The Encrypted Notes of Murderer Petras Dominas

Abstract

Petras Dominas was a Lithuanian-born criminal active in Germany and the Netherlands during the 1960s. His violent series of robberies—including two murders—was documented extensively in contemporary media. Dominas left behind a corpus of encrypted writings consisting of roughly twenty volumes of ciphertext, created between 1952 and 1964. His manually constructed encryption system, comprising more than one thousand distinct symbols, employs homophones as well as glyphs representing entire words or syllables. Although visually reminiscent of shorthand, the cipher was designed not for speed but for secrecy, and its complexity posed substantial challenges to cryptanalists. After multiple failed attempts by various experts, the system was ultimately deciphered by Dieter Bäusch of the German Zentralstelle für das Chiffrierwesen (ZfCh). Based on exclusive materials provided by the German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichten-dienst, BND), this paper presents the first public examination of Dominas’s encrypted texts. The recovered German plaintext reveals not a diary, as sometimes claimed, but detailed accounts of Dominas’s criminal activities, notes on his legal representation, and a range of personal reflections and narrative fragments.