commanded by Oberleutnant Herbert Nollau [1].
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Initially, the ship was assigned to the 4th U-boat Flotilla, but in April 1944,
after some changes, it was transferred to the 2nd flotilla. On 1 May 1945
the boat went on its last patrol as part of the 33rd flotilla.
Only five days later it was sunk by an attacking British Liberator aircraft.
49 of the 52 crew members survived the fatal blast.
The ship was discovered in 1986 on the sea bed of the Kattegat,
off the coast of Denmark, by Danish wreckhunter Aage Jensen, nearly 41 years after it was sunk.
In 1996, the recovered U-boat was transported to Birkenhead (England).
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There it has been on public display at the Warship Preservation Trust until
the museum closed down in 2006. The U-boat has since been aqcuired by
the Merseytravel transit authority and is now on public display again at
the Woodside Ferry Terminal in Liverpool (England) [1].
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Many artefacts were recovered from the U-354 by Danish wreck diver
Aage Jensen, such as weapons, equipment, bottles, name plates, stamps, breathing
masks, clocks, binoculars, tools, etc.
Amoung the recovered documents was also a large number of ciphertext
Enigma messages.
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As the contents of these messages was hitherto unknown
German researcher Michael Hörenberg set out in 2012 to break the
messages again by using distributed computing power.
Starting in July 2012 by combining 112 Intel CPU cores, using a modified
software Turing Bombe and brute force attacks, he achieved his first
break on 31 July 2012, based on a ciphertext-only attack.
By 20 October, 46 of the 50 messages had already been broken again.
One message, of 1 May 1945, is of particular historical importance,
as it was sent by Dönitz.
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Breaking the messages again is still very difficult, even with todays
computing power. One of the main problems is the fact that most documents
are damaged and are only partly complete and sometimes the start of
the message is missing completely. Furthermore, the handwriting of the German
operators is a challenge in itself.
More information from Michael Hörenberg's website [3].
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This message was sent on 1 May 1945. It is of historical importance
as it was sent by Admiral Dönitz to announce his apportment as Hitler's
successor after the latter committed suicide.
The message was originated on an Enigma M4 machine
and was broken again on 20 October by Michael Hörenberg
and is reproduced here by his kind permission.
 Full message text
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A number of letters and letter-combinations that are not frequently used
in German, were used as puntuation marks in the text. The following
markup codes were used by the German Navy:
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X
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Period
End of line or abbreviation (German: Punkt).
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XX
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Colon
(German: Doppelpunkt)
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Y
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Comma
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YY
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Dash, hyphen, slash
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KK
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Brackets, used as KK—KK
Text can be placed between parenthesis (brackets) by placing
the letter combination 'KK' before and after it (Klammern).
E.g. KKTULPEKK should be printed as (Tulpe).
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J
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Stress mark (or quote), used as J—J
It was possible to stress a certain part of the text by placing the
letter 'J' before and after the text, e.g. REICHSLEITER J BOHRMAN J,
could be printed as: Reichsleiter 'Bohrman'.
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UD
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Question mark (?)
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Document kindly supplied by Arthur Bauer.
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© Copyright 2009-2013, Paul Reuvers & Marc Simons. Last changed: Sunday, 21 October 2012 - 17:48 CET
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