1914, mid-summer, July 28 - this date is known as the beginning of the First World "Great Great War". Three main players, states were involved in hostilities: Germany - the conqueror on the one hand, Great Britain and Russia - on the opposing side. What was the turning point in the First Great World War and changed the further course of world history?
The powerful Russian imperial fleet under the command of Admiral Nikolai Ottovich von Essen confidently repulsed all attempts of the German Kriegsmarine flotillas to enter the Gulf of Finland and did not allow enemy troops to land on the coast. The Germans were operating at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland. Each time the Russian squadron went to sea to intercept, but the enemy eluded, avoiding a general battle on the water. During this war period, the Russian Baltic Fleet was based in Kronstadt, Revel (modern Tallinn) and Helsingfors (modern Finnish city of Helsinki), annexed by the Friedrichsgam peace treaty with the Kingdom of Sweden to Russia since 1908.
A mysterious historical incident happened in the Baltic Sea at the height of the hostilities of the First World War in 1914. Once again, having fired at Libau, the German warship began to leave. However, due to heavy fog on August 11, a German four-tube light cruiser named Magdeburg ran aground, hitting the reef of a small rocky island called Odensholm in the Gulf of Finland. The consequences of this seemingly insignificant episode against the background of large-scale military battles turned out to be very important and strongly influenced the further military situation of the deployment of events in the Black Sea, in the Baltic, and even affected the distant Falklands.
Upon learning of the incident with the German ship, Admiral Essen immediately sent serious forces of the Russian fleet to the place where the enemy ship was stranded: the 6th destroyer battalion, Russian cruisers Bogatyr, Pallada, Oleg and Russia. Russian Admiral Nikolai Ottovich von Essen sailed at the head of the Russian flotilla on the cruiser Rurik and personally directed the naval operation. On August 13, 1914, Russian sailors captured the German light cruiser Magdeburg, which had run aground off the island of Odensholm. It was then that on board the wrecked enemy ship, Russian sailors seized a valuable secret book with military codes.
Immediately after the crash of the battle cruiser, the closest German destroyer came to the rescue and tried with all its might to pull the stuck ship from the stone reefs, but to no avail. As soon as the Germans realized the hopelessness of the situation and the inevitable seizure of their warship by the Russian flotilla, they blew up a cartridge cellar to completely destroy and disable the battle cruiser. Although as a result of the explosion its bow (up to the foremast itself) was completely separated from the main body, the German cruiser tried to shoot back from the approaching Russian warship Bogatyr. It was this cruiser "Magdeburg" that opened the account of German losses in the First Great World War.
Russian destroyers approached the enemy cruiser on 8 cables, stuck on the Odensholm reefs, and launched a whaleboat with sailors armed with rifles. Lieutenant Mikhail Hamilton was the first to land on the half-submerged German ship. Only six German sailors and the captain of the Magdeburg remained on the wrecked ship.
Having examined the ship, Hamilton found on the remains of the deck a signal book of the sailors of the German fleet for encrypting enemy codes. With its help, it was possible to easily decipher the enemy text, which was transmitted using the naval alphabet, convenient for any ship communication in the naval theater of operations. In addition, Russian sailors found about three hundred different important and secret documents on the Magdeburg, among which the Baltic Sea grid map with marked classified squares of places for laying enemy mines stood out.
During the underwater work to prepare for the removal of the cruiser from the reef, examining the bottom of the ship, the divers found a drowned German officer. Even underwater, he clutched another copy of the secret signal book of German naval codes in his hands, indicating its extreme importance.
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The conduct of naval combat operations is impossible without a signal code. All military units constantly exchange encrypted information at a greater distance from each other - from the headquarters they receive instructions on the direction of movement, current combat missions and orders for action, and reports on the operational situation are transmitted back to the headquarters. In the fleet, such information is transmitted by a semaphore - by means of a flag telegraph during the day or by light signals from ship searchlights at night and in poor visibility.
In addition to the basic signal book of codes, to decrypt messages, a secret key of the day was also required, which was generated daily during naval battles. It was a special table of symbols for changing codes every day, starting at 12 noon in the entire German fleet. Therefore, the commanders of the Russian army, in particular, secret military intelligence units with a team of Russian encryptors, were faced with the question of how to obtain such a cipher key.
The leading cryptologist of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Oskar Federlein, was sent to hack and decrypt German radiograms with already changed enemy codes, and in a rather unusual way. To confuse the enemy's residency, a cipher specialist was kidnapped in St. Petersburg and secretly taken to the coast in the Gulf of Finland to Cape Spitgamn. A top-secret group of cryptographers was organized there, headed by Mikhail Popov from the communications service, so the old cipher Federlein began to pass through the documents. The secret department began to respectfully be called the "Black Cabinet". After a month of painstaking work, literally without sleep or rest, the "Black Cabinet" group hacked the most complicated German cipher key and the algorithm for its daily replacement.
Through 1918 inclusive, the Russian cipher clerks, thanks to the Federlein key, knew in advance about all the enemy's combat intentions. Thus, a blind accident stranded a fast German cruiser with critical documentation on board, and radically changed the development of the scenario of the First World War, making cryptography and cryptanalysis new tools in the theater of war.
