German officers attending an OKW signals intelligence course in Jüterbog, near Berlin, in October 1944. Left to right: Oberwachtmeister Suenkel; behind the tutor, Hauptmann Russ, of the Fenast post at Treuenbrietzen; the tutor, Major Philiptitsch, also of the Fenast post at Treuenbrietzen; Major Wend, commanding the Fenast at Lauf; Regierungsrat Wilhelm Flicke in glasses; and, next to Flicke, Inspecktor Pokojewski. The Allies had liberated Paris in August and were advancing to the German border. Flicke was tutoring Nachrichtenhelferinnen (female operators) at Jüterbog to replace soldiers drafted into fighting units of the German Army.

The High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) were not good at accepting intelligence evaluations that they disagreed with. Nowhere was this more obvious than during the Russian campaign. The papers of Colonel Randeweg, who was commanding the German intercept units in southern Russia before Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, showed a clear picture of the Red Army and Air Force order of battle. Intelligence from the Abwehr reported the Soviet Air Force would be able to field 10,000 aircraft in the event of war and also that the Russian aviation industry was capable of a high production of planes. The Luftwaffe’s general staff discounted this figure and decided that the number of operational machines was in the order of 3,000 and losses would not be easily replaced. They were much encouraged when a captain of the Soviet Air Force was captured and gave up the Russian key to the air code so Luftwaffe fighter squadrons were able to shoot down over 100 Russian aeroplanes in two weeks in air battles over Minsk. The code was changed within a couple of weeks but the damage to the Soviet Air Force was done. Within a month of launching Barbarossa, more than 3,000 aircraft had been shot down, and yet they still were able to show a strong presence in the air. The figures were, therefore, distrusted by the High Command who decided to do an audit and count the number of crashed aircraft. They came to the surprising conclusion that the claim of 3,000 shot down was a considerable underestimate. A revision was then made by the High Command in July, which enabled the OKW to claim that 6,233 Russian aircraft had been destroyed. This was an indication of the attitude of the German High Command to the often incisive intelligence that the Abwehr was able to gather.

The intelligence community was regarded by Hitler as being anti-Nazi and, although all would profess to be German patriots, he was right to some extent, which put them in a difficult and sometimes dangerous position. Chief among the suspects was Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the Director of the Abwehr and spymaster to the German Wehrmacht, and among others was Wilhelm Flicke, senior cryptologist in German signals intelligence. Flicke’s constant references in his papers to the glaringly obvious shortcomings of the German High Command in its direction of the war were almost treasonable. The almost perverse and dismissive misreading of intelligence evaluations created a situation which made not only his, but also his colleagues’ attitudes clear. The unease of the German public about the invasion of Russia was palpable, although it was not evident in the German media which was strongly controlled by the Ministry of Propaganda. The advance of 3 million men of the Wehrmacht, almost half of Hitler’s armed forces’ strength, into the Russian hinterland started with the support of her allies. There were eighteen divisions of Finns (they had a score to settle), sixteen divisions of Romanians, three of Italians and another three of Slovaks, as well as a scattering of Croatians and Hungarians. This vast juggernaut of men and machines was launched against a Red Army whose officers were well aware of the German threat. Stalin refused to recognise it, however, even after Churchill, with the aid of Ultra, warned him of the preparations for Operation Barbarossa.

