The Cipher Bureau, in
Polish
Polish may refer to:
* Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe
* Polish language
* Poles, people from Poland or of Polish descent
* Polish chicken
*Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin screenwr ...
: ''Biuro Szyfrów'' (), was the
interwar
In the history of the 20th century, the interwar period lasted from 11 November 1918 to 1 September 1939 (20 years, 9 months, 21 days), the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Second World War. The interwar period was relativel ...
Polish General Staff
Polish General Staff, formally known as the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces (Polish: ''Sztab Generalny Wojska Polskiego'') is the highest professional body within the Polish Armed Forces. Organizationally, it is an integral part of the Min ...
's
Second Department's unit charged with
SIGINT and both
cryptography
Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...
(the ''use'' of
cipher
In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is ''encipherment''. To encipher or encode i ...
s and
code
In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication ...
s) and
cryptanalysis
Cryptanalysis (from the Greek ''kryptós'', "hidden", and ''analýein'', "to analyze") refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic sec ...
(the ''study'' of ciphers and codes, for the purpose of "breaking" them).
The precursor of the agency that would become the Cipher Bureau was created in May 1919, during the
Polish-Soviet War (1919–21), and played a vital role in securing Poland's survival and victory in that war.
In mid-1931, the Cipher Bureau was formed by the merger of pre-existing agencies. In December 1932, the Bureau began breaking
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
's
Enigma cipher
In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is ''encipherment''. To encipher or encode i ...
s. Over the next seven years, Polish cryptologists overcame the growing structural and operating complexities of the
plugboard-equipped Enigma. The Bureau also broke
Soviet
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
cryptography.
Five weeks before the outbreak of
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, on 25 July 1939, in
Warsaw
Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is officia ...
, the Polish Cipher Bureau revealed its Enigma-decryption techniques and equipment to representatives of French and British
military intelligence
Military intelligence is a military discipline that uses information collection and analysis approaches to provide guidance and direction to assist commanders in their decisions. This aim is achieved by providing an assessment of data from a ...
, which had been unable to make any headway against Enigma. This Polish intelligence-and-technology transfer would give the
Allies
An alliance is a relationship among people, groups, or states that have joined together for mutual benefit or to achieve some common purpose, whether or not explicit agreement has been worked out among them. Members of an alliance are called ...
an unprecedented advantage (
Ultra
adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by breaking high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. '' ...
) in their ultimately victorious prosecution of
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
.
Background
On 8 May 1919 Lt.
Józef Serafin Stanslicki established a
Polish Army "Cipher Section" (''Sekcja Szyfrów''), precursor to the "Cipher Bureau" (''Biuro Szyfrów''). The Cipher Section reported to the
Polish General Staff
Polish General Staff, formally known as the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces (Polish: ''Sztab Generalny Wojska Polskiego'') is the highest professional body within the Polish Armed Forces. Organizationally, it is an integral part of the Min ...
and contributed substantially to Poland's defense by
Józef Piłsudski's forces during the
Polish-Soviet War of 1919–21, thereby helping preserve Poland's independence, recently regained in the wake of
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
. The ''Cipher'' Section's purview included both
cipher
In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is ''encipherment''. To encipher or encode i ...
s and
code
In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication ...
s.
In
Polish
Polish may refer to:
* Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe
* Polish language
* Poles, people from Poland or of Polish descent
* Polish chicken
*Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin screenwr ...
the term "cipher" ("''szyfr''") loosely refers to ''both'' these two principal categories of
cryptography
Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...
.
(Compare the opposite practice in
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
, which loosely refers to ''both''
code
In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication ...
s and
cipher
In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is ''encipherment''. To encipher or encode i ...
s as "codes".)
During the
Polish–Soviet War
The Polish–Soviet War (Polish–Bolshevik War, Polish–Soviet War, Polish–Russian War 1919–1921)
* russian: Советско-польская война (''Sovetsko-polskaya voyna'', Soviet-Polish War), Польский фронт (' ...
