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Enigma, device used by the German military to encode strategic messages before and during World War II. The Enigma code was first broken by the Poles in the early 1930s. In 1939 the Poles turned their information over to the British, who set up the code-breaking group Ultra, under mathematician Alan M. Turing.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Enigma was a cipher device used by Nazi Germany’s military command to encode strategic messages before and during World War II.
- The number of permutations of settings available to the encoders made the Enigma code difficult to break. The operator set the machine’s rotating w...
- The Enigma machine produced encoded messages. Electrical signals from a typewriter-like keyboard were routed through a series of rotating wheels as...
- In 1932–33 Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski deduced the wiring pattern inside the wheels of Enigma, assisted by Enigma operating manuals provid...
- The Enigma code was broken through the collaboration of the French secret service, the Polish Cipher Bureau, and the British government cryptologic...
- Overview
- Enigma
Ultra, Allied intelligence project that tapped the very highest level of encrypted communications of the German armed forces, as well as those of the Italian and Japanese armed forces, and thus contributed to the Allied victory in World War II. At Bletchley Park, a British government establishment located north of London, a small group of code breakers developed techniques for decrypting intercepted messages that had been coded by German operators using electrical cipher machines, the most important of which were the Enigma and, later in the war, the sophisticated Tunny machine. The flood of high-grade military intelligence produced by Bletchley Park was code-named Ultra (from “Top Secret Ultra”). According to some experts, Ultra may have hastened Germany’s defeat by as much as two years.
Every day the German military transmitted thousands of coded messages, ranging from orders signed by Adolf Hitler and detailed situation reports prepared by generals at the front line down through weather reports and supply ship inventories. Much of this information ended up in Allied hands, often within hours of being transmitted. The actual texts of the deciphered messages—the “raw decrypts”—rarely left Bletchley Park. Instead, analysts there sifted the decrypts and prepared intelligence reports that carefully concealed the true source of the information. (Nevertheless, the entire Ultra operation was endangered by John Cairncross, a member of the British Foreign Office assigned to Bletchley Park who smuggled Tunny and Enigma decrypts out to Soviet agents in 1943.)
The Enigma machine, which combined electrical and mechanical components, was descended from a number of designs that were submitted for patent as early as 1918 in Germany and were produced commercially beginning in the early 1920s. Looking rather like a typewriter, it was battery-powered and highly portable. In addition to a keyboard, the device had a lamp board consisting of 26 stenciled letters, each with a small lightbulb behind it. As a cipher clerk typed a message on the keyboard in plain German, letters were illuminated one by one on the lamp board. An assistant recorded the letters by hand to form the enciphered message, which was then transmitted in Morse Code.
Each bulb in the lamp board was electrically connected to a letter on the keyboard, but the wiring passed via a number of rotating wheels, with the result that the connections were always changing as the wheels moved. Thus, typing the same letter at the keyboard, such as AAAA..., would produce a stream of changing letters at the lamp board, such as WMEV…. It was this ever-changing pattern of connections that made Enigma extremely hard to break.
The earliest success against the German military Enigma was by the Polish Cipher Bureau. In the winter of 1932–33, Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski deduced the pattern of wiring inside the three rotating wheels of the Enigma machine. (Rejewski was helped by photographs, received from the French secret service, showing pages of an Enigma operating manual for September and October 1932.) Before an Enigma operator began enciphering a message, he set Enigma’s three wheels (four in models used by the German navy) to various starting positions that were also known to the intended recipient. In a major breakthrough, Rejewski invented a method for finding out, from each intercepted German transmission, the positions in which the wheels had started at the beginning of the message. In consequence, Poland was able to read encrypted German messages from 1933 to 1939. In the summer of 1939 Poland turned over everything—including information about Rejewski’s bomba, a machine he devised in 1938 for breaking Enigma messages—to Britain and France. In May 1940, however, a radical change to the Enigma system eliminated the loophole that Rejewski had exploited to discover the starting positions of the wheels.
New methods developed at Bletchley Park during 1940 enabled code breakers there to continue to decipher German air force and army communications. However, German naval messages—including the all-important traffic to and from U-boats in the North Atlantic—remained cloaked. (The Poles too had had little success against naval Enigma.) U-boats were sinking such a large number of merchant ships taking food, munitions, and oil to Britain from North America that by 1941 some analysts were predicting that the sinkings would tip Britain into starvation within a few months. In June 1941 British mathematician Alan M. Turing and his group at Bletchley finally succeeded in breaking into the daily communications of the U-boats. Decoded messages revealed the positions of the submarines, enabling ships to avoid contact. Great care was always exercised to conceal the fact that Bletchley had deciphered these messages. For instance, British intelligence leaked false information hinting at revolutionary new developments in long-range radar.
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The Enigma Machine uses a system of rotating wheels (rotors) and electrical wiring to encrypt messages by polyalphabetic substitution. The basic Enigma machine includes 1 wiring board, 3 rotors and 1 reflector, each element configurable independently (machine settings changing daily).
- Poly-Alphabetic Cipher
- dCode can code/decoder 3 enigma machines (Wehrmacht/Luftwaffe with 3 rotors and Kriegsmarine with 3 or 4 rotors). Each model has its own rotos and...
- The ciphered message has only letters, and no letter in the same position as the initial message.
- On some rotor wheel, the alphabet is fixed, in this case rotor and wheel are the same thing, but sometimes the wheel is not fixed and can be shifte...
- In the early 1920s
Enigma and the Bombe. The main focus of Turing’s work at Bletchley was in cracking the ‘Enigma’ code. The Enigma was a type of enciphering machine used by the German armed forces to send messages securely.
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Enigma decoder: Decrypt and translate enigma online. The Enigma cipher machine is well known for the vital role it played during WWII. Alan Turing and his attempts to crack the Enigma machine code changed history. Nevertheless, many messages could not be decrypted until today. ADFGVX.
