German Naval Intelligence Service
[2] During the Second World War, the service underwent various re-organisations, starting as part of 2/SKL, later 4/SKL of the Oberkommando der Marine (OKM) and finally dissolved on 22 July 1945, two months after the end of hostilities.
[4] The Kaiser again approved the proposal and directed the Naval Office to implement it, but Tirpitz continued to obstruct Diederichs – this time by reducing his budget from the requested ℳ150,000 marks to only ℳ10,000.
From its establishment in 1901, it sought to recruit a network of agents around the world to observe the movement of foreign warships, which in practice meant principally British ships.
The German agent Carl Hans Lody, who spied in the UK in the early months of the First World War, was one such example of a shipping employee who had been recruited as an operative.
[8] When the war ended, the news department of the Naval Staff, unfortunately destroyed large parts of their records inventory,[14] a fact which today is very difficult verification of allegations contained in this paragraph.
The News service wasn't specifically looking to achieve tactical or operational superiority, but rather to get to know the state of radio engineering development in the Royal Navy and to track it.
No strategy was formed to determine or investigate the purpose for which the enemy was listening to radio messages, what experience they gained from it and what countermeasures the Imperial Navy could initiate against them.
Two events were particularly significant, illustrating the lack of foresight on Germany's part, with the resulting success of the enemy: The first incident, occurred soon after the outbreak of the world war 1, when a radio officer, Wilhelm Tranow aboard the ship SMS Pommern of the German High Seas Fleet, succeeded in breaking their own cipher.
On 26 August 1914, the Imperial Navy light cruiser SMS Magdeburg was ordered to sweep for Russian reconnaissance forces in the entrance to the Gulf of Finland when dense fog closed in.
With the code books and cipher key, the British were able to track the movements of most German warships; this information could be passed on to the Admiral John Jellicoe, the commander of the Grand Fleet.
The first indication of compromised communications came from Admiral Lord of the Fleet Sir John Fisher, in his biography Memories in 1919, he wrote: The development of the wireless has been such that you can get the direction of one who speaks and go for him; so that the German daren't open his mouth.
In his bestselling series, The World Crisis by Winston Churchill, the first two volumes which were published in 1923, and who has been civilian head of the Royal Navy at the start of the war stated: At the beginning of September 1914, the German light cruiser SMS Magdeburg was wrecked in the Baltic.
The entire intercept staff of 10 was removed from the Navy Department and incorporated with the Torpedo and Mining Inspectorate in Kiel, which did not even have the word 'communications' in its title, reflecting the lack of understanding of Radio Intelligence.
In his capacity, Kleikamp authored a documentary, the 1934 Secret Service MDv 352 bulletin No.13, in which he described in detail the unwary radio use of the Imperial German Navy during World War I at length, and in which he, for the planning and management of future naval warfare stated careful preliminary work in peace was required.
This possibility, however, can be denied to a certain degree, because all experiences and the enemy a serious threat to its own messaging service created when he (...) wants to introduce completely new key systems in the event of mobilization.
[45] Operational tasks of the intercept stations were assigned based on the metrics: geographical location, their size and equipment and the quality of reception in the short, medium and long wave band.
The increase in speed led to the redesign of the staff facilities at B-Dienst, so that the operations department plotting room were directly connected to the updating of charts[6] After Austrian Anschluss in 1938, an Intercept Station was established outside the town of Neusiedel am See, for tracking Russian naval radio traffic in the Gulf of Finland and the Black Sea.
The Unit radio reconnaissance operation in 1937–38 had a central control centre in Berlin, three other control centres (North: Neumünster, middle: Soest, South: Langenargen), four main bearing radio sets (Wilhelmshaven, Flensburg, Swinemuende, Pillau) and eight targeting stations along the North and Baltic Coast (Borkum, Cuxhaven, Arkona, Darss, Falshöft, Ustka, Memel, Windau).
By stretching a line between Borkum and List, composing the base of a triangle and simultaneously the chord, a circular direction finding coverage could be made over the North Sea.
An initial synopsis would be produced after an exercise, followed by a detailed reports, running to hundreds of pages including charts and analysis of shipping maneuvers.
Another security measure implemented to stop the possible solving of Enigma messages, by using a technique called superimposition was ensuring that the rotor starting positions were far apart.
A study by Lieutenant Henno Lucan, second radio officer on the battleship SMS Elsass, reported that the Naval Enigma met neither modern physical or cryptographic security.
A civilian had taken it and delivered it to the mayor of a neighbouring village within half an hour[63]The same memo included a summary of persons executed for treason and betrayal of military secrets, 148 in 1933, 155 for the first seven months of 1934.
Several other people were discovered to be negligent during that period, including Radioman Second Class Egon Bress of the Fourth Torpedo Boat Half-Flotilla who was arrested in February 1934 for taking photographs of Enigma and hundreds of cryptographic documents for his own uses.
On 9 January 1932 Radioman Kunert, located at the Baltic naval base in Kiel, made a fundamental mistake when he transmitted both the enciphered and plain message to anybody who was listening.
After that incident, an additional training program was implemented that illustrated the kinds of errors and their consequences that could be produced to break key security protocols.Another area of concern, was of course, theft, betrayal and accidental comprise.
Worried about water exposure of ships, two copies of cryptographic documents were kept, in enclosed envelope[65] The last security measure put in before the start of World War II, was a system that should be put in place, should all the Enigma system; the machine, the list of current settings, Rotors, the booklet that stated the rotor starting positions and indicators, and the Bigram tables, be lost or stolen.
A central Monitoring Centre was established at the start of the war, it submitted a report to Naval Command, that it should consider keeping communications to the minimum and stated "because our cipher systems are not to be viewed as 100 percent secure".
Unlike the OKW/Chi, B-Dienst did not lose staff to the FA when Abbwehr Gruppe IV/B-Dienst liaison officer, Hans Schimpf, took over the Forschungsamt at Hermann Göring's invitation, which soured relations.
Possibly because of the lack of Fleet action, and inaccuracies in the statistical methods for measurement, the Department of Foreign Navies had a wholly negative impact on the German war effort.
