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← Codebooks ← Enigma
Wetterkurzschlüssel
- this page is a stub
- wanted item
Wetterkurzschlüssel (Short Weather Cipher),
commonly abbreviated to WKS, was a
codebook that was used as part of the
cipher prodecure of the German
Enigma cipher machine.
It was used to compress a weather report – temperature, clouds,
wind direction, etc. – into a series of letters. Shortening messages
was common practice during
WWII, as it shortened the duration of a radio transmission
and, hence, reduced the risk of discovery by means of
radio direction finding (RDF).
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The WetterKurzschlüssel (WKS) was the second part (Teil 2) of the
Geheimer Wetter- und Seeschlüssel der Kriegsmarine (Secret Weather
and Sea Cipher of the German Navy). It was printed as a booklet in DIN A5 format,
and had a hard red cover, part of which is shown on the right.
Inside the booklet are 22 pages that describe how weather reports should
be compressed, using three types of observations: Obskurzschlüssel (for surface
measurements), Tempkurzschlüssel (for radiosonde measurements)
and Pilotenkurzschlüssel (for wind directions).
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Genuine copies of the WKS are extremely rare, as only a handful has survived.
The scanned copy of the WKS that is available for download below [A] was
rescued in 2017 from the (now defunct) website WWII Archives Foundation.
The contents have since been transcribed by Felix Shih [B].
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© Crypto Museum. Created: Tuesday 11 August 2020. Last changed: Friday, 18 February 2022 - 21:51 CET.
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