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Ludwig Stummel (5 August 1898 in Kevelaer – 30 November 1983 in Kronberg im Taunus) was a German career signals officer with the rank of Konteradmiral, who had a glass eye and a limp and who was in effect, the Chief of Staff of the Naval Warfare department, Naval Communications (4/Seekriegsleitung) of the Kriegsmarine. Stummel was most notable for being the person responsible for the cryptography security of the Enigma machine cipher machine and Key M infrastructure security, during World War II. Stummel was replaced at the Kriegsmarine Naval War Command on the 16–17 August 1944 by Fritz Krauss, after becoming ill. Stummel was a fervent Catholic Church. His faith gave him a moral compass during the latter years of the war. Initially a supporter of Nazism, he became doubtful as the war progressed. He was released from the Kriegsmarine in February 1945.
Stummel then spent eight months as a signals officer undergoing training at the intercept station in Neumünster, then spending a month on the pre-dreadnought battleship SMS Elsass, followed by a posting for year as an signals officer in Naval Command South, finishing on 24 Oct 24 Oct 1927. Stummel was then posted to the Torpedo and Mining Inspectorate in Kiel for 6 months. In April 1929 Stummel underwent further training at the Königlich Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg, and promoted in August 1929 to Kapitänleutnant, until March 1931 before being assigned as a radio officer to the battleship SMS Schleswig-Holstein. Stummel held that position until September 1933, when he ordered to a position as company leader at the Torpedo and Signals School in Flensburg, eventually becoming Director of the unit in September 1934 and later Staff Officer by September 1935. In October 1935, Stummel was promoted to Korvettenkapitän. From September 1935 to December 1939, Stummel was a 4th Admiral staff officer and promoted to Fregattenkapitän on 1 April 1939.
Stummels senior officer at the Naval Command was Erhard Maertens. In 1940. Stummel was commanded to Maertens to conduct an investigation into a number of unexplained losses of shipping. One of these was Patrol Boat 805, which was lost under obscure circumstances in Heligoland Bight. The second was then captained by Hans-Wilhelm von Dresky, which was sunk in February 1940 in shallow water in the Firth of Clyde. The third event occurred four days later, when the German tanker, the Altmark, a supply ship for the German cruiser Admiral Graf Spee, that was carrying British prisoners of war, was attacked in the neutral waters of the Norwegian fjord, and boarded by British sailors, who shouted, The navy's here, and subsequently freed the prisoners. These three events taken together were enough for Karl Dönitz, who ordered the investigation.
Stummel spent several weeks on the investigations, speaking principally to the cryptanalysts and cipher specialists, but did not conclude that a leak had occurred in any of those cases. However, as a precaution, the Indicator for weather messages was changed, fake messages were increased in number, and the indicator for officer-grade messages was changed to the indicator for general-grade messages. In his report, Stummel stated in the conclusions, that:
In early May 1943, Dönitz fired Erhard Maertens, for reasons that went beyond his fears about crypto-security and sent him to run the Kriegsmarine shipyard in Kiel. Stummel, who was Maertens chief of staff, was promoted to rear admiral, to take his place. Stummel maintained that the Enigma:
Dönitz apparently believed him, as in June he was telling the Japanese ambassador, Hiroshi Ōshima, who was himself one of the main sources of communication intelligence for the allies during the war, that the U-boat losses were due to a new Allied Direction finding system.
Despite the claims, and perhaps nagging doubt that the Enigma machine cipher was insecure, in 1944, Stummel convinced Dönitz to carry the Kriegsmarine basic cryptography principles to its logical conclusion. By subdividing the navies cryptography map into as many Enigma key nets as necessary, Stummel tried to ensure that the number of messages for a specific key was reduced, thereby increase security of own processes. As the volume of traffic increased from the interwar period, when it was one key net, to separate to separate key nets as the message volume increased, to the addition of a U-boat net and many others by 1943, when traffic average 2563 radio messages a day. By then, Stummel decided to give each U-boat its own key.
Individual keys were issued to some U-boat shortly after the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944. They began to be widely used by late 1944 and early 1945 and were carrying all the operational traffic of the Kriegsmarine High Command. In the early months of 1945 Dönitz told Hitler that Allied knowledge of wolfpacks came from radar and espionage. By that time Stummel had been removed from the navy High Command. However, his faith in individual keys was justified, as they were only broken for brief periods.
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