Almost 200 divisions of the Red Army that were stationed near to their borders were thrown back or overwhelmed in the first onslaught of the attack. Soviet signal communications were thrown into chaos as they reeled before the assault, causing the security of radio messages to become so lax that the German Army intercept units were able to get a clear reading of the order of battle of their opponents. By the end of September, the Red Army communications system began to improve as the army got over the initial shock, although they had lost many experienced radio operators in the first offensive. The Russians had also lost a vast quantity of equipment, but it was mostly out of date and about to be replaced. As war began, Russian industry set about enacting the miracle of production that would churn out enough supplies and equipment to enable the Red Army to later turn the tide in their favour. Also, as the shock of the invasion by the Panzers was absorbed, security disciplines began to return to Soviet radio communications. It was not so in German signals communications, however, as the demand for radio operators and particularly evaluators of the intelligence data had increased by a factor of ten. Experienced personnel were spread more and more thinly to satisfy a rapidly expanding intercept service and this led to fatal mistakes in evaluations sent to the OKW. A communiqué was issued saying that no unified command structure of the Red Army could now be recognised, implying that it was breaking down into isolated groups. The reverse was true; the Russian front was strengthening, but the symptoms were not being recognised by the newly recruited cryptographers in German intercept stations. Their stations intercepted what they thought was the Red Army’s chaos in radio communications, but it was actually resorting to the norm. When security practices returned to Russian operations, fewer transmissions were received and from fewer locations, hence the conclusion was drawn that the organisation of the army was falling to pieces. It was not. Hitler always assumed in his crusade against Bolshevism that the people and the army’s resistance would collapse as anti-Communist forces came to their aid. This was not true as the Russian people saw the German Army as the invaders that they were, resisted very strongly and began to fight what was called the Patriotic War.

It was assumed that the resistance of the Russian soldiers was being maintained by political commissars who were behind them with weapons to keep the men in place in the frontline. As a result, intelligence reports that the Red Army was crumbling were welcomed and in a speech to the German nation he said, ‘The enemy is broken and will never rise again’. This was followed by a statement that:

We have been so forehanded that in this mighty war of materiel I can now cut back production in many lines because I know there is no longer any opponent whom we cannot overcome with the stock of ammunition on hand.

Production lines were substantially cut and the supplies to the front were later greatly curtailed; as a result, German soldiers suffered severely from lack of ammunition on the Russian front. This was self-deception on a grand scale, but there was worse to come as the German media reported that the Russian Marshals Voroshilov, Timoshenko and Budyonny had been relieved of their commands and turned over to the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) in a brutal purge. The German newspaper headlines shouted, ‘They are Silent in Moscow’ – and so they were. The three experienced commanders had, in fact, gone beyond the Urals to train the many new divisions released from duty on the Japanese frontier.

Wilhelm Flicke’s intercept station at Lauf had, meanwhile, been intercepting much radio traffic from the region east of Moscow and come to some disturbing conclusions. In October Flicke’s superior, Colonel Kettler, reported forty new Red Army formations of the size and nature of a division being trained and put into an army reserve of formidable size. Kettler was able to report the nature of each division, such as tank or infantry units, either motorised or cavalry, their composition and strength in men and machines, their equipment and ammunition states and command structure. Flicke then helped him compose a report of his findings in great detail to send to his commander, General E. Fellgiebel. Flicke then added in his papers that this general was later murdered by Hitler following the bomb plot in July 1944. The report was then sent to the OKW for the attention of Hitler where its findings were met with an immediate rejection. A note to Fellgiebel on its cover from Colonel General Jodl said that Kettler should be put out of business. It was countersigned by SS Superior Group Leader Fegelein who noted that this was also the opinion of the Führer. Fegelein was shot on Hitler’s order just before the end of the war. By November there was increasingly stiff resistance from the Russians in front of Moscow as reinforcements to the Russian line began to arrive in total radio silence, a great achievement in radio operations given a movement of that size. A stirring moment in the war is brought to life in the newsreels of Stalin taking the salute at a parade in Red Square in Moscow as battalions of Russian soldiers marched past him and straight on in to the trenches just outside Moscow to hold back the German Army.

German Army commanders eventually began to see the light and General Halder, the Chief of Staff, wrote in his diary that it was becoming ever clearer that they had underestimated the Russian colossus. The High Command had not wanted to get bogged down in a positional war of entrenchment. They had expected 200 enemy divisions to oppose them but so far they had counted 350 and, although they were not always properly equipped or led, they were always there. Whenever a dozen of these divisions were destroyed or captured, another dozen would immediately replace them. In addition, the Germans’ long line of supplies was being increasingly disrupted by Russian partisans while the Red Army were close to its source of supply. The Germans found themselves in front of Moscow with little or no winter clothing in -30°C: their skin froze on to the metal of their guns as they touched them and tore off their hands if they tried to pull them away; the oil froze and the tanks could not function or the guns fire; and the radio sets would not work as the batteries froze, so the German generals had the dilemma of withdrawing and leaving their equipment or staying put to be overrun as their weapons did not work. Then to the amazement of the Germans, the Russians attacked them in early December with forty divisions of fresh, well-equipped reinforcements from Siberia, who considered the Moscow weather to be relatively warm. They fell upon the German troops like wolves and the whole of the German Army Centre Group retired in disarray to a line 90 miles distant from Moscow.

