![]() In a classic Caesar cipher, which grade school students might use to pass secret notes to one another, thereby frustrating their teachers, each letter of the intended message is substituted for another. There were several versions of this commercial Enigma, but they all shared one critical idea. The military version of the Enigma machine. This illuminated letter would then be written down and finally transmitted by a radio operator. Instead it was invented in 1918 by Arthur Scherbius, a German engineer who planned to sell his new devices to the private sector as well as to governments.Įnigma looked like an electric typewriter with the additional feature that when a key was pressed a letter would light up (see below) indicating the newly encrypted letter. Enigma would play a vital role in this new way to conduct “lightning war.” Interestingly, Enigma was not developed by the fearsome Wehrmacht of the 1930s. Hitler’s blitzkrieg tactics demanded rapid and secret communications between German commanders and their forces. Watch Codebreaker: Alan Turing - Persecution Of A Genius on MagellanTV.ĭevelopment of Scherbius’s Enigma Machine It’s actually a good place to begin to untangle a truer story of how Alan Turing and his team eventually achieved their well-publicized successes. He has remained hidden from view, perhaps because he knew too much of a far messier backstory about Enigma than had been represented in popular history.Īnd all the principals of this shadowy story, Turing included, were subservient to the strange logic of state secrecy that forced everyone to conceal their work and accomplishments long after the war was over and their enemies defeated.Įven the Enigma machine itself is something of a hidden figure, and its origins are far more benign than one might first suspect. In France, a savvy espionage chief formed a crucial link between the Poles and the British. But the accepted story of who cracked the Enigma code gained prominence because Eastern European mathematicians didn’t fit a mythical image of Oxbridge-educated linguists defeating the Nazis. Their amazing cleverness allowed them to decrypt Enigma-encoded messages years before the British at Bletchley. ![]() The Poles were hidden figures much like the women in the popular movie of the same name. The less well-known version of events involves Polish mathematicians and a French spy master. More recently, Sir Dermot Turing, Alan’s nephew, wrote a book to correct the record and reveal a cast of cryptologists, spies, and others who have more claim to breaking Enigma than the lone-genius Turing. After intelligence services, in the 1990s, finally declassified many of the documents related to Bletchley, a fuller story has been long known and reported on. The truth is far more complex and involves a cast of “hidden figures” who never received full recognition for their amazing contributions.Įven a cursory examination of the history surrounding the British code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park hints at evidence that contradicts – or at least complements – the popular version of how the German Enigma code was broken. The popular version, as portrayed in The Imitation Game, is that British mathematicians, chess players, and puzzle masters at Bletchley Park in England, led by the brilliant Alan Turing, worked out a method to decrypt the German military’s message traffic. ![]() ![]() ![]() Since some of the documents are, to this day, yet to be declassified, the complete story of how the German’s Enigma code was broken during World War II may never be completely known. ![]()
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