I am the one who broke the Enigma

You may say it was an accident, luck or miracle. Undoubtedly, it was a new version of David’s rivalry with Goliath; a competition between man and machine and a powerful history affecting individual lives. Last year marked the 90th anniversary of breaking the Enigma code and it is worth commemorating the man who did it first.

Polish cryptologists found that Germany used Enigma in the late 1920s, almost a decade before the outbreak of the Second World War. Their intuition was to look for unconventional tools because traditional ways of working were simply unsuccessful. Easy to say, hard to do. However, not this time. After special training devoted to students of mathematics, they chose three outstanding individuals who showed that the impossible is nothing. They were Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki. “The beginning of work was difficult – we had no starting point. The encryption was done by a machine and the frequency of the letters was random. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Germans fully believed that the new code was fully reliable and secure,” said Rejewski in interview many years later.

In November 1932, Rejewski’s supervisor wanted to talk to him. During the conversation, the question he asked was “does Marian have free time in the afternoon, could he come to work?” Such a question in a place like Cypher Bureau must have meant something special. Rejewski was not supposed to mention it to anyone, not even to his fellow cryptologists. He worked alone, in isolation, and it was then that his adventure with Enigma began. Executing exactly the same method of breaking the Enigma as before, this time he had new – and key – information at his disposal, which was provided by French partners. As one can guess, the command wanted results... and quickly. 

How did Rejewski do it? It took two steps to decode the Enigma. Firstly, it was necessary to reconstruct the machine itself, and secondly, to develop methods that would allow the daily keys to be quickly restored, because they allowed the encrypted message to be read. A Herculean challenge, considering that the whole “adventure” with the machine began relatively recently. Rejewski possessed two tools necessary for the job: mathematical knowledge acquired during his studies and his imagination.

PASSING THE BATON

In fact, a few short weeks before Adolf Hitler’s armies crossed the border into Poland in 1939, the Enigma secrets – the structure of the machine, and the devices being used to uncover the daily settings – had been generously gifted to Bertrand, and to Alastair Denniston, the head of the UK’s Government Code & Cypher School. The gift was the fruits of Rejewski’s research. It was what the Western Allies needed to begin their own work against Enigma, and to build up to the eventual success of Bletchley Park.

Marian Rejewski had to wait many years to share his knowledge with the public. During the Second World War, he moved with his colleagues from Poland to France. He was then sent to prison in Spain before arriving in the UK in August 1943. But even though he came to this country, he never visited or knew about Bletchley Park. After the war, he returned to Poland to his hometown Bydgoszcz and started a new life. Alas, it was impossible to work as a cryptologist in the communist-ruled country. In 1973, when Gustave Bertrand released his memoirs, the Polish newspapers started looking for codebreakers. It was only then – many decades after the war – that Marian Rejewski, responding to an appeal in a local newspaper, could state: “I am the one who broke the Enigma. If you are interested in how I did it, please come along and I will explain all the details.”

In Britain, there might still be some surprise that it was Marian Rejewski, rather than Alan Turing, that broke the Enigma. But Alan Turing would have been the first to acknowledge that it was Rejewski’s breakthrough – reverse-engineering the German Armed Forces version of the machine, and then devising the first techniques for recovering the machine settings – that gave him, and his fellow codebreakers at Bletchley Park, the leg-up they needed to begin reading Enigma messages during the war.

SECRECY AND STORIES

By the time that Marian Rejewski began to explain the real story, Alan Turing was long dead. So were all the other British codebreakers who had been involved. Anyone who did know anything from their time at Bletchley Park was forbidden to speak by the onerous requirements of the UK’s Official Secrets Act.

Meanwhile, with everyone kept in the dark, rumours about how Enigma was broken grew more fantastic; few had any connection to the breakthrough achieved by Rejewski in 1932. A muddled and incomplete version of what had taken place was passed on by word of mouth, exaggerated and embellished. An ‘official’ history that eventually emerged in Britain at the end of the 1970s perpetuated the distorted hand-me-down account, complete with a spy stealing an Enigma machine from a German factory. It was fun, but it was complete nonsense. Rejewski himself became aware of this account and wrote a polite rebuttal which was published in English shortly before his death. The editors of the official history were then good enough to issue a corrected version of the Enigma story.

Nowadays, the real story is much better known from its beginnings in Poland in 1932 and through the war years. In Britain, the codebrakng successes at Bletchley Park are rightly lauded and the site itself offers a range of fascinating and popular experiences for visitors, who can discover the Enigma story for themselves. While in Poland, it is worth visiting the Cypher Centre in Poznań.