A former officer, Schmidt had been forced to leave the army having suffered from gas during the
First World War. His brother,
Rudolf Schmidt, secured him a civilian post at the German Armed Forces'
cryptographic headquarters, the Cipher Office. Shortly after the military version of the
Enigma machine was introduced, he contacted
French intelligence and offered to supply information about the new machine. His offer was accepted by Captain
Gustave Bertrand of French Intelligence, and he received from the French the
codename Asché, and was assigned a contact, the French agent codenamed
Rex. For the next several years, until he left his position in Germany, he met with French agents at various European cities and supplied them copies of the Enigma machine's instruction manual, operating procedures, and lists of key settings. Even with this information, however, French Intelligence was unable to break messages
encrypted on the Enigma. Nor were the
British cryptologists whom Bertrand contacted able to make any headway. In December 1932, Bertrand shared intelligence obtained from Asché with the Polish
General Staff's Cipher Bureau (
Biuro Szyfrów). Mathematician-cryptologist
Marian Rejewski had already set up a system of
equations describing the operation of the then new German Army Enigma rotor-wirings. The
key-settings lists provided by Schmidt helped fill in enough of the unknowns in Rejewski's
formulae, allowing him to speedily solve the equations and recover the wirings. That accomplished, the Poles were henceforth able to read Enigma traffic for nearly seven years to the outbreak of
World War II as well as for a time into the War, while operating in conjunction with French intelligence
in France. In a two-week January 1938 trial, they solved and read about three-quarters of all
Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces) Enigma
intercepts: a remarkable result, considering that parts of the raw intercepts were garbled or incomplete due to interference [Kozaczuk,
Enigma 1984, p. 45]. After the
Battle of France, the French agent who had been Schmidt's case officer, a German citizen named Stallmann who went by the name "
Rodolphe Lemoine" (
fr) and used the codename "Rex," was arrested by the
Gestapo and betrayed Schmidt as a French spy. Schmidt was arrested on 1 April 1943, and in September 1943 his daughter Giselle was called on to identify his body; her account (as recounted in
Hugh Sebag-Montefiore's book) suggests that Schmidt had committed suicide. == See also ==