Gustave Bertrand

Into intelligence

He was born in 1896 in Nice. He enlisted in 1914 and in 1915 was wounded in the Dardanelles. In 1924 he was posted to signals, and in 1930 to Section D of French military intelligence, which he later headed and where he followed the German Enigma.^1,2

Hans-Thilo Schmidt and the Poles

In 1931, through Rodolphe Lemoine, known as ‘Rex’, he recruited as a source Hans-Thilo Schmidt, an official of the Reichswehr cipher service. In December 1932, on orders, he passed the documents obtained from Schmidt to Polish intelligence.¹

That same month Marian Rejewski broke the cipher of the military Enigma in Warsaw.³

According to the DRM, he learned of the Polish success only on 25 July 1939. At the meeting in the Kabaty Forest outside Warsaw he led the French delegation.^1,2

Bruno and Cadix

After Poland’s defeat in September 1939 the Polish cryptologists ended up in France, at the ‘P.C. Bruno’ centre run by Bertrand at the Château de Vignolles (Seine-et-Marne). Among those who worked there were Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski.^1,2,3

On 17 January 1940 the team broke a German cipher for the first time in wartime, and operational exploitation of messages began on 6 March 1940. On 10 June 1940 the centre was evacuated to Algeria, and in July 1940 the team resumed work at Uzès (Gard) as ‘P.C. Cadix’. In March 1941 Bertrand passed the results of the work to the British.¹

In March 1943 five Polish cryptologists were arrested in the Pyrenees. On 2 June 1944 Bertrand was evacuated to Britain in an RAF aircraft; he then joined the staff of General Koenig’s French Forces of the Interior (FFI).¹

Revealing the secret

His memoir, Enigma ou la plus grande énigme de la guerre 1939–1945, was published in Paris by Plon. In it Bertrand revealed, among other things, the name of Henri Braquenié, an officer who had worked with him on Enigma; according to the Foreign Intelligence Agency (AW), it was also Bertrand who revealed the role of Jerzy Różycki.^2,3,4

The catalogue of the French Ministry of the Armed Forces libraries gives his dates as 1896–1976.⁴