German intelligence had failed Hitler once again after a complete lack of warning of the Torch landings and now an underestimation of the strength of the Red Army by almost half as much again. Russian production achievements had massively exceeded the Abwehr estimate and their T-34 tanks were beginning to appear on the battlefield in their thousands.

American aid was also coming to their new allies through the Middle East. Hitler berated Canaris for the failure of his organisation in public and the Admiral knew that he would pay a high price for the failure in a way that would only help Himmler’s SS who were building a separate intelligence organisation of their own. The intelligence service, or rather services, were in conflict and the results would be disastrous, but the Abwehr knew it had to pull off a coup to get Hitler’s approval. Meanwhile, in Russia things were going from bad to worse as the German Army reached its high water mark in their advances into Russia and then the tide began to recede.

In September 1942 the long crucifixion of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad began as they advanced to the banks of the Volga. By November the Russians’ pincer movement had been launched and the two arms met at Kalach behind the German Army. Russian troops encircled the Sixth Army, although the Luftwaffe was able to lift 50,000 men out of the trap. A final surrender in February of the following year had cost the German Army almost a quarter of a million men as casualties or prisoners. This great public humiliation for Hitler and his army convinced the world that the Wehrmacht was not invincible. The last message from General Paulus, commanding the doomed Sixth Army, was intercepted by the Lauf listening station and Wilhelm Flicke recounted how the message brought in by a duty officer read, ‘My Führer, in future follow more the advice of your Generals!’ The document was passed from one adjutant to another until it landed on the desk of Field Marshal Keitel. He ordered that it be taken into the office of the chief of the supreme command of the armed forces of the Third Reich immediately. The author himself knows how impressive and overbearing the entrance to Hitler’s office was, as he visited the bombed and ruined Reich Chancellery just after the war. The double doors were 30ft and each was 6ft wide with heavy sculptured bronze images depicting German myths of the past. None of those brave soldiers in attendance on the Führer ventured to volunteer to pass through those doors to take the document to him – Nazi Germany occasionally copied the Greek practice and killed the messenger bearing bad news. Finally the paper was placed in a portfolio with others and laid on Hitler’s desk in a casual manner, and then a small but apprehensive group waited outside.

The silence did not last long, from behind the massive double doors came the sound of breaking vases and chairs being overturned. Hitler tore the telegram into smaller and smaller pieces and ranted and raged at everything and everybody but himself. Keitel was summoned and listened to the strident demands for the degrading of Paulus from his rank of field marshal, confirmed for him the day before. It was too late as the announcement had already gone to the press so Keitel stood, stony faced and took the tirade of bitterness and frustration. In the ruins of Stalingrad the new Field Marshal Paulus marched what was left of his army through the snow into a long captivity from which only 5,000 would return. Flicke made a surprising assertion in his papers about another battle at Kharkov further south, which was regarded as a masterpiece of manoeuvre by one of Hitler’s best generals, von Manstein. He persuaded the Führer that a positional war such as Hitler had experienced in the First World War needed to give way to one of movement. The general was allowed to manoeuvre the Red Army into a trap as exhausted Russian troops ploughed on to the extreme of their supply chain before the German Panzers struck. The world saw von Manstein’s victory as a model of defensive mechanised warfare but Wilhelm Flicke, whose listening station measured the action blow by blow, did not.

Flicke compared Kharkov with Napoleon’s ‘victory’ at the Battle of Borodino where the Imperial Russian Army was defeated but Napoleon’s army was so damaged in the battle that its ultimate fate was decided. Flicke thought that the way that German forces were weakened at Kharkov enabled the Red Army to prevent the Germans from taking Stalingrad or the oil fields in the Caucasus. The real decision in Russia, Flicke asserts, did not take place at Stalingrad but earlier at Kharkov when the Red Army inflicted such severe losses on the Germans that the timetable of the depleted German divisions was upset as they moved on to the Kuban area, the Caucasus and the Volga. The Russians sustained terrible losses in men and materiel but were able to replace them, while the Germans not only lost men but also time.

