Rudolf Schauffler (born 11 August 1889 inUlm– died 6 February 1968) was a German mathematician, who was most notable for being the nominal head of theLinguistics andCryptanalysis section ofPers Z S, theSignal Intelligence Agency of theGerman Foreign Office (German:Auswärtiges Amt) before and duringWorld War II.[1]
BeforeWorld War I Schauffler had been a schoolmaster after studying mathematics, physics and languages at theUniversity of Tübingen and theLudwig Maximilian University of Munich.[1] During World War I he wasgassed.[2] During the first world war, Schauffler worked as a cryptanalyst at the German army headquarters.[3] After the war Schauffler found the work of schoolmaster to be too difficult and decided to join Pers Z S. Schauffler was recruited byKurt Selchow and joined on the 1 December 1918.[2] Selchow who also recruited Werner Kunze, Adolf Paschke, Karl Zastrow, Wilhelm Brandes, and Ernst Hoffmann for the unit as he had known them during the war.[4]
Although he did not have aDoctor of Philosophy degree nor did hehabilitate while in office, Schauffler was most definitely a real mathematician.[1] Themathematician and cryptographerErich Hüttenhain in his evaluation of Schauffler regarded him as atrue scientist.[5]
Very early in his career he wrote two papers in 1917 and 1921 for theMathematische Annalen mathematical research journal. After the war he wrote a thesis in 1941 but did not submit it until 1947 to theUniversity of Marburg. The subject was on cryptography:An application of cyclic permutations and their theory (German:Eine Anwendung zyklischer Permutationen und ihre Theorie). It had not been submitted due to the contents being secret.[1] He was promoted toDoctor of Philosophy in 1948. In 1956 and 1957 he wrote two further papers, the first of these was on the theory ofCheck digit systems.[1]
In 1967, the historianDavid Kahn interviewed Schauffler in his apartment for his 1967 book,The Codebreakers and found it most depressing.[1] Kahn wrote of Schauffler:[6]
Initially Schauffler worked on cryptographic problems. During the period from 1921 to 1923, Schauffler worked as part a team that includedWerner Kunze on the development of aone-time pad system for the use by the Foreign Office.[8][9] He later became interested inChinese andJapanese languages while sharing an office withEmil Krebs,[10] who taught him, eventually becoming a specialist in both languages over a period of twenty years.[1] Schauffler later focused ontheoretical research that became his main field of interest.[11] He later edited the in-house journal,Scientific Writings of theDahlem Special Service, (German:Wissenschaftliche Schriften des Sonderdienstes Dahlem).[12]
In 1950, theFederal Foreign Office tasked Selchow along with Schauffler,Erich Hüttenhain andHeinz Kuntze to form a cryptographic service under the direction of Adolf Paschke that was called Section 114.[13] The service was to act as a cypher bureau for the Central office of Encryption (ZfCh) (German:Zentralstelle für das Chiffrierwesen) that had been previously created in 1947 and was located atCamp King. In 1955 the unit was disbanded asWest Germany was rearming and a new unit was to be created.[13] In 1956 all the equipment and resources of the unit were transferred to theFederal Intelligence Service (Germany).[13] In 1989 the unit was renamed to ZFI (German:Zentralstelle für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik). In 1991 it became the BSI (Federal Office for Information Security)
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