two decades, his voluminous reports, routinely dictated on a tape
recorder, focused on internal party matters as well as the activities of
the West German peace movement. Ranked in the highest category
of Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, Maerker (code name max) managed to
escape detection and was posthumously honored by the affixing of
his name to the Bonn SPD headquarters. The first positive identifica-
tion of Max occurred in 2000 during the Düsseldorf trial of a former
HVA officer. Additional details emerged from the Rosenholz data
four years later.MAGDEBURG. The vessel whose wreck precipitated Germany’s most
damaging intelligence loss during World War I, the Magdeburg, a
“four stacker” or small cruiser, was built for the imperial navy in
1912 and belonged to the Baltic fleet. Dispatched into action at the
beginning of the war, the ship performed several tasks successfully,
including the mining of Latvia’s naval port. On 26 August 1914, it
ran aground on the small island of Odensholm at the southern en-
trance to the Gulf of Finland. After a German torpedo boat proved
unable to dislodge the cruiser, the captain, Richard Habenicht,
ordered his crew to set demolition charges to prevent the enemy from
acquiring the undamaged vessel.
Before the abandonment of the cruiser was completed, the charges
began to detonate prematurely. In the confusion, one of the thick
blue-bound codebooks (Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine) was
tossed overboard; another copy and the cipher key were also lost in
the water. A nearby Russian ship, the torpedo boat Lejtenant Bura-
kov, sent a boat with armed men to the German cruiser. Following
Habenicht’s surrender, the Russians found a copy of the codebook in
the captain’s locker. The two other lost codebooks were later found
on the stony seabed by a Russian diving team. Recognizing the value
of their find, the Russians sent the undamaged codebook to their Brit-
ish ally and kept the two waterlogged copies.
Under the direction of Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the
Admiralty, the codebook was delivered to the secret codebreaking
agency then in its infancy. The initial difficulties faced by the British
cryptanalysts were soon overcome by the acquisition of another Ger-
man codebook (Handelsschiffsverkehrsbuch) from a merchant ship
off Melbourne, Australia. The expanded codebreaking staff moved
280 • MAGDEBURG