21 Panzer Division

Heroes Remember

21 Panzer Division

Transcript

Well, it was exciting. It was exciting, you know. Well, for example, when we invaded we were still in, in Europe, in England and Rommel was the Commander-in-Chief of the forces there, or the mobile force, I don't know. They had, their high command was so screwed up it was unbelievable on D-Day, but I'll come to that in a minute. His favourite division in that part of the world was 21 Panzer because he was with them in Egypt. So he used the reconnaissance unit of the 21st Panzer as a phantom unit. A phantom unit, we used the same thing, you had a, you had a, a eight-wheel scout car with a huge antenna on it and their job was, they're responsible for five kilometres or ten kilometres in front and they would just incinerate themselves and they report directly back to Rommel what's going on. It's a phantom unit. And we could read those fellows. Now listen to this. They, they, they used a three letter code. We couldn't always read three letter codes, but there was always one or two words in there which was enemy, Panzer, casualties, attack, defence, so forth. The German codes, I don't know why, but they obviously could, did not a ready made code for place names because they didn't know where they're gonna be fighting. You know, you see these codes are printed out in books and books and books and books. They didn't know where they gonna fight. So in the theatre of Normandy, there are at least half a dozen place names called Bretteville. Now, if you look at Bretteville: B-r-e-t-t-e-v-i-l-l-e. It's got a pattern. There was Bretteville-sur-Laize, Bretteville this and Bretteville that. And most, many place names ended up v-i-l-l-e, right? So they used a simple substitution code. You know what a simple substitution is? And it shows up a pattern. The double t and the double l tells you this is Bretteville, you know. So you already had six or seven letters. It didn't take, you, you be, you could always do Trun. No problem with Trun. There was another place name we could do easily enough because it was so short, Rotz, R-o-t-z. I like that because it means snugs, snot in German. So we could read quite a few of their messages. But when things got really tough and things got really tough every so often, they just had to break out in plain language. And I have this, the papers I have here, I have a bunch of copies of some of our reports and you can have those. They're printouts of what used to be top secret reports, but they tell you the sort of terminology we used and the procedures we used and what we did.

Description

Mr. Pollak describes the 21 Panzer Division and how useful their intelligence of the signalling patterns became in tracking the German’s movements.

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:: 03:26
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:: 2019-04-03