Soviet espionage activities both within German-occupied Russia and also in the German homeland were well known to the Abwehr. Flicke tells how detailed German operational plans for the 1942 spring offensive were known to the Russians as was the plan to advance across the Volga and into the oil fields of the Caucasus. Areas of assembly of German Army formations designated to carry out these operations and their order of battle, with the numerical strength of the army and their allies, were all known to the Russians in detail. Units from battalion size upwards had been identified with even the names of unit commanders and the numbers of tanks, guns and planes available and those not available but under repair for the coming campaigns. The attack plans for the coming summer offensive of the three German Army groups in Russia had been established and the Rote Kapelle, or Red Orchestra (the Soviet spy ring), had reported them to their Moscow control. In short, the Russian Intelligence services knew as much about the German Army and its order of battle and future plans as Bletchley Park did, although probably by different means.

Intelligence services of all beligerent countries had planted networks of radio agents around Europe, notably the Russians. From the 1930s she was the first country to develop espionage networks with an international dimension. The Soviet Union gradually set up networks of shortwave radios reporting to a control station in Moscow and other lesser control stations in other European countries. Wilhelm Flicke’s intercept service recognised and reported these stations to the OKW who assumed they were a propaganda network for Communist International purposes aimed at spreading the word of Communism across Europe. There was little indication of the network’s size as most of the stations kept a discreet radio silence, nor any indication of their nature as those transmissions that were received were in a code that remained unbroken and only made infrequent transmissions. The network was, in fact, the radio communication system for the Russian intelligence service designed to collect and transmit intelligence gathered by Communist sympathisers across Europe acting as agents. There were many such people before the war who were told to observe and report on all aspects of armed forces activity in their country. In addition they were ordered to report on industrial strengths and weaknesses of the economy in European countries, particularly Germany. Agents were expected to assess the production capabilities of their country and its technology, including the searching of patents. Members of the network were also tasked with monitoring political events and identifying politicians that might have an effect on the wellbeing of the Soviet Union. Soon after the outbreak of war in 1941, the German state security police estimated that there were 120,000 agents and fellow travellers serving the network, who all kept a low profile as they reported their findings through embassies. The long-term investment in establishing this huge intelligence operation was about to pay off in a big way.

The German invasion of southern Russia in 1941. German signals and listening network was extensive due to the need to communicate over the huge distances involved. Their signals intelligence war was as complicated as the rest of this huge military campaign. Counter intelligence radio played a major part in directing the Russian partisans who later helped to destroy the German Army Group Centre in 1944.

The number of shortwave stations that sprang up in all territories occupied by Germany as she declared war on Russia in 1941 increased enormously. Wilhelm Flicke and his colleagues named the network the WNA net, which was taken from the call-sign of the Moscow station directing it. Dozens of radio transmissions on many shortwave frequency bands suddenly came to life and connected to what was to prove to be the largest espionage networks in Europe. The German listening service was overwhelmed; Lauf and other listening stations counted over 600 radiograms in the month of August following the invasion of Russia. Transmissions could be heard coming from every European country but most disturbingly some from within Germany itself. The building of a clandestine intelligence operation of this size and scope must count as being among the most successful the world has ever seen.

