2026/05/20 by Florentijn van Kampen, George Lasry · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact #Central European national history #History and International Relations
paper · doi:10.1080/01611194.2026.2638191
openalex publication_date 2026/05/20 · openalex created_date 2026/05/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/14
In World War I, Germany employed a multitude of codes and codebooks for the communications of diplomats and attachés – naval and military – in remote embassies across European neutral countries, the Balkans, South and North America, and Asia. The Germans also introduced increasingly sophisticated superencipherment methods to enhance the security of their communication. However, these proved to be no match for the codebreakers of the Allied Powers, who could read nearly all enciphered traffic to and from those embassies throughout the war. The impact of such decryptions, like the Zimmermann Telegram in 1917, has been extensively studied. Still, until now, technical information on the codebooks used in embassies and their superencipherments has been sketchy and fragmentary. The recent discovery of files on Dutch codebreaking in WWI, coupled with an extensive survey and in-depth analysis of archival sources in the UK, Germany, France, and the US, enables us to paint a comprehensive and detailed picture of the various families of German codebooks used by embassies. This allows us to evaluate the achievements of the French, British, and US codebreaking services against those codes and underscore the previously unknown successes of the codebreakers of the Netherlands.