(1919–1921), approximately a hundred Russian ciphers were broken by a sizable cadre of Polish cryptologists who included army Lieutenant
Jan Kowalewski
Lt. Col. Jan Kowalewski (23 October 1892 – 31 October 1965) was a Polish cryptologist, intelligence officer, engineer, journalist, military commander, and creator and first head of the Polish Cipher Bureau. He recruited a large staff of crypto ...
and three world-famous professors of mathematics —
Stefan Mazurkiewicz
Stefan Mazurkiewicz (25 September 1888 – 19 June 1945) was a Polish mathematician who worked in mathematical analysis, topology, and probability. He was a student of Wacław Sierpiński and a member of the Polish Academy of Learning (''PAU''). ...
,
Wacław Sierpiński
Wacław Franciszek Sierpiński (; 14 March 1882 – 21 October 1969) was a Polish mathematician. He was known for contributions to set theory (research on the axiom of choice and the continuum hypothesis), number theory, theory of functions, and to ...
and
Stanisław Leśniewski. Russian army staffs were still following the same disastrously ill-disciplined signals-security procedures as had
Tsarist
Tsarist autocracy (russian: царское самодержавие, transcr. ''tsarskoye samoderzhaviye''), also called Tsarism, was a form of autocracy (later absolute monarchy) specific to the Grand Duchy of Moscow and its successor states ...
army staffs during
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
, to the decisive advantage of their German enemy.
As a result, during the Polish-Soviet War the Polish military were regularly kept informed by Russian signals stations about the movements of Russian armies and their intentions and operational orders.
The Soviet staffs, according to Polish Colonel Mieczysław Ścieżyński,
"had not the slightest hesitation about sending any and all messages of an operational nature by means of radiotelegraphy; there were periods during the war when, for purposes of operational communications and for purposes of command by higher staffs, no other means of communication whatever were used, messages being transmitted either entirely ("in clear," or plaintext
In cryptography, plaintext usually means unencrypted information pending input into cryptographic algorithms, usually encryption algorithms. This usually refers to data that is transmitted or stored unencrypted.
Overview
With the advent of comp ...
) or encrypted by means of such an incredibly uncomplicated system that for our trained specialists reading the messages was child's play. The same held for the chitchat of personnel at radiotelegraphic stations, where discipline was disastrously lax."
![The Saxon Palace, Warsaw 1](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/The_Saxon_Palace%2C_Warsaw_1.jpg)
In the crucial month of August 1920 alone, Polish cryptologists
decrypted 410 signals:
* from Soviet General
Mikhail Tukhachevsky
Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky ( rus, Михаил Николаевич Тухачевский, Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevskiy, p=tʊxɐˈtɕefskʲɪj; – 12 June 1937) nicknamed the Red Napoleon by foreign newspapers, was a Sovie ...
, commander of the northern front
* from
Leon Trotsky
Lev Davidovich Bronstein. ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky; uk, link= no, Лев Давидович Троцький; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trotskij'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky''. (), was a Russian ...
,
Soviet commissar of war
* from commanders of armies, for example:
** the commander of the ,
** the commander of the
1st Cavalry Army __NOTOC__
The 1st Cavalry Army (russian: Первая конная армия, Pervaya konnaya armiya) was a prominent Red Army military formation. It was also known as "Budyonny's Cavalry Army" or simply as ''Konarmia'' (Кона́рмия, "Horse ...
,
Semyon Budionny
Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonnyy ( rus, Семён Миха́йлович Будённый, Semyon Mikháylovich Budyonnyy, p=sʲɪˈmʲɵn mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪdʑ bʊˈdʲɵnːɨj, a=ru-Simeon Budyonniy.ogg; – 26 October 1973) was a Russian c ...
** the commander of the ,
Gai
Gai or GAI may refer to:
People
Given name or nickname
* GAI (musician) (born 1987), Chinese hip-hop musician
* Gai Assulin (born 1991), Israeli footballer
* Gai Brodtmann (born 1963), Australian politician
* Gai Eaton (1921–2010), Brit ...
