Differentiation of Signals (Part 2 of 2)

Heroes Remember

Differentiation of Signals (Part 2 of 2)

Transcript

The Germans had a, an air base at a place called Bad Zwischenahn. Very important to us. Bad Zwischenahn, which is just 10k outside of Oldenburg in North West Germany, Emden, so forth. And they had a flight of three or four what they called Condor air craft. They were a four-engined modern air craft who could fly at, which could fly, do not say who, which could fly, aren't you impressed with my English? Interviewer: It's fabulous. ... which could fly 35-40,000 feet, which was quite an enormous height, to a point where even if there was an early warning for our fighters, they could never catch them. They could never get up there in time, they were gone. They were there through everyday, what they call, what they called a Zenith Flight. Everyday, a Condor would take off from Bad Zwischenahn and go along the east coast of Britain all the way up to Iceland, then go back to Stavanger, and go back to Bad Zwischenahn. And they, they had, had four engines on them, and they'd throttle them out, at the end of the runway. They'd synchronize the engines, warm them up before they took off, and we were talking to the tower in the code and whenever we heard the Zenith, looked at his call sign: NDF today. So you had a, a reverse list. NDF is on page forty-two, we were using number seventeen today. There we were. And every unit which we had identified before, we could identify again. Wasn't that difficult. The Germans never caught on that we had that, we had, we had penetrated their system ‘til early in ‘45, they introduced a system which was called Frei Valf: Free, Free Selection. You could, they allowed people to, to, to change, to change frequency on the, on the radio which caused us a little trouble. But, we had listened to some of these units so long now that it was difficult for them to conceal who they were. You could tell 12SS, 1SS, 8SS, 10SS, 17SS, 2SS, and then 115 Panzer, Panzer Lehr, and all those infantry units. We could identify them easily enough.

Description

Mr. Pollak describes how they were able to differentiate the origin of one signal from another.

Fred Pollak

Mr. Pollak was born May 20, 1919, in Vrezno, Czechoslovakia, a small town in the German part of Bohemia. In September of 1938, his family was expelled from Vrezno and had to go inland to Prague. They arrived in Canada as refugees in August of 1939 and lived in Prescott, Ontario. Mr. Pollak eventually joined the Canadian Army, enlisting as a typist. At the end of the war, Mr. Pollak monitored radio transmissions for German traffic and was also employed as an interrogator of war criminals in Belsen.

Meta Data

Medium:: Video
Owner:: Veterans Affairs Canada
Duration:: 02:38
Person Interviewed:: Fred Pollak
War, Conflict or Mission:: Second World War
Location/Theatre:: France
Battle/Campaign:: Northwest Europe
Branch:: Army
Occupation:: Signals Intelligence

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Date modified:: 2019-06-20