The most powerful network in this Russian intelligence assault on the Third Reich’s secrets was undoubtedly the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle), as the Abwehr named one of its Soviet espionage networks. The translation of the word kapelle into English is uncertain as it has a double meaning; it can either be a chapel of religious worship or alternatively an orchestra. The author favours the orchestra term because Flicke refers to the operators in the network as musicians in his papers and the director in Moscow as the conductor. The Soviet espionage organisation had three largely unconnected parts each of which gave the Abwehr and Gestapo many headaches. These were the Schulze-Boysen group, the Trepper group and the Red Three (Rote Drie) network, with a base in Switzerland. The first of these was brilliantly run by two men, Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack, who were both Communist sympathisers who managed a disparate group of over a hundred anti-Nazi agents, most of whom had been members of the Communist Party in Germany until forcibly dissolved by the Gestapo. Many in this motley crew did not involve themselves in espionage directly but observed and reported matters of interest to the network leaders. An inner circle of more active agents used their surprisingly good skills and contacts to enhance the observations of the others. Horst Heilmann worked with the Wehrmacht on decoding signals; Johann Gradenz sold aircraft spares to the Luftwaffe and knew about aircraft production; and Herbert Gollnow was a policeman and had access to counter-espionage secrets. Other shadowy figures worked in the German Foreign Office, the Ministry of Labour, and the Berlin Council, holding mainly government positions. From this mixture of observers and activists the Schulze-Boysen Group were able to accumulate a surprisingly rich vein of intelligence evaluations to report to its Moscow control.

The Abwehr’s painstaking decoding of the texts left them astonished at the high quality of the intelligence in the reports, which might concern anything from the movement of thirty army divisions being transferred from west to east, or 400,000 German soldiers holding strategic points in Italy to guarantee that her government would not make a separate peace. At another level, a technical description of a new anti-aircraft gun could be included, as well as more internal political matters. For instance, Hitler’s willingness for the Finns to make a separate peace with Russia once the Germans occupied Leningrad for the purpose of shortening her line of defence and to enable her troops to be more easily supplied was one item reported on. Details of the German war machine and its manufacturing base was another; a breakdown of the statistics of Luftwaffe strength in the air and how the 22,000 machines of first and second line aircraft were deployed. Losses of planes were also enumerated, such as the fact that ten to twelve dive bombers were being built a day but forty-five planes had been lost on the Eastern Front from 22 June to the end of September. These and many other aspects of military and economic information emerged as the horrified German cryptanalysts worked to clarify the contents.

The case caused German intelligence great concern. After breaking up the Schulze-Boysen group, the Germans found that dedicated Communist agents had been planted many years before the war without arousing any suspicion. They had used their positions in industry to gradually make excellent connections and become trusted by leaders in industry and the armed forces. The penetration and breaking down of the network in Germany by the Abwehr was a blow to Soviet intelligence, particularly as the arrests led to the discovery of networks in France and other occupied countries. The link to Moscow using the Schulze-Boysen Group’s captured radio sets was kept up, although Moscow soon realised that their network had been blown. The Russians kept up the double bluff of pretending that the network was still working, as they wanted to distract the Germans while the Soviets strengthened and built another intelligence network.

This new network was the Trepper Group, a Soviet espionage ring run by staunch Communist Leopold Trepper who posed initially as a Canadian industrialist. He started to trade in clothes and underwear in Brussels as a cover for his espionage activities and developed business interests in France, Belgium and Germany before the Second World War. He created intelligence networks of Communist agents in those places using his business activities as a front for his agents while selling black market goods to German forces occupying those countries. He supplied Hitler’s Organisation Todt (the Third Reich’s civil and military engineering group) with materials and to do this he changed his persona to that of a German businessman. He used social occasions and dinner parties to cultivate high-ranking German officials to elicit information about troop movements and building defence projects. In late December 1941 his transmitter in Brussels was detected by a directional indicator and was promptly shut down by the Abwehr and, after a long chase, he was arrested in Brussels. After interrogation, he agreed to work for the Germans by transmitting disinformation to Moscow, although he managed to include hidden signs to his controller giving warning of his plight. In September 1943 he escaped and went into hiding with the French Resistance, but by then all the members of his groups had been arrested, including the well-known French agent Suzanne Spaak who was executed at Fresnes Prison just two weeks before Paris was liberated. Trepper survived and, after the war, returned to his old business of clothes wholesaling and quite possibly continuing espionage for the Soviet Union.

