The True Story of Hans-Thilo Schmidt — the German Who Sold the Enigma Secrets

On a Sunday in November 1931, in a hotel in the Belgian town of Verviers, a German civil servant opened his briefcase and sold the French the secret manuals of the Enigma machine — for ten thousand Reichsmarks. His name was Hans-Thilo Schmidt. He worked in the German army's cipher office, a job his own brother, a future panzer general, had found for him. He was not a resistance hero. By most accounts he did it for the money. But the pages he sold, carried to Warsaw by French intelligence officer Gustave Bertrand, helped the Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski break Enigma at the end of 1932 — years before the war, and long before Bletchley Park. This is the true story of the man the French called Asché: eighteen secret meetings, a recruiter who was himself a Berliner in disguise, the woods at Pyry where Poland handed the secret to Britain and France, and the arrest that ended it all in 1943. CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold open: a hotel room in Verviers, 1931 2:00 Chapter 1: The Second Son 4:31 Chapter 2: The Cipher Office 7:31 Chapter 3: A Letter to Paris 11:22 Chapter 4: Nobody Could Read It 15:12 Chapter 5: The Spy Who Kept Coming Back 18:16 Chapter 6: The Woods at Pyry 21:18 Chapter 7: Rex Talks 24:30 Chapter 8: Ash SOURCES Hugh Sebag-Montefiore — Enigma: The Battle for the Code, chapter 1 "The Betrayal" (2000) Paul Paillole — Notre espion chez Hitler (1985), via AASSDN file "Enigma 1: Partie française", including Gustave Bertrand's signed statement (1976) and Rodolphe Lemoine's Abwehr statements (1943) Polish Foreign Intelligence Agency — Enigma decryption, official history Jean-Charles Foucrier, Sorbonne University — Enigma, the Polish codebreakers and the French secret services 1932–1945, Prace Historyczne (2019) French Ministry of the Armed Forces — Gustave Bertrand, Enigma and the defeat of the Nazis NSA Center for Cryptologic History — Solving the Enigma: History of the Cryptanalytic Bombe Gustave Bertrand — Enigma ou la plus grande énigme de la guerre 1939–1945 (1973) Władysław Kozaczuk — Enigma: How the German Machine Cipher Was Broken (1984), with Marian Rejewski's appendices F. W. Winterbotham — The Ultra Secret (1974) #WW2 #Enigma #Spy