* from the staffs of the XII, XV and XVI Armies
* from the staffs of:
** the
Mozyr Group (named after the
Belarus
Belarus,, , ; alternatively and formerly known as Byelorussia (from Russian ). officially the Republic of Belarus,; rus, Республика Беларусь, Respublika Belarus. is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by R ...
ian city)
** the
Zolochiv Zolochiv, ( ua, Золочів) may refer to the following places in Ukraine:
* Zolochiv, Lviv Oblast, city in Lviv Oblast
* Zolochiv, Kharkiv Oblast, urban-type settlement in Ukraine
{{set index, populated places in Ukraine ...
Group (after the
Ukrainian
Ukrainian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Ukraine
* Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe
* Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine
* So ...
town)
** the Yakir Group
fter General Iona Emmanuilovich Yakir">Iona_Emmanuilovich_Yakir.html" ;"title="fter General Iona Emmanuilovich Yakir">fter General Iona Emmanuilovich Yakir* from the 2, 4, 7, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 24, 27, 41, 44, 45, 53, 54, 58 and 60 Infantry Divisions
* from the 8 Cavalry Division
etc.
The intercepts were as a rule
decrypted the same day, or at latest the next day, and were immediately sent to the Polish
General Staff
A military staff or general staff (also referred to as army staff, navy staff, or air staff within the individual services) is a group of officers, enlisted and civilian staff who serve the commander of a division or other large military un ...
's Section II (Intelligence) and operational section. The more important signals were read in their entirety by the Chief of the General Staff, and even by the Commander in Chief, Marshal
Józef Piłsudski. Interception and reading of the signals provided Polish intelligence with entire Russian operational orders. The Poles were able to follow the whole operation of
Budionny's Cavalry Army in the second half of August 1920 with incredible precision, just by monitoring his radiotelegraphic correspondence with
Tukhachevsky
Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky ( rus, Михаил Николаевич Тухачевский, Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevskiy, p=tʊxɐˈtɕefskʲɪj; – 12 June 1937) nicknamed the Red Napoleon by foreign newspapers, was a Sovie ...
, including the famous and historic conflict between the two Russian commanders.
The intercepts even included an order from
Trotsky
Lev Davidovich Bronstein. ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky; uk, link= no, Лев Давидович Троцький; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trotskij'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky''. (), was a Russian M ...
to the revolutionary council of war of the Western Front, confirming Tukhachevsky's operational orders, thus giving them the authority of the supreme chief of the Soviet armed forces. An entire operational order from Tukhachevsky to Budionny was intercepted on 19 August and read on 20 August, stating the tasks of all of Tukhachevsky's armies, of which only the essence had previously been known.
Ścieżyński surmises that the Soviets must likewise have intercepted Polish operational signals; but he doubts that this would have availed them much, since Polish cryptography "stood abreast of modern cryptography" and since only a small number of Polish higher headquarters were equipped with
radio station
Radio broadcasting is transmission of audio (sound), sometimes with related metadata, by radio waves to radio receivers belonging to a public audience. In terrestrial radio broadcasting the radio waves are broadcast by a land-based radio ...
s, of which there was a great shortage; and finally, Polish headquarters were more cautious than the Russians and almost every Polish
division had the use of a
land line
A landline (land line, land-line, main line, home phone, fixed-line, and wireline) is a telephone connection that uses metal wires or optical fiber telephone line for transmission, as distinguished from a mobile cellular network, which uses ...
.
Polish cryptologists enjoyed generous support under the command of Col.
Tadeusz Schaetzel
Tadeusz Schaetzel de Merxhausen (1891–1971) was a Polish Army colonel, intelligence officer, Promethean leader, diplomat and politician.
Career
During World War I Schaetzel served in the Polish Legions and as deputy director of the Chief Comma ...
, chief of the
Polish General Staff's Section II (Intelligence). They worked at
Warsaw
Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is officia ...
's radio station ''WAR'', one of two Polish long-range radio transmitters at the time. The Polish cryptologists' work led, among many other things, to the discovery of a large gap on the
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, after ...
's left flank, which enabled Poland's Marshal
Józef Piłsudski to drive a war-winning wedge into that gap during the August 1920
Battle of Warsaw.
The discovery of the Cipher Bureau's archives, decades after the
Polish-Soviet War, has borne out Ścieżyński's assertion
Cipher Bureau
In mid-1931, at the Polish
General Staff
A military staff or general staff (also referred to as army staff, navy staff, or air staff within the individual services) is a group of officers, enlisted and civilian staff who serve the commander of a division or other large military un ...
