USING CODES (LORENZ KNORR)

In the summer of 1938, before the Nazis marched in, we agreed that we not only want to keep in touch, but as well that we wanted to develop a cipher, a secure code in which we were able to correspond politically, not only in the general and personal way. That was a cipher which the Gestapo was not able to figure out until the end: A very shifty system, the so called „two-box-system“. Which is commonly known, but you could still see that it was a cipher. When something like that was found, you only needed to press out the sender and the addressee to find out more. That was why the code had to be masked again – that was my idea. We then arranged that we would use the Goebbel’s weekly article, that he used to write either in the ’Völkischer Beobachter’ or in the ’Reich’, as a disguise. We then underlined in red and in the accompanying letter we wrote this sentence of Goebbels is important, you need to discuss this sentence with others, and you need to consider this and so on. The only function was to distract, because this article was carrying the cipher; that is to say in the way that the encoded text was to be pricked from the back side with a needle at certain letters. The letters had to be filtered out by holding the paper into the light and only then it was decoded. It was not noticeable that we were communicating in cipher. And when the war began, another really important thing happened. With the attack on Poland the ‘Wehrmacht’ and the German air force were looking for ’Blitzmädchen’ (female military Helpers during World War II), which were able to help as switchboard operators or radio operators in the occupied areas. Eight of our female comrades, which did not belong to the hard core, volunteered. We thought this to be good. They had to be let in on our cipher, which only the hard core had known. We had to keep up the contact, and they had to, wherever they were, get in touch with the local partisans. After having been badly wounded, I was

more clips: Contemporary witnesses of the Nazi-Regime • 1939 • Widerstand • Knorr, Lorenz
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