increased from a staff of 20–30 to a peak strength of nearly 200 dur-
ing the war years. It also outgrew its offices in the Wilhelmstrasse
and occupied a number of locales in the Berlin area.
Although the Foreign Ministry had established a cipher office in
the late 19th century, its functions consisted primarily of developing
secure diplomatic communications and precluded eavesdropping on
foreign governments. Pers Z, by contrast, purposely sought to break
the codes of other countries. The unit succeeded in accessing the dip-
lomatic traffic of 34 powers, including Great Britain, France, Japan,
Italy, Spain, the United States, and the Vatican. One major exception
was the Soviet Union after its adoption of one-time pads in 1927.
But Per Z’s solution of the Turkish cryptograms, accomplished under
the direction of Hermann Scherschmidt, provided detailed wartime
information from Turkey’s diplomatic mission in Moscow. Results
proved less impressive later in the war, especially after the United
States changed to a more secure strip-cipher system.
Working in relative isolation, the cryptanalysts rarely received
direction from senior Foreign Ministry officials and approached their
work as more of an intellectual challenge than a pressing intelligence
matter. Moreover, since no evaluation process existed, Pers Z sim-
ply transmitted the raw decrypts to the office of Foreign Minister
Joachim von Ribbentrop; only a handful ever reached Adolf Hitler.
The only significant cooperation with a related agency involved the
Forschungsamt, which designated one of its officers as a liaison.
Despite orders in 1945 to destroy all of Pers Z’s cryptological
material and organizational documents, 90 steel cases were captured
by British forces at Schloss Burgscheidungen (Saxony-Anhalt) and
flown to London. A trainload of crates were found by the Red Army
and never surfaced again.PERSPEKTIVAGENT. The equivalent of a “sleeper,” a Perspektiva-
gent (or Warteagent) is a spy who refrains from active espionage for
a long period, often a matter of years, in order to become well estab-
lished in the host country. The postwar division of Germany provided
highly propitious conditions for such agents, whom counterintel-
ligence officials found nearly impossible to detect. As the Ministe-
rium für Staatssicherheit stressed, a Perspektivagent was activated
only after a careful assessment of the individual’s situation.
PERSPECTIVAGENT • 345