, a Cipher Bureau was formed by merging the Radio-Intelligence Office (''Referat Radiowywiadu'') and the Polish-Cryptography Office (''Referat Szyfrów Własnych'').
[, note 6] The Bureau was charged with both
cryptography
Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...
— the generation, and supervision of the ''use'', of
cipher
In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is ''encipherment''. To encipher or encode i ...
s and
code
In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication ...
s — and
cryptology, the study of ciphers and codes, particularly for the purpose of "''breaking''" them.
Between 1932 and 1936, the Cipher Bureau took on additional responsibilities, including radio communications between
military-intelligence posts in Poland and abroad, as well as radio
counterintelligence — mobile
direction-finding and intercept stations for the locating and
traffic-analysis of
spy
Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information (intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tangib ...
and
fifth-column
A fifth column is any group of people who undermine a larger group or nation from within, usually in favor of an enemy group or another nation. According to Harris Mylonas and Scott Radnitz, "fifth columns" are “domestic actors who work to un ...
transmitters operating in Poland.
Stalking Enigma
![EnigmaMachineLabeled](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/EnigmaMachineLabeled.jpg)
In late 1927 or early 1928, there arrived at the Warsaw Customs Office from Germany a package that, according to the accompanying declaration, was supposed to contain radio equipment. The German firm's representative strenuously demanded that the package be returned to Germany even before going through customs, as it had been shipped with other equipment by mistake. His insistent demands alerted the customs officials, who notified the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau, which took a keen interest in new developments in radio technology. And since it happened to be a Saturday afternoon, the Bureau's experts had ample time to look into the matter. They carefully opened the box and found that it did not, in fact, contain radio equipment but a cipher machine. They examined the machine minutely, then put it back into the box.
The Bureau's leading Enigma cryptanalyst
Marian Rejewski
Marian Adam Rejewski (; 16 August 1905 – 13 February 1980) was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in late 1932 reconstructed the sight-unseen German military Enigma cipher machine, aided by limited documents obtained by French mili ...
commented that the cipher machine may be surmised to have been a ''commercial''-model Enigma since at that time the military model had not yet been devised. "Hence this trivial episode was of no practical importance, though it does fix the date at which the Cipher Bureau's interest in the Enigma machine began"manifested, initially, in the entirely legal acquisition of a single commercial-model Enigma.
On 15 July 1928, the first German machine-enciphered messages were broadcast by German military radio stations. Polish monitoring stations began intercepting them, and cryptologists in the Polish Cipher Bureau's German section were instructed to try to read them. The effort was fruitless, however, and was eventually abandoned. There remained very slight evidence of the effort, in the form of a few densely written-over sheets of paper and the commercial-model Enigma machine.
On 15 January 1929 Major
Gwido Langer
Lt. Col. Karol Gwido Langer (Žilina, Zsolna, Austria-Hungary, 2 September 1894 – 30 March 1948, Kinross, Scotland) was, from at least mid-1931, chief of the Polish General Staff's Biuro Szyfrów, Cipher Bureau, which from December 1932 decr ...
, after a tour of duty as chief of staff of the
1st Legion Infantry Division, became chief of the Radio-Intelligence Office, and subsequently of the Cipher Bureau.
The Bureau's deputy chief, and the chief of its German section (''BS-4''), was Captain
Maksymilian Ciężki
Maksymilian Ciężki (; Samter, Province of Posen (now Szamotuły, Poland), 24 November 1898 – 9 November 1951 in London, England) was the head of the Polish Cipher Bureau's German section (''BS–4'') in the 1930s, during which time— ...
.
In 1929, while the Cipher Bureau's predecessor agency was still headed by Major Franciszek Pokorny (a relative of the outstanding
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
Austro-Hungarian Army cryptologist, Captain
Herman Pokorny
Hermann Pokorny (Kroměříž, Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1882–1960, Budapest, Hungary) was a World War I Austro-Hungarian Army cryptologist whose work with Russian ciphers contributed substantially to Central Powers victories over Russia. He was ...
