This Enigma machine is one of thousands manufactured in Germany by Ertel-Werk manufacturers. The machine was invented in 1918 to protect communications in the banking industry. Because it was battery powered and therefore portable, it was taken up and developed by the German armed forces. This model was produced for use in Luftwaffe ground stations; its metal case - earlier machines had wooden cases - provided extra protection during field operations. Axis officials and forces used Enigma machines to protect their top-secret radio communications throughout World War II. These communications, transmitted in Morse code by wireless radio, were easy to intercept, but their encipherment using Enigma machines, made them incomprehensible to the Allies. This allowed the Luftwaffe to make sudden and devastating attacks and the Kriesgmarine to inflict massive losses on shipping.
How Enigma worked
Enigma represented a new form of encryption using machines rather than hand ciphers or codebooks. It was capable of generating 159 million million million combinations of cipher using an electro-mechanical cipher machine. Messages typed into the machine were scrambled first by movable mechanical rotors inscribed with letters, and then by a plug board of electrical circuits, generating enciphered text. Ciphering depended on the start position of the rotors, which could be removed, rotated and replaced in any order. The text the machine produced was unintelligible unless the receiver knew the rotor and plug board settings on the day the enciphered text was produced. As knowing the machine’s settings was the key to decoding the messages, the Germans reset their Enigma machines at midnight every night to maintain security. Each network used different settings, and slightly different machines. Every month, German Enigma machine operators were issued with a key sheet printed with the daily settings for their network. Soluble ink was used so that the settings could be erased with water if there was a risk of sheets being captured by the Allies.
Thanks to Polish intelligence, the British knew how the Enigma machine worked, but in order to break the code they needed to break the key - the settings that were changed by the Germans daily. The team of British and Polish mathematicians and cryptanalysts who worked to intercept and decode German communications was based at the British Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park and the project focused on the Enigma ciphers became known as the Ultra programme. As breakthroughs were made, additional staff were brought in to support the code breakers and systems were set up to organise this work force as they intercepted, decrypted and processed German communications. Through the course of the war thousands of people worked at Bletchley Park, two thirds of whom were women, some recruited via universities and many drafted in from the services such as the Women’s Royal Naval Service.
In order to discover the daily Enigma settings used by the Germans, British mathematicians Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman developed a device called the Bombe, improving on a Polish invention (the ‘bomba’). This electro-mechanical machine helped to deduce the day’s enigma settings by rapidly eliminating many incorrect variables until the right combination of settings was found. The prototype, named ‘Victory’, was installed at Bletchley Park in March 1940, and began deciphering Luftwaffe communications. Over the course of the war several hundred bombes were produced.
The impact of the Bletchley Park code breakers
By 1944 a new machine named Colossus had been installed at Bletchley Park. It was built by a Post Office engineer named Tommy Flowers in order to decipher communications between Hitler and German High Command which were encrypted using a cipher even more complex than Enigma. Colossus could process information very rapidly and was the world’s first digital electronic computer.
The Bombe and Colossus machines increased the speed at which messages could be decoded and intelligence reports passed to British commanders in the field. Ultra intelligence gave Britain a tactical advantage in the Battle of the Atlantic, for example, and provided information for the planning of the D-Day landings. Sir Harry Hinsley, official historian of British intelligence in World War II, is quoted: “Ultra shortened the war by not less than two years and probably by four years; moreover, in the absence of Ultra, it is uncertain how the war would have ended.”
However, as well as having a direct impact on the conduct of the war, the expertise the code breakers developed and the machines they built to solve the problem of rapidly deciphering messages led to the development of modern computers. Turing, Welchman and others who worked at Bletchley Park went on to continue research and development in computing and artificial intelligence in universities and other scientific institutions. The code breaking processes enabled by machines such as the Bombe and Colossus heralded the beginning of the information age and Bletchley Park is widely regarded as the birthplace of the modern computer.
It was employed extensively by Nazi Germany during World War II, in all branches of the German military. The Enigma machine was considered so secure that it was used to encipher the most top-secret messages. The Enigma has an electromechanical rotor mechanism that scrambles the 26 letters of the alphabet.
In the Enigma Machine lesson, students will learn the intricacies of cryptography used in World War II to convey secret messages to soldiers in the field. Students will start by looking at a simple shift cipher and will create their own cipher wheel to send and receive encoded messages.
The Enigma machine was a field unit used in World War II by German field agents to encrypt and decrypt messages and communications. Similar to the Feistel function of the 1970s, the Enigma machine was one of the first mechanized methods of encrypting text using an iterative cipher.
Until the release of the Oscar-nominated film The Imitation Game in 2014, the name 'Alan Turing' was not very widely known. But Turing's work during the Second World War was crucial.
The Enigma used a combination of rotors, plugs and wiring to code messages and was said to have as many as 103 sextillion possible settings, which is one of the reasons the Germans thought their code was unbreakable, according to the Bletchley Park Museum.
To decrypt a message, one needs not only an Enigma machine, but also the knowledge of the starting state, i.e. at which positions the wheels were when the text was typed in. To decrypt the message, the machine must be set to the same starting state, and the cipher text is entered. Output is the plain text.
Enigma Code – this code refers to mystery within a text. Clues are dropped, but no clear answer are given. Enigmas within the narrative make the audience want to know more. Unanswered enigmas tend to frustrate the audience. Action Code – This code contains sequential elements of action in the text.
Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray, MBE (née Clarke; 24 June 1917 – 4 September 1996) was an English cryptanalyst and numismatist who worked as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War.
Enigma is a 1995 novel by Robert Harris about Tom Jericho, a young mathematician trying to break the Germans' "Enigma" ciphers during World War II. Jericho is stationed in Bletchley Park, the British cryptology central office, and is worked to the point of physical and mental exhaustion.
The Enigma machine was invented by a German engineer Arthur Scherbius shortly after WW1. The machine (of which a number of varying types were produced) resembled a typewriter. It had a lamp board above the keys with a lamp for each letter.
It was in 1974 that Weidenfeld & Nicolson published The Ultra Secret by Frederick Winterbotham. He had not been a codebreaker, but had headed up the RAF's Intelligence section since 1930, and was well aware of the significance of what the codebreakers had achieved.
How was Enigma cracked? In 1932–33 Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski deduced the wiring pattern inside the wheels of Enigma, assisted by Enigma operating manuals provided by the French secret service, to make a successful decryption machine.
The care with which Enigma-derived Intelligence was handled prevented its source from being discovered, and this, together with Germany's unjustified faith in the machine's power, meant that knowledge of Allied breaking of Enigma remained a secret not just throughout the war, but until 1974, when The Ultra Secret, a ...
Due to the problems of counterfactual history, it is hard to estimate the precise effect Ultra intelligence had on the war. However, official war historian Harry Hinsley estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over 14 million lives.
The only woman to work in the nerve centre of the quest to crack German Enigma ciphers, Clarke rose to deputy head of Hut 8, and would be its longest-serving member. She was also Turing's lifelong friend and confidante and, briefly, his fiancée.
While there, Turing built a device known as the Bombe. This machine was able to use logic to decipher the encrypted messages produced by the Enigma. However, it was human understanding that enabled the real breakthroughs. The Bletchley Park team made educated guesses at certain words the message would contain.
Although his impact on computer science was widely acknowledged, it wasn't until the 1990s that his role in cracking the Enigma code in the Second World War came to light. Born in London in 1912, Turing was a brilliant mathematician who studied at both Cambridge and Princeton universities.
Introduction: My name is Kerri Lueilwitz, I am a courageous, gentle, quaint, thankful, outstanding, brave, vast person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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