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Before Rejewski started work on the Enigma, the French had a spy, Hans-Thilo Schmidt, who worked at Germany's Cipher Office in Berlin and had access to some Enigma documents. Even with the help of those documents, the French did not make progress on breaking the Enigma. The French decided to share the material with their British and Polish allies.
The nations involved fielded a plethora of code and cipher systems, many of the latter using rotor machines. As a result, the theoretical and practical aspects of cryptanalysis, or codebreaking, were much advanced. Possibly the most important codebreaking event of the war was the successful decryption by the Allies of the German "Enigma" Cipher.
The Enigma machine was invented by German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I. [4] The German firm Scherbius & Ritter, co-founded by Scherbius, patented ideas for a cipher machine in 1918 and began marketing the finished product under the brand name Enigma in 1923, initially targeted at commercial markets. [5]
2002 plaque, Bletchley Park, "commemorat[ing] the work of Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski, mathematicians of the Polish intelligence service, in first breaking the Enigma code [sic: it was a cipher]. Their work greatly assisted the Bletchley Park code breakers and contributed to the Allied victory in World War II."
Since it was British and, later, American message-breaking which had been the most extensive, the importance of Enigma decrypts to the prosecution of the war remained unknown despite revelations by the Poles and the French of their early work on breaking the Enigma cipher. This work, which was carried out in the 1930s and continued into the ...
The B-Dienst, created in the early 1930s, had broken the most widely used British naval code by 1935. When war came in 1939, B-Dienst specialists had broken enough British naval codes that the Germans knew the positions of all British warships. They had further success in the early stages of the war as the British were slow to change their codes.
Kozaczuk, Władysław (1984), Kasparek, Christopher (ed.), Enigma: How the German Machine Cipher Was Broken, and How It Was Read by the Allies in World War Two, Frederick, Maryland: University Publications of America, ISBN 978-0-89093-547-7 A revised and augmented translation of W kręgu enigmy, Warsaw, Książka i Wiedza, 1979, supplemented ...
The Enigma-M4 key machine Key manual of the Kriegsmarine "Der Schlüssel M".. The Enigma-M4 (also called Schlüssel M, more precisely Schlüssel M Form M4) is a rotor key machine that was used for encrypted communication by the German Kriegsmarine during World War II from October 1941.