Hans-Peter Luzius

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Hans-Peter Luzius (19 February 1912 – after 1964) was a German actuarial mathematician and economist. He is best known for his wartime work in cryptanalysis, especially on the M-209 cipher machine, which helped break American codes. He served with the Wehrmacht’s signals intelligence unit OKH/In 7/VI based at Matthäikirchplatz in Berlin, near the Bendlerblock.

Luzius was born in Berlin, the son of merchant Jakob Peter Luzius. He finished high school in 1930 and studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin, with a semester in Göttingen in 1931. He travelled to the United Kingdom in 1933 and soon after to the United States, where he worked for a time as an actuary at Alliance Insurance and improved his English.

In April 1936 he qualified as a teacher in mathematics, physics and chemistry. In 1938 he earned a doctorate at the Humboldt University with a thesis on calculating the risk reserve fund in life insurance using moments; his supervisor was Paul Riebesell.

In 1941 he was drafted and transferred almost immediately to In 7/VI at the Army High Command. From February 3, 1941 he worked in Unit 7 on protecting their own procedures, first under Carl Boehm and later under Hans Pietsch. After the United States entered the war in December 1941, an American desk was established at OKH/In 7, and Luzius moved there.

One of his early successes was solving the American strip cipher, which was related to the M-94 cipher that used interchangeable stripes. There were methods using 25 and 30 strips.

In 1943, with Rudolf Kochendörffer, Willi Rinow and Friedrich Steinberg, he helped break the M-209 rotor cipher machine, which the Germans called AM-1 (American Machine No. 1).

In October 1944 the German Army signals unit was reorganized and became part of the General der Nachrichtenaufklärung (GdNA).

Near the end of the war, Luzius moved north to Flensburg, where he lived after the war. After the war he joined the German Actuarial Society and published several papers between 1956 and 1964.