Hans-Thilo Schmidt | |
|---|---|
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| Born | (1888-05-13)13 May 1888 |
| Died | 19 September 1943(1943-09-19) (aged 55) Berlin, Germany |
| Cause of death | Execution or Suicide |
| Occupation | Civil servant |
| Espionage activity | |
| Allegiance | France |
| Codename | Asché |
| Codename | Source D |
Hans-Thilo Schmidt (13 May 1888 – 19 September 1943) codenamedAsché orSource D, was a Germanspy who sold secrets about theEnigma machine to the French duringWorld War II. The materials he provided facilitated Polish mathematicianMarian Rejewski's reconstruction of thewiring in the Enigma'srotors andreflector; thereafter the Poles were able to read a large proportion of Enigma-enciphered traffic. He was the younger brother ofWehrmacht generalRudolf Schmidt.
A former officer, Schmidt had been forced to leave the army having suffered from gas during theFirst World War.[1] His brother,Rudolf Schmidt, secured him a civilian post at the German Armed Forces'cryptographic headquarters, the Cipher Office.[1] Shortly after the military version of theEnigma machine was introduced, he contactedFrenchintelligence and offered to supply information about the new machine. His offer was accepted by CaptainGustave Bertrand of French Intelligence, and he received from the French thecodenameAsché, and was assigned a contact, the French agent codenamedRex.
For the next several years, until he left his position in Germany, he met with French agents at various European cities and supplied them copies of the Enigma machine's instruction manual, operating procedures, and lists of key settings. Even with this information, however, French Intelligence was unable to break messagesencrypted on the Enigma. Nor were theBritishcryptologists whom Bertrand contacted able to make any headway.
In December 1932, Bertrand shared intelligence obtained from Asché with the PolishGeneral Staff's Cipher Bureau (Biuro Szyfrów). Mathematician-cryptologistMarian Rejewski had already set up a system ofequations describing the operation of the then new German Army Enigma rotor-wirings. Thekey-settings lists provided by Schmidt helped fill in enough of the unknowns in Rejewski'sformulae, allowing him to speedily solve the equations and recover the wirings. That accomplished, the Poles were henceforth able to read Enigma traffic for nearly seven years to the outbreak ofWorld War II as well as for a time into the War, while operating in conjunction with French intelligencein France. In a two-week January 1938 trial, they solved and read about three-quarters of allWehrmacht (German Armed Forces) Enigmaintercepts: a remarkable result, considering that parts of the raw intercepts were garbled or incomplete due to interference [Kozaczuk,Enigma 1984, p. 45].
After theBattle of France, the French agent who had been Schmidt's case officer, a German citizen named Stallmann who went by the name "Rodolphe Lemoine" (fr) and used the codename "Rex," was arrested by theGestapo and betrayed Schmidt as a French spy. Schmidt was arrested on 1 April 1943, and in September 1943 his daughter Giselle was called on to identify his body; her account (as recounted inHugh Sebag-Montefiore's book) suggests that Schmidt had committed suicide.
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