Thelma Beron

Thelma Beron nee Ziman M.B.E. (8 May 1916 Witbank South Africa - 11 April 2009 Johannesburg, South Africa) was the daughter of Jacob (Janke) Nathan Ziman (1883-1941) and Anne Ziman nee Gluckman (1889- 1977) of Witbank. After she finished school, she studied for a science degree at Rhodes University College, Grahamstown. At the outbreak of World War Two she was in England and in 1940 she enlisted in the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRENS). Her initial posting was to a listening/ intercept station, which was eavesdropping on the verbal radio communications of the German navy. In 1941, Third Officer Ziman was one of several women invited to Bletchley Park to meet the members of Naval Section who were receiving the intercepts supplied by the listening stations. She was one of three women seconded for service at Bletchley Park in October 1941. She worked in Naval Section II (Z-watch). German Naval Communications were usually encrypted and transmitted in Morse code by wireless telegraphy, and could also be intercepted by the Allies. When the codebreakers at Bletchley Park had decrypted a message, the German text had to be translated into intelligible English, and that was the job of Naval Section II. Thelma worked alongside several distinguished male academics. The head of the section was Walter Ettinghausen (Eytan), an Oxford don who later became an Israeli diplomat. The work was conducted around the clock and Thelma became deputy head of her particular watch. The translations produced by Naval Section II were sent by teleprinter to the Admiralty in London, which was the end user of signals intelligence produced by Naval Section II. Thelma's initials appeared on many of these teleprinted messages. Much of this output concerned the activities of U-boats in the Atlantic. When the U-boat fleet surrendered at Lisahally in Northern Ireland in 1945, First Officer Ziman was dispatched to sift through any documents found in them looking for items of potential interest. When she departed for Lisahally, Thelma had not been informed that the Allies planned to operate some of these boats against the Japanese, and that those on the spot were expecting her to collate and translate the operating instructions. Thelma discovered that she knew more about U-boats than the men who were enlisting her assistance. Consequently, it wasn't long before she found herself conducting the interrogation of German submariners; the very submariners whose doings she had been following for several years. The German operating instructions proved difficult to render into comprehensible English since British and American submarines lacked the equivalent mechanisms. Thelma tackled this problem by finding out for herself how components of a U-boat operated. When her assignment was completed, the Royal Navy suggested she should sail with them to Scotland in one of the U boats. Therefore, on the first leg of her return journey to Bletchley Park, she sailed into the Firth of Clyde in a superior type 21 U-boat with which Admiral Doenitz had hoped to turn the tide in the Atlantic. Thelma ended the war in the Admiralty working on the captured archives of the German Navy to help establish an accurate tally of the number of U-boats sunk during the conflict. In 1946 she was awarded the MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) and she returned to South Africa in 1947. In 1949 she married Dr Abraham (Jock) Beron (1909-1976) who had served in the Union Defence Force during the war. They had two children. In 1959 her husband was appointed headmaster of King David Primary School Linksfield, Johannesburg.

Sources: Errata Witbank. Northern Highveld. October 2008 Jewish Life in the South African Country Communities Volume 1: The Northern Great Escarpment, The Lowveld, The Northern Highveld, The Bushveld. The South African Friends of Beth Hatefutsoth page 150 2002. Abraham Beron https://www.jwmww2.org/soldier.aspx?id=33830. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-personnel-at-bletchley-park-in-world-war-ii.