Who can solve this encrypted diary from the First World War?

An encrypted diary from 1916 was presented on Twitter. Can a reader decipher it? It shouldn’t be particularly difficult.

Deutsche Version

Tobias Schrödel, who should be known to my readers as a comedy hacker, crypto postcard collector, crypto bibliographer and Stern TV expert, has brought an interesting encrypted text to my attention. This was circulated yesterday by Christoph Pallaske on Twitter. Mr. Pallaske is apparently a historian with a PhD from Cologne. He tweeted:

A student showed me his great-grandfather’s diary from WWI – written partly in #secretcode. Anyone have any idea what code it is?

The diary

Here’s an excerpt from said diary:

Quelle/Source: Twitter

Apparently the entries were written in February 1916. They are only partially encoded. For example, the information that the author was in church on Sundays is in plain text.

Encrypted diaries are not unusual. There are about 30 of them on my Encrypted Book List (I’ll include this one at position 00115). It’s also not unusual for the writer to have only parts of his entries encrypted. Apparently, many diary writers find it too much trouble to encrypt everything they put down on paper.

Solution approaches

The advantage of an encrypted diary from a codebreaker’s point of view is that the method used is usually quite simple. In most cases, it is a simple letter substitution. Apparently, most diary writers do not feel like using a complicated and thus time-consuming cipher method.

As with the encrypted postcard I presented the day before yesterday, you can try to guess words based on the letter patterns. Jürgen Hermes, a reader of this blog, did so and posted a corresponding comment on Twitter. Jürgen’s eye was caught by the two words wo+ and w+{ in the sixth row. Both start with the same letter and have another letter in common. Apparently, the two words are DIE and DER.

Presumably the c stands for the N and the – for the A.

This almost solves the encryption. Will a reader manage to decipher the rest as well?

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Further reading: Zwei verschlüsselte Tagebücher: Wer kann sie knacken?

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