It is the German Enigma cipher machine (German: Enigma, also translated as enigma machine, or enigma). The British successfully deciphered the working principle of the German cipher machine and created imitations. Being able to completely grasp the dynamics of the Germans
On November 8, 1931, French intelligence officers and the brother of the head of the German communications department (who ordered the German army to use the Enigma cipher machine), Hans-Ti Lo Schmidt, joint in Belgium. Schmidt, who worked in the German cryptography department, hated Germany, so he provided French intelligence agents with two pieces of information about the operation of the Enigma machine and the internal circuitry of the rotor. But France was still unable to decipher its code, because one of the design requirements of the Enigma machine was to maintain a high degree of confidentiality even after the machine was captured. At that time, the French army believed that because the Treaty of Versailles restricted the development of the German army, even if it could not decipher the German code, it would not suffer much if they met on the battlefield in the future, so it concluded that the German code was "impossible to decipher". I no longer study it carefully.
Unlike France, the newly independent Poland was in a dangerous situation during World War I. Germany in the west ceded a large area of ??territory to Poland under the Treaty of Versailles. The Germans held a grudge against it, while Poland in the east was resentful. The Soviet Union also coveted Polish territory. Therefore, Poland needs to always know the inside information of these two countries. This dangerous situation created a large number of excellent cryptographers in Poland. They easily monitored the German army's internal communication system, but the Enigma cipher machine used by the German army in 1926 caused them great difficulties.
In 1921, Poland and France signed a military cooperation agreement. At Poland's insistence, France handed over the information obtained from Schmidt to the Poles. In the "Indicator" section of the "Operation Steps" chapter of this article, we mentioned the serious shortcomings of the indicator step. It was this shortcoming that the Poles used as a breakthrough to decipher the commercial Enigma cipher machine.
But in 1941, the British Navy captured the German submarine U-110 on Captain Joe Baker-Cresswell's Bulldog warship before they actually obtained the cipher machine and code book used by the German Navy, and kept the matter secret only Tell U.S. President Roosevelt that Britain's King George VI hailed the event as the most important event in the entire naval battle of World War II. This allowed the German cipher machine to be deciphered, which even the mathematical genius Turing could not decipher. The "bomb" machine designed by the Allies specifically to decipher the Enigma cipher also greatly improved the work efficiency of Bletchley Park.
After the war, the British did not make a big deal about deciphering the Enigma because they wanted the British colonies to use this machine. In 1967, Poland published the first book about the Enigma decipherment, and in 1974, the British F.W. Winterbotham, who had worked at Bletchley Park, wrote "The Ultra Secret" (The Ultra Secret). The publication of a book made the hard work of Allied cryptographers during World War II widely known to the outside world.
On April 21, 2001, three outstanding Polish cryptographers, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozoki and The Rejewski, Rozowski and Zogarski Memorial Fund named after Henrik Zogarski was established in Warsaw, which installs plaques commemorating these Polish cryptographers in Warsaw and London. In July 2001, the Foundation placed a cornerstone at Bletchley Park, inscribed with Churchill’s famous quote: “Never in the history of mankind have so many owed so much to so few.
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