Selmer S. Norland of Silver Spring Md., died Dec. 5, 2015, age 99. The cause was complications from a stroke, said a daughter, Janet Schwenke.
Selmer was a World War II Army officer who served with the original American contingent of cryptanalysts assigned to the Bletchley Park code-breaking center in England that broke encrypted messages from Nazi Enigma machines.
Mr. Norland was fluent in German and possessed of a good memory for the names of German military units and their locations, according to an oral history declassified more than 50 years after the fact by the National Security Agency. He was assigned to a unit that handled evaluation and translation of already-decrypted messages from the Enigma machines.
With these skills, he was able to make quick judgments on which intercepted messages were new or significant enough to require immediate attention of higher-ups in the military chain of command.
After the war, Mr. Norland settled in the Washington, D.C., area and was a cryptolinguist with the NSA, from which he retired in 1974.
Selmer Sevryn Norland was born on a farm near Garner, Iowa, on Jan. 8, 1916. His father was a Norwegian immigrant, and his mother was a daughter of Norwegian immigrants. Norwegian was the language spoken at home.
According to family lore, Mr. Norland told his teacher on his first day of school that she would have to learn Norwegian since he did not speak English. The school was a one-room building where the future cryptanalyst often had to stoke the fire on cold winter mornings.
He graduated in 1938 from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, where he minored in German, and he later taught high school German in St. Charles, Minn.
In 1942 he began his Army career, and a year later was among a group of Army officers selected for joint service with British intelligence. They sailed for England and posting at Bletchley Park under the code job description as “pigeon experts.”
After the war, Mr. Norland was invited to remain in Europe as a translator at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, but he elected to return to the United States, and soon thereafter joined what became the NSA.
In retirement he continued to work for the NSA as a reemployed annuitant, and he also prepared income tax returns for clients until shortly before his death.
He received the Distinguished Service Award from Luther College at Homecoming in 2013.
His wife of 64 years, the former Dorothy Martin, died in 2011. He was also preceded in death by his brother, Marvin Norland ’43. Survivors include two daughters, Janet Schwenke of Arnold, Md., and Deborah Dixon of Rochester, Minn.; seven grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.