Otto Buggisch

Otto Buggisch (28 June 1910 – 15 September 1991) was a German mathematician who, during World War II, was a cryptanalyst working in the cipher bureau, the Cipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW/Chi) responsible for deciphering of the opposing forces Communications. He also dealt with the security control of own key procedures. Through research and revelations exposed by two Polish officers, late in the war, he recognized the true cryptographic weaknesses of the Enigma rotor cipher, key machine used by the German armed forces to encrypt their secret communications, in World War II.

Life Toward the end of the war in July 1944, the Luftwaffe introduced the clock or Enigma-uhr to cryptographically strengthen the Enigma I. Buggisch graduated from the Ludwig-Georgs Gymnasium (LGG) in Darmstadt in 1928. He studied pure mathematics and physics and the subsidiary subject applied mathematics at the Technische Universität Darmstadt.

In 1938, Buggisch was promoted to Dr. rer. nat. with a mathematical dissertation titled On the Rarity of Equations with Affect (German: Über die Seltenheit der Gleichungen mit Affekt) which was supervised by Udo Wegner at the Technische Universität Darmstadt.

During the war, Buggisch held the military rank of a sergeant in group 7/VI at OKW/Chi.

Military career

1940 From May 1940 to July 40, Buggisch was posted to a Wireless Telegraphy (abbr. W/T) Listening Interpretation Station (colloquially Out-Station or Intercept station) of Army Group C in Bad Schwalbach, Bad Kreuznach, Saarbrücken. Buggisch was subordinated to Hauptmann Walter Mettig, a signals officer, who became second-in-command of OKW/Chi. Together with his colleague, the mathematician, Wolfgang Franz, they initially worked on French Army cipher systems before and during the Battle of France. These were the F90, F110 ciphers, known by their German designations and were based on 4-figure codes. In one case the recipher consisted of a periodic adder, or subtractor of length 11. In the other, it was ordinary transposition, the transposition key being obtained from a key word which itself was taken from the code and shown by an indicator group. Both systems were being read from the winter of 1939 to the end of the Battle of France in June 1940. Buggisch also worked on analysing the diagonal write-out transposition (Transposition cipher), C-36 cipher machine These were simple field codes. From 20 July 1940, he was posted and attached to an intercept station in Berlin at 29/30 Bendlerstrasse, where there were other specialist sections for interception of Russian and Balkan traffic. During this period, he undertook the completion of two works on the C-36 Cipher machine, while working with the team which included Erich Hüttenhain, the chief cryptanalyst of OKW/Chi and Fritz Menzer, the hand and machine cipher designer and inventor. Buggisch also studied the M40 device, designed by Fritz Menzer, finding it moderately secure but it was never actually used. The M40 device was the forerunner of the Cipher Machine 41 , but the motion of the wheels was found to be not so irregular.

In November 1941, Buggisch was transferred to In 7/VI in Berlin, working at the French specialist section, located at Matthekirchplatz 4. Posted there until August 1942, he worked on a variety of problems, including Hatted diplomatic 5-figure codes used by Charles de Gaulle Swiss Hagelin machine messages.

The unit included Dr Kunze of Pers Z S, working on French diagonal write-out transposition ciphers used by the de Gaulle delegation in Senegal. He has become acquainted with Jaeckle in 1943, when Jaeckle who was an ordinary Naval Signals Officer, had managed to get hold of a model of the M-209 cipher device and had worked out a solution while sitting idle in a French port. The solution was, in fact, childish and consisted of nothing more than a study of the theoretical working equation of the machine. Jaeckle had talked his way into the SKL and had talked a lot about getting a section of 200 men to work on the machine. Actually he had been exposed quickly and had been sent back to sea after three or four months.

TICOM publications Otto Buggisch is mentioned in the following TICOM documents: