European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

It 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“.

When a cipher 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.

The only function was to distract, because this article was carrying the cipher;

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 then it was decoded.

It was not noticeable that we were communicating in cipher.

When the war began, another 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 radio operators in the occupied areas.

Eight of our female comrades volunteered.

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 retrained as a radio operator in the punishment battalion in Africa.