General
Schellenberg, head of this department, describes the whole affair in his memoir.
After learning the codename of this operation the Germans were naturally
keeping an eye for messages that referred to it.
In page 390 of
his memoirs he says about the files that Cicero copied from the ambassador’s
safe:
The contents so impressed me that at
first I devoted myself entirely to the study of the documents and almost forgot
to initiate those measures which must be carried out by the chief of a Secret
Service in such cases. However, I then ordered:
(a) the immediate presentation of the
reports to Hitler through Himmler.
(2) General Thiele (Chief of the
Wireless Security and Decoding section of the Wehrmacht Supreme Command) to
visit me at once to receive the material, which would enable him to start work
on deciphering the British diplomatic code (The four greatest decoding experts in
Germany, two professors of mathematics among them, worked on this material for
weeks until finally they were able to 'crack' a part of the code. It was a
tremendous achievement. Especially revealing were a number of handwritten notes
on the margins of the documents, technical data on code messages from London to
Ankara. Such things were of the greatest value to our experts.)
In page 393
he says:
In the meantime, by using the
documents we had been able to decipher part of the British diplomatic code. One
of the first important pieces of information we found in 'Cicero's' material
was that the planned invasion of France was to carry the code name Operation
'Overlord'. After the first appearance of these words in the document, I
immediately conferred with General Thiele. He at once started operations that
would enable us to determine where and when the code word 'Overlord' appeared
in the enemy's short-wave communications.
However his
postwar interrogation by the Allies, summarized in ‘Hitler's Last Chief of Foreign Intelligence: Allied Interrogations of
Walter Schellenberg’, p251 says:
Schellenberg maintains that he has
never seen deciphered British messages. He has learnt that the last successful
deciphering was that of British messages which went by W/T from Cairo to
London. After that a coding machine was introduced in Cairo which abruptly prevented
all further deciphering. General Thiele had continuously asked Schellenberg to
provide him with an English code machine or an English diplomatic or military
attache code still in use, but Schellenberg never succeeded in getting these.
So which version
is correct?
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