Cryptanalysis also suffered from a problem typical of the German armed forces of the time: numerous branches and institutions maintained their own cryptographic departments, working on their own without collaboration or sharing results or methods.
[2] There was no central German cryptography agency comparable to Britain’s Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), based at Bletchley Park.
They included: While most contributed little to the German war effort, the Navy's OKM did have some remarkable successes in breaking Allied codes.
The B-Dienst could regularly read the Broadcast to Allied Merchant Ships (BAMS) code, which proved valuable for U-boat warfare in the early phases of the Battle of the Atlantic.
For example, the Reichspost was able to descramble scrambled voice transmission of transatlantic radiotelephone conversations between the USA and Great Britain.
From 1940, the Mail Service's descrambling specialists intercepted and understood classified telephone conversation between President Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
The specialists in Lauf concentrated on messages from Bonner Fellers relating to the North African Campaign, so they could pass information to Feldmarschall Erwin Rommel about Allied plans and operations.
[citation needed] The Navy's B-Dienst was an exception to the rule, although its successes largely ended when the Allies began using more sophisticated encryption methods by 1943.