European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

as a radio operator, you were too far away from the front.

As a radio operator you are relatively far behind where the general staff sits.

And they sit 50 to 60 km behind the front.

Most of the time I was with the army, at the higher posts.

We were away from the front, so it did not work there, but the opportunity had to be taken.

I would have done so like many others if the option had occurred.

Using codes

In the summer of 1938, before the Nazis marched in,

we agreed that we not only want to keep in touch,

but we wanted to develop a secure code in which we were able to correspond politically.

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.