Page 417 - The Secret Museum

successful a double agent was he that Agent Zigzag, aka Little Fritz, was awarded the

Iron Cross by the Germans, the only British person so honoured.

However, he nearly gave the game away shortly after his arrival in England. At
9.45 on 27 December, he sent a telegram to Germany that read, ‘CALL AT 1000 IF
PARIS UNABLE RECEIVE ME. OK FRITZ. HU HA HU HO.’ He sat down in the kitchen to
have a cup of tea, and his heart sank: he had forgotten his crucial sign, ‘FFFFF’. He
was terrified that his bosses back in Germany would smell a rat and he would be
caught out.

He sent another message to cover up his mistake. We found the message in a book,
kept in a drawer of the archives. It reads: ‘FFFFF. SORRY DRUNK OVER XMAS.

FORGOT FFFFF IN LAST MESSAGE. FRITZ. HAPPY XMAS.’ Fortunately, that one did the
trick, and he carried on his double-agent work for Britain, helping the war effort in
his own way, alongside the codecrackers in Buckinghamshire.

We also found a lexicon from 1812, a sort of dictionary of code given by Lord
Castlereagh, who was foreign minister at the time. Gillian liked the book, as ‘it was
the beginning of Britain using code for secret correspondence.’

It wasn’t just coded German messages that were intercepted and deciphered – lots
of people worked on Japanese messages too. Codebreakers working on those had to
have a crash course in Japanese (on average, it takes two years to learn Japanese, but
the codebreakers did it in six months). We found some boxes that were full of

flashcards covered in Japanese characters which recruits to the park had used to
learn the language.

We opened some drawers and found maps, on tracing paper, showing Japanese
convoy routes, the coastline of Europe, and Hungary. Most of the maps were marked
‘ULTRA’. Gillian said it was ‘frustrating but exciting’ to be in charge of the whole
archive, because she often can’t find the things she’s looking for but frequently
discovers unexpected gems in the process. As we were talking, she opened a drawer
and said, ‘Hang on is this a map showing Bletchley Park’s communication lines?

That’s a bit of a find.’

We stuck our heads into a room filled with wartime memorabilia: toys, clothes,
uniforms, ration containers, grenades, gas masks, books – everything from the home
front. New things are sent to the museum all the time.

The most touching things I saw in the archives were photographs of winter scenes
at the park. In one photograph, young women skate on the lake, while another lady, all
wrapped up, plays the accordion. In another photograph, codebreakers are having
some time off and having a snowball fight. In the summer, the people working at
Bletchley Park played rounders and tennis.

Equally lovely are programmes from shows the codebreakers put on. Some were
great singers and actors, and they performed operas and plays. Some of the top
codebreakers are listed in the programmes. Barbara Abernathy, one of the original