General Gustave Bertrand, before being the first head of the technical research service (STR) and deputy director of the SDECE when it was created in 1946, was responsible for the crypto-intelligence service of the Ministry of War. In this capacity, he played a major role in the work of deciphering the code of the German machine Enigma thanks to the technical documentation collected by the German source Hans Thilo Schmidt.
The fonds of General Bertrand's archives is made up of documents relating to his activities before and during World War II, and consists of a study, written in 1949 by Gustave Bertrand, and documents prior to 1943, grouped and organized in the in the order in which they are cited in this study.
The whole is completed by a dossier entitled "History of the STR". Physically, the Bertrand collection represents a linear meter of documents, obviously only a small part of the archives put together by Bertrand and his team, because a large part of them were destroyed by Bertrand himself. - even on the occasion of the dismantling of PC Bruno in June 1940 and especially after the invasion of the free zone and the arrival of the Germans at PC Cadiz near Uzès.
These are therefore the documents that Bertrand had selected and chose to keep despite the danger because he considered them essential in order to be able to continue working. He hid them before reaching Algiers and then London, it seems by walling them up with the two machines at his disposal, the "Polish" Enigma and the "real-false" Enigma he had brought up. Bertrand never disclosed the location of this cache, the archives and machines of which only emerged at the Liberation.
SHD – DE 2016 ZB 25/1. 1949. Fond Bertrand (Particularly volume II which serves as a summary). SHD – DE 2016 ZB 25/5. 1949. Fond Bertrand – files 230 to 279. SHD – DE 2016 ZB 25/6. 1949. Fond Bertrand – files 280 to 285.