On This Day In History: ENIGMA The Secret Code Used By Germans Was Finally Broken- On July 9, 1941

AncientPages.com - On July 9, 1941, the German army's secret code - Enigma -  to direct ground-to-air operations on the Eastern front was finally broken.

Polish mathematicians from the University of Poznan, from left: Henryk Zygalski, Jerzy Rózycki and Marian Rejewski, who broke the Enigma code. photo: PAP

At the end of December 1932, Polish student of mathematics Marian Rejewski read the first information sent via the German cipher machine "Enigma." Co-breaking code "Enigma" were his colleagues, also mathematicians Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski.

Enigma was the Germans' most sophisticated coding machine, necessary to transmit information secretly.

The Enigma machine was invented in 1919 by Hugo Koch, a Dutchman. The device looked like a typewriter and was initially used for business purposes. The German army adopted the machine for wartime use and considered its encoding system perfect –unbreakable.

Many believed it was impossible to break the German code. Poles have achieved success by using a mathematical method rather than linguistics.

The idea came from Lt. Col. Maksymilian Ciężki Cipher Bureau. Three mathematicians have designed a copy of the cipher machine, and several documents of this device (interconnected) were created in Warsaw, Poland.

A memorial to Marian Rejewski, the mathematician who first broke Enigma and educated the British and French about Polish methods of cryptanalysis. Image credit: Wojsyl  - CC BY-SA 3.0

During the summer of 1939, Polish military authorities transferred copies of your machine "Enigma" to France and the UK with information on the broken code.

In September 1939, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski were evacuated through Romania to France. One of the codebreakers, Jerzy Różycki, was killed in January 1942 on the ship, which sank in mysterious circumstances in the Mediterranean Sea.

The other two mathematicians were later occupied with the German codes, working in a unit of the Polish Army in Great Britain.

Work on the next version of the violations and improvements cipher "Enigma" was continued in the British cryptology facility at Bletchley Park.

In 2000 Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski were posthumously awarded the Great Cross of the Order of the Rebirth of Polish.

AncientPages.com 

Expand for references

References:

Nauka w Polsce

Polish Greatness

[/expand