14 Facts About Gisbert Hasenjaeger

Gisbert Hasenjaeger worked as an assistant to Heinrich Scholz at Section IVa of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht Chiffrierabteilung, and was responsible for the security of the Enigma machine.

Gisbert Hasenjaeger went to high school in Mulheim, where his father Edwin Renatus Hasenjaeger was a lawyer and local politician.

Gisbert Hasenjaeger was drafted for military service in World War II, and fought as an artillerist in the Russian campaign, where he was badly wounded in January 1942.

Gisbert Hasenjaeger attended a cryptography training course by Erich Huttenhain, and was put into the recently founded Section IVa "Security check of own Encoding Procedures" under Karl Stein, who assigned him the security check of the Enigma machine.

In Munster, Gisbert Hasenjaeger worked as an assistant to Scholz and later co-author, to write the textbook Fundamentals of Mathematical Logic in Springer's Grundlehren series, which he published in 1961 fully 6 years after Scholz's death.

In 1962, Dr Gisbert Hasenjaeger left Munster University to take a full professorship at Bonn University, where he became Director of the newly established Department of Logic and Basic Research.

Gisbert Hasenjaeger was put into a newly formed department, whose principal responsibility was the defensive testing and security control of their own methods and devices.

The Enigma machine that Gisbert Hasenjaeger examined was a variation that worked with 3 rotors and had no plugboard.

Gisbert Hasenjaeger was presented with a 100 character encrypted message for analysis and found a weakness which enabled the identification of the correct wiring rotors and the appropriate rotor positions, to decrypt the messages.

Gisbert Hasenjaeger crucially failed to identify the most important weakness of the Enigma machine: the lack of fixed points due to the reflector.

Gisbert Hasenjaeger could take some comfort from the fact that even Alan Turing missed this weakness.

Gisbert Hasenjaeger continued to refine his proof through to 1953 when he made a breakthrough.

In 1963, Gisbert Hasenjaeger built a Universal Turing machine out of old telephone relays.

Gisbert Hasenjaeger went on to build a small efficient Wang B-machine simulator.