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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 Swiss used a version of Enigma called Model K or Swiss K for military and diplomatic use, which was very similar to commercial Enigma D. The machine's code was cracked by Poland, France, the United Kingdom and the United States; the latter code-named it INDIGO. An Enigma T model, code-named Tirpitz, was used by Japan.
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.
Jeffreys's perforated sheets were used by Polish cryptologists in exile in France to make the first wartime decryption of an Enigma message on 17 January 1940. [ 8 ] In early 1940, a section called " Hut 6 " — named after the building in which it was initially housed — was created to work on solving German Army and Air Force Enigma messages.
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."
In due course, the British cryptographers – whose ranks included many chess masters and mathematics dons such as Gordon Welchman, Max Newman, and Alan Turing (the conceptual founder of modern computing) – made substantial breakthroughs in the scale and technology of Enigma decryption. German code breaking in World War II also had some ...
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 Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes. London & New York: Allen Lane & McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-7139-1294-4. Gordon Welchman, The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes (1997: Cleobury Mortimer, Baldwin) ISBN 978-0-947712-34-1; Irene Young, Enigma Variations: A Memoir of Love and War (1990, Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh) ISBN 1-85158-294-0