Late in 1941 the intercept services at Lauf began picking up transmissions from three new operational stations, one of which transmitted from Switzerland. Their transmissions to Moscow soon established them as agent stations in the Soviet Red Orchestra. The Abwehr christened this new station Rote Drei or Red Three in the network. It took the German cryptographers until well into 1944 before they could decrypt any of the enormous volume of traffic that passed on the shortwave links to Moscow. The Abwehr rated this network as especially dangerous as it operated in Geneva in neutral Switzerland, outside the security sphere of the Third Reich, although that did not stop them investigating the operation. Its first question was easily answered as they identified Alexander Rado, a Hungarian national, as the main agent in the network. He lived at 22 Rue de Lausanne, next door to the Comintern International offices running a Communist propaganda programme around the world. Rado, whose code name was Dora, had two radio sets allocated to him and was supervised by his director from Moscow Central. Wilhelm Flicke says that one of those sets was at another address in Lausanne, 2 Chemin Longerai, where an Englishman A.A. Foote was living, but how Flicke knew any of this is not clear. He goes on to say that Foote’s cover name was ‘John’ and he did all his own cipher work and worked independently of Rado. This is strange as the Russians and particularly those in the intelligence community had a deep distrust of the British.

Rado established the Rote Drei in 1937 with a small staff in Geneva to cope with the heavy workload of transmissions. German intelligence established the names of all of them and their code names but could get no further information. In the critical period of the battles for Stalingrad and the Caucasus the radios were never quiet and, following the encirclement and capture of a German Army at Stalingrad, the Russian intelligence service faced the most important problem in its history. After the Red Army’s initial breakthrough of German lines, what was the enemy’s situation? Did they have enough reserves to strike a counter blow? Did the Red Army risk falling into a trap as they advanced so rapidly or could they pursue the enemy safely on the Southern Front? This was the finest hour for Rote Drei and indeed the Soviet intelligence service; they rose to it magnificently by answering the Red Army’s questions in detail. The often hourly reports detailing the order of battle of each of the three army groups of the Germans were received in Moscow and proved unfailingly accurate and timely. German intelligence operatives have told the author that the war was won in Switzerland, but how was Rote Drei getting its information and who were its informants? The German security agencies tried every means they could to find the leak that was haemorrhaging away the strength and dispositions of the German Army, but to no avail. They knew all the people in the Rote Drei office in Geneva and watched them closely, as they did with hundreds of people in the Führer’s Headquarters, but could not find a hint of the leak of such critical and wide-ranging information. Wilhelm Flicke wrote that, as the tide turned against Germany in the late 1940s, ‘The Rote Drei’s source of information remains the most fateful secret of World War 2’.

It was obviously a dark mystery to the Germans, but there is a simple explanation; the mysterious A.A. Foote (John), either known or unknown to Rado, was a member of the British secret service, or MI6, whose life story could fill another book. Both he and Rado were being hounded by the Abwehr, together with the Swiss counter-espionage organisation BUPO, but all the time Foote was in touch either directly or indirectly with London. The critically important information that Rado, trusted by Moscow Central, was passing on was intelligence that came from Foote. The content was so detailed and accurate over a long and critical period that it must have come from Bletchley Park. The indirect use of Rote Drei had a double advantage to the Park: first, the information came to Moscow from one of their own tried and trusted people; secondly, it safeguarded the Park’s security as Rado was seen by the Germans as a wizard at finding mysterious sources of information that they could not identify. Meanwhile, the Abwehr and Gestapo were mesmerised into strenuously seeking the answer in the Führer’s Headquarters or the inner circle of the Wehrmacht and never thought to look further afield.

Russian Battlefield Intelligence

The tactical battlefield operations of German intercept units in the field against Russian troops had an entirely different nature to those on the home front described above. Colonel Randeweg, commanding the intercept detachment in the German Army Group South in Russia, recounted his experiences that were probably similar to every intercept unit in Army Groups Centre and North on the Russian front:

The vastness of Russia’s steppes, with little in the way of good roads and almost nothing resembling a commercial or military communications system, left the Russian army with no option but to use radio to contact its formations. German signals intelligence operations therefore concentrated on long-range interception operations to determine the battle order of the Soviet army and air force west of the Ural Mountains.