), Ciężki, Franciszek Pokorny, and a civilian Bureau associate,
Antoni Palluth
Antoni Palluth (11 May 1900, Pobiedziska, Province of Posen – 18 April 1944) was a founder of the AVA Radio Company. The company built communications equipment for the Polish military; the work included not only radios but also cryptographic ...
, taught a secret
cryptology course at
Poznań University
Poznań () is a city on the River Warta in west-central Poland, within the Greater Poland region. The city is an important cultural and business centre, and one of Poland's most populous regions with many regional customs such as Saint John ...
for selected mathematics students. Over ten years later, during
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
while in
France
France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...
, one of the students,
Marian Rejewski
Marian Adam Rejewski (; 16 August 1905 – 13 February 1980) was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in late 1932 reconstructed the sight-unseen German military Enigma cipher machine, aided by limited documents obtained by French mili ...
, would discover that the entire course had been taught from French General Marcel Givièrge's book, ''Cours de cryptographie'' (Course of Cryptography), published in 1925.
In September 1932, Maksymilian Ciężki hired three young graduates of the Poznań course to be Bureau staff members:
Marian Rejewski
Marian Adam Rejewski (; 16 August 1905 – 13 February 1980) was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in late 1932 reconstructed the sight-unseen German military Enigma cipher machine, aided by limited documents obtained by French mili ...
,
Jerzy Różycki and
Henryk Zygalski.
Successes and setbacks
In 1926, the German Navy adopted, as its top cryptographic device, a modified civilian
Enigma machine; in 1928 the German Army followed suit. The complexity of the system was much increased in 1930 by the introduction of a plugboard (''Steckerbrett''), albeit with only six connecting leads in use. In December 1932,
Marian Rejewski
Marian Adam Rejewski (; 16 August 1905 – 13 February 1980) was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in late 1932 reconstructed the sight-unseen German military Enigma cipher machine, aided by limited documents obtained by French mili ...
made what historian
David Kahn describes as one of the greatest advances in cryptologic history, by applying pure
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
the
theory of permutations and groupsto breaking the
German armed forces' Enigma machine ciphers.
Rejewski had worked out the precise interconnections of the Enigma rotors and reflector, after the Bureau had received, from French Military Intelligence Captain
Gustave Bertrand, two German documents and two pages of Enigma daily keys (for September and October of that year). These had been obtained by a French
military intelligence
Military intelligence is a military discipline that uses information collection and analysis approaches to provide guidance and direction to assist commanders in their decisions. This aim is achieved by providing an assessment of data from a ...
agent, a German codenamed ''Rex'', from an agent who worked at Germany's Cipher Office in Berlin,
Hans-Thilo Schmidt
Hans-Thilo Schmidt (13 May 1888 – 19 September 1943) codenamed Asché or Source D, was a spy who, during the 1930s, sold secrets about the Germans' Enigma machine to the French. The materials he provided facilitated Polish mathematician Maria ...
, whom the French codenamed ''Asché''.
![Cyclometer4](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Cyclometer4.png)
After Rejewski had worked out the military Enigma's logical structure, the Polish Cipher Bureau commissioned the
AVA Radio Company
The AVA Radio Company (Polish: ''Wytwórnia Radiotechniczna AVA'') was a Polish electronics firm founded in 1929 in Warsaw, Poland. AVA designed and built radio equipment for the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau, which was responsible for ...
, co-owned by
Antoni Palluth
Antoni Palluth (11 May 1900, Pobiedziska, Province of Posen – 18 April 1944) was a founder of the AVA Radio Company. The company built communications equipment for the Polish military; the work included not only radios but also cryptographic ...
, to build replicas (
"doubles") of the Enigma to Rejewski's specifications. His method of decrypting Enigma messages exploited two weaknesses of the German operating procedures. It used what Rejewski called "characteristics" that were independent of the plugboard connections. This involved compiling a
card catalog of certain features of the set of
indicator
Indicator may refer to:
Biology
* Environmental indicator of environmental health (pressures, conditions and responses)
* Ecological indicator of ecosystem health (ecological processes)
* Health indicator, which is used to describe the health o ...
settings.
