Wilhelm Fenner

Personal life

Wilhelm was born on April 14, 1891 in Saint Petersburg. He was the sixth of seven children of Heinrich Gottlieb Fenner and Charlotte Georgine Fenner, born Michaelsen. His father was the chief editor of the St. Petersburgische Zeitung, a German language daily newspaper published in Saint Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire. After two years of home schooling, he attended the Evangelical Lutheran Anne School in St. Petersburg from 1899, and completed his final examination with distinction in May 1909. In the autumn of 1910 he matriculated at the Royal Institute of Technology in Berlin (TH) in Berlin-Charlottenburg and studied construction engineering. In the summer of 1914, he passed his final examination.

Wilhelm Fenner was married on 11 January 1922 to Elise Sophie Katharine von Blanckensee, a daughter of the former Prussian Major General Peter von Blanckensee. They had two children, a son, Siegwart Heinrich (born January 28, 1923), who served as a lieutenant in World War II, and was killed on February 19, 1945, and a daughter, Ilse Fredericki (born July 24, 1928).

Work

With the outbreak of the First World War, he had to drop out of college, and worked for a short time at Siemens, before being drafted into military service on December 1, 1914. After the war, now with the rank of lieutenant, he remained in the military until February 9, 1920. Just over a year later, his career took a decisive turn when he met Peter Novopaschenny in the spring of 1921. Novopaschenny was a former Russian Navy captain of the tsarist Marine and professor of Applied Tactics. Novopaschenny asked Fenner to help him to move to Berlin and confided in Fenner that he had worked during the war as director of the Russian cryptanalytic service working to break the ciphers of the German Baltic Fleet, and that he intended to make his experience available to the German General Staff. In the same year, Fenner provided him with contacts, and in the process began discovering the field of cryptanalysis. He was now working under the guidance of his "teacher", Novopaschenny, and together they were successful in breaking Russian military ciphers. Fenner's excellent command of the German and Russian languages worked to his advantage, while Novopaschenny, although an excellent cryptanalyst, spoke hardly any German.

In this process, Fenner introduced a uniform, clear technical terminology into the field of cryptanalysis, laying the groundwork for further successes by his new employer. In the autumn of 1922, he and Novopaschenny were not only officially taken into the employment of the cryptanalysis group of the Reichswehr (Chi-point), but Fenner was also appointed as head of the cryptanalysis section and assigned a staff of eleven. Within the next years Fenner changed the operation of his group significantly. From a chaotic assembly of creative "geniuses", he formed an analytical, systematic and disciplined unit of more, and more experienced, code breakers. His actions bore fruit, and the number of successfully decrypted messages increased steadily. The group also grew in numbers, and Fenner took the opportunity to train newcomers himself and transfer his own, now greatly developed, knowledge of cryptology to them. However, his growing leadership role caused him to start losing contact with the actual cryptanalytic work.

On April 4, 1927 he was appointed a Government Councillor (Regierungsrat). In addition to his management duties he increased contact and cooperation with friendly foreign groups in Austria, Hungary and Finland, and later Italy, Spain and Estonia He provided training, and wrote two treatises on cryptanalysis, namely Grundlagen der Entzifferung (fundamentals of code-breaking) and Beitrag zur Theorie der Schieber (contribution to the theory of the strip cipher). He also worked on the Enigma machine, then already in trial use by the Reichswehr, pointing out cryptographic weaknesses, and making proposals for its improvement.

After the seizure of power by the Nazis in January 1933, the times became increasingly restless for the cipher bureau, which now felt the competition from newly established rival institutions. In 1933, for example, Goering's new Luftwaffe created its own intelligence agency, the Research Office of the Reich Air Ministry. Many capable employees of the cipher bureau joined the new organisation, where they hoped for better career prospects. Among these were cryptanalysts whom Fenner considered excellent, namely Baron von Reznicek and Herr Weachter. Fenner was forced to fill the resulting gaps with newcomers, necessarily having to forgo experience in favour of attitude in selection of candidates. Fenner as a rule always recruited people who had not left the church and were not members of the NSDAP. It was during this time that he decided to implement a thorough training for all new talented cryptanalysts. He decided to use Romanian ciphers as his training system. Over two winter semesters he conducted a Course in Low Level Cryptography on a Romanian system with a single re-encipherment, which was held in three times a week from 1500 to 1700 until 1943. In the summer of 1933, he was promoted to Senior Councillor (German:OberRegierungsrat). Hatching a plan which he formulated in the 1920s to professionalize the business of cryptology and make cryptanalysts a special career within the military, i.e. ensure they were high officials, he approached the military, but it wasn't until the summer of 1938, shortly after establishment of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces the Chiffrierstelle was renamed the Cipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW/Chi), that the plan was approved by the chief of the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht, Wilhelm Keitel. Now a Director of OKW/CHI (German:Ministerialrat) he could counteract the harmful poaching of staff, ensure suitable staff had a secure future, and place unsuitable people at the disposal of others.

The staff strength of the Chiffrierstelle (OKW/Chi) had increased in 1939 to include over 200 employees, after only two years earlier was only about 40 personnel. In the ensuing war years until 1944 it quadrupled to 800. The wartime for Fenner and his staff in the OKW/Chi was initially relatively peaceful and successful. The raw material, in the form of intercepted radio messages, gushed abundant and lay the material in more than sufficient quantities before, not infrequently, so that they focus several hundred messages a day on the most important projects and had to ignore relatively unimportant sources. There were able to get important decoding success (German:Entzifferungserfolge), for example, against France, in 1940, much to the quick victory of the German Armed Forces in the West contributed ("Case Red") during World War II. Also Polish, Russian and Yugoslav messages could be deciphered.

Towards the end of 1943, conditions now deteriorated rapidly for all staff of OKW/Chi, the working and living conditions in Berlin when the bombing increasingly approached the German capital. The work spaces were largely destroyed and many employees lost their homes by bombs. Of course you had to spend the night and now provisionally the daytime working outdoors unprotected, whereby the efficiency of OKW/Chi was degraded. Fenner describes that he sometimes could afford only a quarter of their usual workload barely a third. Towards the end of the war on July 20, 1944, Fenner had even to resist personal attacks when he was accused of the participation in the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler. In February 1945, the working conditions in Berlin had become so catastrophic that the OKW/Chi move to Saxon Halle an der Saale was postponed. Just two months later, in mid-April, it was no longer safe here and there began the general resolution.

While his section chief, Colonel Kettler, and the head of the main group A, Major Mettig, and also one of its best people, the head of the group IV, Dr Erich Hüttenhain, located toward the north, Fenner fled with a part of its employees to the south. On April 23, 1945 OKW/Chi was officially disbanded and the staff of the General of Nachrichtenaufklärung (gDNA) assumed. Just before the American army reached their position (about 40 km south of Salzburg), they burned their documents or threw them into the Salzach River. With the surrender of the Wehrmacht on 8 May 1945 went out of the service agreement for all former employees of the High Command. Fenner moved to Landshut and found in neighboring Straubing employment as a bicycle and car mechanic.

In July 1946, he was charged as a witness for the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal and in August transferred to the Haus Alaska, a cover name for HQ 7707 European Command Intelligence Center Camp King, the US Army's interrogation centre, Oberursel (near Frankfurt), and interned with other high-ranking German's. Fenner was intensively interrogated by the Army Security Agency (ASA) and has written a number of reports about his life and his work, including an autobiographical essay, whose translation in TICOM Archive: DF-187 The Career of William Fenner bearing the words TOP SECRET is filed. These documents were made publicly available only a few years ago.

Literature