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Hans-Thilo Schmidt (“Asche”) – Research Notes

Basic Facts

Full name: Hans-Thilo Schmidt Codenames: Asche (German: “ash”; French spelling: Asché), also “Source D,” also known by cover designation HE Born: 13 May 1888 Died: 19 September 1943 (suicide in custody, or possible extrajudicial execution; circumstances disputed) Nationality: German

Background

Schmidt came from a Prussian military family. His older brother Rudolf Schmidt (1886–1957) would rise to the rank of Wehrmacht Generaloberst and command the 2nd Panzer Group and later the 2nd Panzer Army on the Eastern Front. Hans-Thilo, by contrast, had been unable to sustain a military career: he suffered gas injuries during World War I that forced his discharge, and after the war he struggled financially.

By the late 1920s, Schmidt was indebted and resentful. His brother Rudolf, trading on family connections and personal rank, had obtained for him a civilian administrative position at the German Armed Forces’ Chiffrierabteilung (Cryptographic Agency / Cipher Office) in Berlin. It was a sensitive position, handling Enigma operating documents and key tables. It was also one Schmidt appears to have viewed as an opportunity.

Recruitment and Espionage

Schmidt approached French intelligence through Rodolphe Lemoine (born Friedrich Rudolf Stallmann, 1871–1946), a German-born French intelligence operative who ran agents across Europe under the codename “Rex.” Lemoine was an experienced talent-spotter who cultivated Schmidt’s resentment and financial distress.

The first meeting: On Sunday, 1 November 1931, Schmidt arrived at the Grand Hotel in Verviers, Belgium – a small town on the German-Belgian border – for his initial contact with the French. On 8 November 1931, at the same hotel, Schmidt produced documents from his briefcase: Enigma operating manuals and key tables that made French intelligence officer Gustave Bertrand gasp with disbelief.

Over the following years, Schmidt met with Lemoine at various European cities – including Luxembourg, Brussels, Bern, and Czechoslovakia – and supplied a growing trove of materials:

  • Copies of the Enigma machine’s instruction manual
  • Operating procedures
  • Monthly key tables (including for September and October 1932)
  • Rotor wiring information

The financial arrangement was substantial: German sources suggest he was paid the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of francs over the course of the espionage relationship. Personal resentment toward the German officer class, and toward the brother whose success threw his own mediocrity into relief, appears to have played as large a role as money.

What His Documents Made Possible

Gustave Bertrand, who received Schmidt’s materials through Lemoine, first offered them to the British Government Code and Cypher School. Dilly Knox and his colleagues were unable to make use of them.

Bertrand then, in approximately December 1932, passed the documents to Polish Cipher Bureau chief Major Gwido Langer. Marian Rejewski – who had already formulated his system of permutation equations to model the Enigma – found that the Schmidt documents (specifically the September and October 1932 key tables) reduced the unknowns enough to solve for the rotor wirings.

Rejewski later wrote: “the intelligence material furnished to us should be regarded as having been decisive to solution of the machine.” He added that he could theoretically have broken the code without the French materials, “but it would have taken much longer and would instead have been based on chance.”

The combination was critical: Schmidt’s documents provided the data; Rejewski’s mathematics provided the method. Without either, the break would not have occurred when it did.

Arrest and Death

After the fall of France in 1940, the chain of betrayal began:

  1. Rodolphe Lemoine was arrested by the Gestapo, possibly on or around 27 February 1943, after attempting to sell an Italian cipher to the Germans. Under interrogation in Berlin, he betrayed Schmidt as a French intelligence source.

  2. Schmidt was arrested on 1 April 1943.

  3. In September 1943, Schmidt’s daughter Giselle was called to identify his body. Her account indicates Schmidt died in custody on 19 September 1943. The cause is recorded ambiguously: most sources describe it as suicide; some leave open the possibility of extrajudicial execution. No formal trial record exists.

  4. Lemoine himself died in German captivity in 1946, shortly after being arrested by French troops following the Nazi capitulation.

His Brother’s Fate

Rudolf Schmidt was stripped of his command and removed from the Wehrmacht’s active list in 1943. The circumstances were not publicly connected at the time to his brother’s espionage, and the exact relationship between Hans-Thilo’s arrest and Rudolf’s disgrace remains a matter of debate among historians. Rudolf survived the war and died in 1957.

Historical Significance

Schmidt is one of the most consequential spies of the twentieth century – though the full import of his actions was not understood until decades after his death.

The documents he sold to French intelligence were the essential key that Rejewski needed to reconstruct the Enigma machine’s internal wiring. That reconstruction enabled the Polish Cipher Bureau to read German military Enigma traffic from 1933 onward. The Poles passed their methods to the British and French at Pyry in July 1939. The British built the Bombe programme on the Polish foundation. Ultra intelligence shaped the outcome of the war.

Schmidt acted from resentment and greed, not ideology. He had no idea what his documents would make possible. The greatest intelligence coup of World War II was, in part, the accidental by-product of a disgruntled German bureaucrat selling secrets for cash to settle his debts.

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