The Germans increased the difficulty of decrypting Enigma messages by decreasing the interval between changes in the order of the rotors from quarterly, initially, to monthly in February 1936, then daily in October of that year, when they also increased the number of plugboard leads from six to a number that varied between five and eight. This made the Biuro's
grill method much less easy, as it relied on ''unsteckered'' letter pairs.
The German navy was more security-conscious than the army and air force, and in May 1937 it introduced a new, much more secure, indicator procedure that remained unbroken for several years.
The next setback occurred in November 1937, when the scrambler's reflector was changed to one with different interconnections (known as ''Umkehrwalze-B''). Rejewski worked out the wiring in the new reflector, but the catalog of characteristics had to be compiled anew, again using Rejewski's "
cyclometer
The cyclometer was a cryptologic device designed, "probably in 1934 or 1935," by Marian Rejewski of the Polish Cipher Bureau's German section (BS-4) to facilitate decryption of German Enigma ciphertext. The original machines are believed to ...
", which had been built to his specifications by the AVA Radio Company.
In January 1938, Colonel
Stefan Mayer Colonel Stefan A. Mayer (1895 — 23 March 1981, London) was a Polish military intelligence officer and prewar chief of Counterintelligence within the Polish General Staff's Section II (''Oddział II''). In that capacity, he supervised the General ...
directed that statistics be compiled for a two-week period, comparing the numbers of Enigma messages solved, to Enigma intercepts. The ratio came to 75 percent. "Nor,"
Marian Rejewski
Marian Adam Rejewski (; 16 August 1905 – 13 February 1980) was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in late 1932 reconstructed the sight-unseen German military Enigma cipher machine, aided by limited documents obtained by French mili ...
has commented, "were those 75 percent ... the limit of our possibilities. With slightly augmented personnel, we might have attained about 90 percent ... read. But a certain amount of cipher material ... due to faulty transmission or ... reception, or to various other causes, always remains unread ..." Information obtained from Enigma decryption seems to have been directed from B.S.-4 principally to the German Office of the General Staff's Section II (Intelligence). There, from fall 1935 to mid-April 1939, it was worked up by Major
Jan Leśniak
Jan Leśniak (1898 – 1976 in Vienna) was a Polish military intelligence officer in the Interbellum and World War II.
Career
Leśniak was from fall 1935 deputy director of the Polish General Staff's German Office and for a year, from April 1 ...
, who in April 1939 would turn the German Office over to another officer and himself form a Situation Office intended for wartime service. He would head the Situation Office to and through the
September 1939 Campaign.
![Płachta Zygalskiego - decrypting Enigma](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/P%C5%82achta_Zygalskiego_-_decrypting_Enigma.jpg)
The system of pre-defining the indicator setting for the day for all Enigma operators on a given network, on which the method of characteristics depended, was changed on 15 September 1938. The one exception to this was the network used by the ''
Sicherheitsdienst'' (SD)—the intelligence agency of the
SS and the
Nazi Party
The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that crea ...
—who did not make the change until 1 July 1939. Operators now chose their own indicator setting. However, the insecure procedure of sending the enciphered message key twice remained in use, and it was quickly exploited. Henryk Zygalski devised a manual method that used 26
perforated sheets
The method of Zygalski sheets was a cryptologic technique used by the Polish Cipher Bureau before and during World War II, and during the war also by British cryptologists at Bletchley Park, to decrypt messages enciphered on German Enigma machin ...
, and Marian Rejewski commissioned the AVA company to produce the ''
bomba kryptologiczna'' (cryptologic bomb).
Both the Zygalski-sheet method and each ''bomba'' worked for only a single scrambler rotor order, so six sets of Zygalski sheets and six ''bomby'' were produced. However, the Germans introduced two new rotors on 15 December 1938, giving a choice of three out of five to assemble in the machines on a given day. This increased the number of possible rotor orders from 6 to 60. The Biuro could then only read the small minority of messages that used neither of the two new rotors. They did not have the resources to produce 54 more ''bomby'' or 54 sets of Zygalski sheets. Fortunately, however, the fact that the SD network was still using the old method of the same indicator setting for all messages, allowed Rejewski to re-use his previous method of working out the wiring within these rotors. This information was essential for the production of a full set Zygalski sheets which allowed resumption of large-scale decryption in January 1940. On 1 January 1939, the Germans made military Enigma even more difficult to break by increasing the number of plugboard connections from between five and eight, to between seven and ten.
