Gustave Bertrand
| Gustave Bertrand | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | 1896 |
| Died | 1976 |
| Occupation | Military intelligence officer |
Gustave Bertrand (1896–1976) was a French military intelligence officer who made a vital contribution to the decryption, by Poland's Cipher Bureau, of German Enigma ciphers, beginning in December 1932. This achievement would in turn lead to Britain's celebrated World War II Ultra operation.
Bertrand joined the French military as a private in 1914 and was wounded in 1915 at the Dardanelles. From 1926, he worked in radio intelligence.
In the 1920s, French radio intelligence was decentralized. Decryption of foreign, chiefly German and Italian, ciphers and codes was the responsibility of a General Staff cryptology department, while radio monitoring was conducted by the intelligence service, Service de Renseignement or S.R. At the end of 1930, decryption was turned over to the S.R., which created a Section D (for Decryptement), of which Bertrand became chief. He later took over all of French radio intelligence.
Bertrand's intelligence associates had purchased documents pertaining to the Enigma machine from Hans-Thilo Schmidt (codenamed "Asché" by the French), an employee at the German Armed Forces' Cryptographic Agency. In December 1932, then-Captain (later, General) Bertrand turned these documents over to the Polish Cipher Bureau's chief, Major Gwido Langer. Asché's documents, according to cryptologist Marian Rejewski's testimony, proved in practice crucial to his mathematical solution of the military Enigma machine's wiring. During his work with the Poles, Bertrand used the code name Bolek, given him by the Poles.
Bertrand was to learn of the Poles' success against Enigma only six and a half years later, at a trilateral Polish-French-British conference held in the Kabaty Woods, south of Warsaw, on 25 July 1939, just five weeks before the outbreak of World War II. After Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939, then-Major Bertrand from October 1939 to November 1942 sponsored the continued work of prewar Cipher Bureau personnel: first at PC Bruno, outside Paris; then, after Germany's invasion of France (May–June 1940), at the Cadix center in southern France's Vichy "Free Zone."
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