The Amazing Stories of Cracking Hitler’s Unbreakable Code

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Despite its compact size, Germany’s Enigma machine was capable of complex encoding. When an operator pressed any of the 26 letter keys on the keyboard, a signal passed through a system of wheels and a plug board before lighting up a letter on a light board in its coded form. It was almost impossible to decipher a message encoded by the machine.

On July 25, 1939, six weeks before the German invasion of Poland and the out-break of world War II, three British Secret Service men met with their Polish counterparts in an underground room deep in the Molokov-Pyry forest outside Warsaw. There the Poles offered the British the Third Reich’s most precious secret: the phenomenally complicated Enigma machine that encoded and decoded all German military messages. It was gift that would change the course of the impending war.

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By the end of the following day the machine was in England, together with everything the Poles had discovered about its operation. The British immediately established a special center at Bletchley Park, a rambling country mansion, and gave the operation the code name Ultra.

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Soon it became apparent just how complex the Enigma machine really was.

A Fiendish Device

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Battery-powered to facilitate complete mobility on the battlefield, But when one key was pressed on the keyboard, a complex system of three parallel rotating wheels went into action.

Each wheel displayed a full alphabet. The accompanying plug board, similar to a telephone switchboard, ensured that a different letter would light up on a panel containing 26 bulbs – one for each letter of the alphabet. The devious way in which the different letters could be conjured up made Enigma fiendishly difficult for an outsider to crack, even if he had a machine.