When
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
broke out on 1 September 1939, Leśniak and his colleagues had been working intensively for two or three years to establish the German
order of battle
In modern use, the order of battle of an armed force participating in a military operation or campaign shows the hierarchical organization, command structure, strength, disposition of personnel, and equipment of units and formations of the armed ...
and had succeeded in working out nearly 95 percent of it. The German attack on Poland came as no surprise to the
Polish General Staff
Polish General Staff, formally known as the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces (Polish: ''Sztab Generalny Wojska Polskiego'') is the highest professional body within the Polish Armed Forces. Organizationally, it is an integral part of the Min ...
. The results that had been obtained by
Polish intelligence, according to Leśniak, "absolutely exceeded what would normally have been possible."
Kabaty Woods
Until 1937 the Cipher Bureau's German section, ''BS-4'', had been housed in the Polish General Staff building — the stately 18th-century
"Saxon Palace" — in Warsaw. That year BS-4 moved into specially constructed new facilities in the
Kabaty Woods
The Stefan Starzyński Kabaty Woods Nature Reserve ( pl, Rezerwat przyrody Las Kabacki im. Stefana Starzyńskiego) is a woodland park located in southern Warsaw, between two major arteries, Puławska and Łukasz Drewny Streets. Administratively ...
near
Pyry, south of Warsaw. There, working conditions were incomparably better than in the cramped quarters at the General Staff building.
The move was dictated as well by requirements of security. Germany's ''
Abwehr
The ''Abwehr'' (German for ''resistance'' or ''defence'', but the word usually means ''counterintelligence'' in a military context; ) was the German military-intelligence service for the ''Reichswehr'' and the ''Wehrmacht'' from 1920 to 1944. A ...
'' was always looking for potential traitors among the military and civilian workers at the General Staff building. Strolling agents, even if lacking access to the Staff building, could observe personnel entering and leaving, and photograph them with concealed miniature cameras. Annual ''Abwehr'' intelligence assignments for German agents in Warsaw placed a priority on securing informants at the Polish General Staff.
Gift to allies
It was in the Kabaty Woods, at Pyry, on 25 and 26 July 1939, with war looming, that, on instructions from the Polish General Staff, the Cipher Bureau's chiefs, Lt. Col.
Gwido Langer
Lt. Col. Karol Gwido Langer (Žilina, Zsolna, Austria-Hungary, 2 September 1894 – 30 March 1948, Kinross, Scotland) was, from at least mid-1931, chief of the Polish General Staff's Biuro Szyfrów, Cipher Bureau, which from December 1932 decr ...
and Major
Maksymilian Ciężki
Maksymilian Ciężki (; Samter, Province of Posen (now Szamotuły, Poland), 24 November 1898 – 9 November 1951 in London, England) was the head of the Polish Cipher Bureau's German section (''BS–4'') in the 1930s, during which time— ...
, the three civilian mathematician-cryptologists, and Col.
Stefan Mayer Colonel Stefan A. Mayer (1895 — 23 March 1981, London) was a Polish military intelligence officer and prewar chief of Counterintelligence within the Polish General Staff's Section II (''Oddział II''). In that capacity, he supervised the General ...
, chief of
intelligence
Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can b ...
, revealed Poland's achievements to cryptanalytical representatives of France and Britain, explaining how they had broken Enigma. They undertook to give each country a Polish-reconstructed Enigma, along with details of their equipment, including
Zygalski sheets and Rejewski's
cryptologic bomb. In return, the British pledged to prepare two full sets of Zygalski sheets for all 60 possible wheel orders. The French contingent consisted of Major
Gustave Bertrand, the French radio-intelligence and cryptology chief, and Capt.
Henri Braquenié
Henri Braquenié was an interbellum and World War II French Air Force officer and cryptanalyst.