The mission of Randeweg’s units was to establish the current radio techniques of Red Army operators and what German interceptors could find about their unit’s command structures and strength. The scenario gained from these operations showed a picture of the Soviet Air Force that was very different to the evaluation accepted by OKW intelligence officers as has been seen earlier. The lack of information available to Army Group South about the Red Army caused the Germans to make a grave error in underestimating the Red Army’s strength.

Russian military signals security in their frontline units was not good and tank units in particular gave themselves away by faulty security procedures before and during attacks which made German intercepts very effective. In particular, careless requests for fuel gave away their positions and condition and transmissions from tank commanders made them particularly vulnerable. In July 1942 the Russian 82nd Tank Brigade had been trapped in a large pocket by the German Ninth Army who intercepted a plain text message discussing a break-out. The Brigade Commander asked about the axes of movement for his formation and was advised on the best location for an escape. The general of the 9th ordered the escape route to be lined with his tank-killer 88mm guns which decimated the Russian T-34 tanks and prevented the break-out so the remnants of the brigade retired into swamp-land for cover. Soon messages were intercepted requesting assistance in towing their T-34s out of the muddy swamp so the German radio operators used a deception on tank commanders, pretending to be Russian and asking for their position so the towing vehicles could find them. They then used the co-ordinates to direct artillery fire on the position and, still pretending to be Russian, the operator was able to keep in touch with the tank commander until his tank was knocked out and went off the air. Finally the Russian divisional staff tried to rescue some of the brigade from its disaster by trying to reorganise the troops and ordering them by radio to assemble at designated points, which then came under further intense artillery fire. The effect of the bombardment could then be checked by transmissions from surviving Russian operators asking for help. The whole of the Russian 82nd Tank Brigade had been wiped out due to lack of radio security. Frontline Russian operators would find it difficult to equal this kind of devastating efficiency shown by German intercept companies.

In the autumn of 1943 German forces were encircled near Cherkassy in a similar way to that of the 82nd Tank Brigade and successfully broke out by intercepting Russian signals in the operation. At the behest of the German propaganda machine, the commander of the brigade of tanks told how he had been able to direct movements of his armour by use of interception of Russian transmissions. An account of it was printed in the German press and after the Russian frontline security of messages improved.

Another aspect of action in Russia was the use the Russians made of partisans. While serving as commissar with Budyonny’s cavalry, Stalin’s role as a partisan in the 1920s allowed him to observe the defects of the Russian radio services, and it taught him much about the value of disrupting the enemy’s supply lines. A band of guerrillas in the vast empty Russian steppes could attack the lightly defended supply routes of the Germans whose first intimation of an attack would be the swish of the skis of the attacker before the destruction of supplies or ammunition intended for frontline units. A major partisan offensive was launched by Stalin using such guerrilla tactics to disrupt the German Army’s ever-lengthening supply lines, causing a major headache for their listening posts. Each band carried a shortwave radio and took orders from their parent Red Army formation headquarters as to where to strike and when. Listening posts allocated to identifying these radio sets complained regularly that it was impossible for them to keep track of literally hundreds of tiny mobile stations transmitting in their sector.

As the tide of battle turned from the high water mark of Stalingrad and then Kursk, the Russian use of radio communications became more adept and the German interception service was gradually overwhelmed. As the Red Army fought along its savage 3,000-mile journey from Moscow across Russia and Poland and then through Germany, increasing numbers of German intercept companies and their equipment were destroyed or abandoned. The Russians, on the other hand, became more and more confident in their radio communication service and took less and less care as they advanced. By the time the Russians were on the outskirts of Berlin they were confident enough not to encode messages. The Germans, on the other hand, were using their skilled intercept personnel as infantry in a last ditch effort to hold back Russia’s avenging army. In the last of his papers, Wilhelm Flicke asks the great why. Why, when the intercept service revealed the growing strength of the enemy on all fields, did they not stop the war when they knew it could not be won? German soldiers continued to fight as the Russians advanced into the gardens of the Reich Chancellery and the doors of Hitler’s bunker in Berlin. The most convincing answer he received came from a German ex-soldier, wounded in battle with the loss of an arm: ‘It has to do with the German culture,’ he said, ‘we continued to fight because we were never told to stop.’