Did the Nazis know the British were breaking the Enigma codes? (2024)
I am often asked whether the Germans had any idea that the British were successfully breaking Enigma during the war.
Surely, they say, there were German spies in Britain who would have been able to pick up some clues, and to report their findings back to Germany? It often comes as a surprise to them when I tell them that, firstly, all the German spies in Britain were directly controlled by the British, and that, secondly, British achievements were not known of in Germany until the 1970s.
It seems that the Enigma machine – or, rather, its ciphers – were seen in Germany as unbreakable. After all, there were theoretically 3 x 10114 possible cipher patterns which the basic three-rotor machine could create, and testing all these possibilities one after the other is beyond modern computing power even now, and so was well beyond anyone’s wildest dreams during WW2.
With this exaggerated belief in the inviolability of the Enigma system, its users never stopped to think – or even to test – whether it could really withstand an organised attack using mathematics rather than the ‘brute force’ approach of attempting to test all those possibilities in succession. (See: War Hackers: Why Breaking Enigma is Still Relevant to Cybersecurity Today).
There were occasions when Allied successes in combat were such that questions were raised on the German side – investigations were set up to identify what had gone wrong, had valuable information been leaked?
Inevitably, when all the possible explanations were examined, unfounded faith in Enigma steered the investigators away from realising that Enigma might actually have succumbed to a sustained mathematical attack.
With hindsight, we can now identify occasions when more rigorous analysis might have revealed to the Germans that Enigma was, at least, breakable, even if not broken. Such a conclusion might have prompted tightening up or changing the way in which Enigma was used, or perhaps changing the wiring patterns of the rotors. The latter never happened, and such changes as were made to the operating procedures were never sweeping enough to shut out Bletchley for long.
Of course, great care had to be taken over Allied use of Intelligence derived from breaking Enigma. Over-hasty or injudicious use of such Intelligence could well have suggested to the Germans that Enigma-encrypted messages were being read. No-one on the Allied side, therefore, was permitted to base any action on a decrypt, unless there was also another way in which the relevant Intelligence might have been acquired.
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 book written by RAF Intelligence officer Frederick Winterbotham, revealed the truth.
Even so, there was a perilous moment when Schellenberg’s handbook for the planned invasion of Britain (produced in 1940) reported that MI6 had moved its Communication Section from Broadway to Bletchley Park, and that its duties included Wireless/Radio communications.
The implications of this accurate observation, correctly linking MI6, Bletchley, and wireless communications, were never followed up. The evidence lay upon the printed page – but was never spotted.
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 ...
German code breaking in World War II achieved some notable successes cracking British naval ciphers until well into the fourth year of the war, using the extensive German radio intelligence operations during World War II.
Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician. Born in London in 1912, he studied at both Cambridge and Princeton universities. He was already working part-time for the British Government's Code and Cypher School before the Second World War broke out.
The US and Britain had been closely collaborating on the various Enigma cipher system from February 1941 (note, that's ten months before the US joined the war), when a delegation of American cryptographers arrived at Bletchley Park and received a thorough briefing on Enigma codebreaking techniques, the "bombe" ...
General principles. The Enigma machines produced a polyalphabetic substitution cipher. During World War I, inventors in several countries realized that a purely random key sequence, containing no repetitive pattern, would, in principle, make a polyalphabetic substitution cipher unbreakable.
The Enigma code was eventually cracked by British Intelligence officers working at Bletchley Park near London, initially using methods developed by Polish mathematicians. The messages sent out each day used a different password, and discovering this password permitted the messages to be read.
Military intelligence gained from decrypting Enigma messages was known by the code name "Ultra." Winston Churchill told King George VI, "It was thanks to Ultra that we won the war." Dwight D. Eisenhower, then the western Supreme Allied Commander, said that Ultra was decisive to the Allied victory.
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.
After the war Turing worked on the design of the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) at the National Physical Laboratory, which many people see as the forerunner to the modern computer.
Turing and his colleagues were also able to break the more complicated Naval ENIGMA system, which from 1941-1943 helped the Allies avoid German U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic. Poland was actually the first to realize that the solution to breaking ENIGMA would most likely be discovered by a mathematician.
A major flaw with the Enigma code was that a letter could never be encoded as itself. In other words, an “M” would never be encoded as an “M.” This was a huge flaw in the Enigma code because it gave codebreakers a piece of information they could use to decrypt messages.
There were periods during the war when the British managed to break Enigma codes for weeks on end, safely directing their ships around German U-boat patrols. Still, up until after the end of the war, German commanders still believed that the Enigma was only breakable in theory, but not in practice.
These shortages could have been easily rectified, but the codebreakers' urgent requests were ignored by officials in Whitehall. Going over the heads of those in command at GC & CS, Turing and his co-signatories wrote directly to the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
As Prime Minister, Churchill certainly knew about Ultra, the intelligence gathered from decrypting intercepted Enigma and Lorenze messages. Churchill refused to save Coventry to hide the fact that the Enigma code was broken.
Did Stalin know that the UK had cracked the Enigma code? - Quora. Yes, Stalin knew. Stalin knew because there was at least one Soviet mole working at Bletchley Park, namely John Cairncross. Cairncross was one of the "Cambridge Five".
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.
In July 1939, with the German invasion of Poland imminent, the Poles invited French and British code breakers for a secret meeting near Warsaw. The Polish team disclosed their Enigma results and handed their allies-to-be copies of the Enigma machine. On 1 September the war broke out.
Introduction: My name is Nathanael Baumbach, I am a fantastic, nice, victorious, brave, healthy, cute, glorious person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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