Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
I found secret Nazi codes in my house
Luckily, my neighbour Marj, 95, helped crack Enigma at Bletchley Park during WW2
A COUPLE trying to decipher coded Nazi papers stashed under their floorboards during the Second World War have turned to their neighbour who worked for Bletchley Park.
John and Val Campbell were renovating their Guernsey home when they found the cache believed to have been hidden there by a German soldier billeted at the house while the Channel island was under occupation.
Alongside cigarette packets, matches, shampoo, throat sweets and brothel passes they discovered pieces of mousenibbled paper covered in code.
So they enlisted the help of neighbour Marj Dodsworth, 95, a wartime codebreaker who has now spoken out for the first time about her secretive work.
But she reckons she might need access to an Enigma-style machine to solve the Campbells’ mystery.
She said: “When I first saw it I thought there’s no way without a machine.”
Marj joined the Wrens in 1943 aged 18, and after just six weeks was offered a top-secret role. She was posted to RAF
Eastcote in Hillingdon, North West London, an outpost for Bletchley Park where the Enigma code was cracked.
She said: “Bletchley was so full they couldn’t take more people in. What we did was passed on to Bletchley by teleprinter. We did exactly the same work and used the same machines.”
On one occasion she met the legendary code-breaker Alan Turing.
The machines Marj used contained drums marked with every letter of the alphabet that rotated at varying speeds.
She said: “We had to plug in all the wires at the back to program it. It just went on and on and on and if the machine stopped it came up with letters.
“Then we went to a second machine, which was a cross between a typewriter and a bombe [Enigma-style codebreaking device].
“You plugged the letters in and it came up with certain things, which possibly meant a code had broken.”
She added: “The machines were big, noisy, oily, dirty and so large I could barely touch the top.”
After the war Marj, originally from Reading, Berks, became a legal secretary and wed husband Bert, who was in the
Royal Navy, and had four sons. But, having signed the Official Secrets Act, she only told Bert of her wartime role a few years before he died.
Even her parents had gone to their graves never knowing about it.
She said: “When we signed the Act, it was for life, but after 50 years we were notified that the Official Secrets Act was no longer enforced.”
She now lives near to the Campbells on Guernsey and was intrigued by their discovery of a Nazi code.
The find included an envelope addressed to Ernst Buchtela and several pieces of encoded paper.
Mr Campbell has now launched a wider appeal to crack the mystery.
He said: “Whoever could decipher it must be rather specialist. It may be someone not from Guernsey, or someone from Bletchley Park. But how you reach out to those people or if this message would even be worthy of the effort I don’t know, but I suppose that is the beauty and mystery of code.”