How Sweden cracked a secret German code in 1940

most people probably have heard that the British cracked the famous Enigma machine fewer will have heard that Sweden did the same thing in 1940 but for another cipher machine the CMAs have scotty 52 came fab hype the t 52 of 100 kilobits used mostly with fixed telegraph lines the size of the machine dictated what the kind of information it was used for we're eating machines handed mostly tactical information because it was very small and portable the C 52 would handle strategical diplomatic information 9th of April 1940 Germany invades Denmark and Norway and Sweden or more or less caught by surprise soon thereafter Germany demands the use of telegraph lines running through Sweden between Norway and Denmark officially Sweden complaints but agrees but in secret celebrates and directly tap the lines however Sweden only gets encrypted information which is useless unless you can decipher them incomes orna Berlin a mathematical genius who later in life will have the same office that Albert Einstein had at Princeton sitting in a portly condemned building at Carla plan for in Stockholm where the code breakers had been housed he tried to crack the code using only pen and paper and intercepted traffic from the 25th of May 1940 he spent two weeks and then cracked the code he also designed a machine to do this automatically that was called an app and he did all of this without actually having seen a machine or had any idea what a machine actually looked like which photo means skip forward about a year and is June 1941 Germany is massing troops around the Swedish borders but sweet and does nothing we don't really mobilize we don't really take any action at all why is this the reason is that we know that Germany is about invade Soviet Union and not Sweden we had intercepted a message that a woman called bill get us was the first to read that stated that the German soldiers will get double pay when they enter Russia so sweden knew that Germany was not about to invade Sweden but they were going after the Soviet you all was well until 1942 43 when the Germans got suspicious regarding how well-informed Sweden seemed to be according to legend of Finnish military attache visiting Stockholm so one of the deciphered telegrams and being allied with the Germans informed them so the Germans started introducing new t52 models and early ones as weeds could break what the late ones we could not so after 1943 we couldn't really read any of that information it should also be said that the security surrounding this operation was somewhat lacking for example one courier who was ferrying decrypted telegrams was actually a Soviet spy which is okay in this time but it is a Soviet spy one can imagine that the Germans had some spies lurking around also so they might have found out that way or cologne Chryst who was also working as a code breaker once asked him how he did it owner apply and illusionist never shows his tricks and he never did so actually how he cracked the codes will never find out but cracked them he did

Channel: JMS WW2

Views: 6,343

Keywords: World war 2, Sweden, Secret, encryption, T52, Arne Beurling, cracked the code

Id: K_VorM8HGgQ

Length: 4min 5sec (245 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020