Captain Braquenié attended, with French Major Gustave Bertrand and another French Army officer, the 9–10 January 1939 Paris meeting of French, Poli ...
of the French Air Force staff. The British sent Commander
Alastair Denniston, head of Britain's
Government Code and Cypher School,
Dilly Knox, chief British
cryptanalyst and Commander Humphrey Sandwith, head of the
Royal Navy
The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by English and Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years' War against F ...
's intercept and
direction-finding stations.
When Rejewski had been working on reconstructing the German military Enigma machine in late 1932, he had ultimately solved a crucial element, the wiring of the letters of the alphabet into the entry drum, with the inspired guess that they might be wired in simple ''alphabetical'' order. Now, at the trilateral meetingRejewski was later to recount"the first question that ...
Dillwyn Knox
Alfred Dillwyn "Dilly" Knox, CMG (23 July 1884 – 27 February 1943) was a British classics scholar and papyrologist at King's College, Cambridge and a codebreaker. As a member of the Room 40 codebreaking unit he helped decrypt the Zimme ...
asked was: 'What are the connections in the entry drum? Knox was mortified to learn how simple the answer was.
The Poles' gift, to their western Allies, of Enigma decryption, five weeks before the outbreak of World War II, came not a moment too soon. Former
Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes ( Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years following ...
mathematician-cryptologist
Gordon Welchman has written: "Ultra would never have gotten off the ground if we had not learned from the Poles, in the nick of time, the details both of the German military ... Enigma machine, and of the operating procedures that were in use." Allied Supreme Commander
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (born David Dwight Eisenhower; ; October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was an American military officer and statesman who served as the 34th president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. During World War II, ...
, at war's end, described intelligence from Bletchley Park as having been "of priceless value to me. It has simplified my task as a commander enormously." Eisenhower expressed his thanks for this "decisive contribution to the Allied war effort."
Churchill's greatest wartime fear, even after Hitler had suspended
Operation Sea Lion and
invaded the Soviet Union, was that the German submarine
wolfpacks would succeed in strangling sea-locked Britain. A major factor that averted Britain's defeat in the
Battle of the Atlantic
The Battle of the Atlantic, the longest continuous military campaign in World War II, ran from 1939 to the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, covering a major part of the naval history of World War II. At its core was the Allied naval blockade ...
was her regained mastery of Naval Enigma decryption; and while the latter benefited crucially from British seizure of German Enigma-equipped naval vessels, the breaking of German naval signals ultimately relied on techniques that had been pioneered by the Polish Cipher Bureau. Had Britain capitulated to Hitler, the United States would have been deprived of an essential forward base for its subsequent involvement in the European and
North Africa
North Africa, or Northern Africa is a region encompassing the northern portion of the African continent. There is no singularly accepted scope for the region, and it is sometimes defined as stretching from the Atlantic shores of Mauritania in ...
n theaters.
A week after the Pyry meeting,
Dillwyn Knox
Alfred Dillwyn "Dilly" Knox, CMG (23 July 1884 – 27 February 1943) was a British classics scholar and papyrologist at King's College, Cambridge and a codebreaker. As a member of the Room 40 codebreaking unit he helped decrypt the Zimme ...
, in a letter dated 1 August 1939, thanked the Poles, in Polish, "for your cooperation and patience." He enclosed little paper batons and a scarf picturing a
Derby horse raceevidently emblematic of the cryptological race that Knox had hoped to win using the batons, and whose loss he was gallantly acknowledging.
On 5 September 1939, as it became clear that Poland was unlikely to halt the ongoing German invasion, BS-4 received orders to destroy part of its files and evacuate essential personnel.
Bureau abroad
![Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-001-0251-09, Warschau, Parade deutscher Truppen](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/Bundesarchiv_Bild_101I-001-0251-09%2C_Warschau%2C_Parade_deutscher_Truppen.jpg)
During the German
Invasion of Poland
The invasion of Poland (1 September – 6 October 1939) was a joint attack on the Republic of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union which marked the beginning of World War II. The German invasion began on 1 September 1939, one week aft ...
in September 1939, key Cipher Bureau personnel were evacuated southeast and—after the Soviets invaded eastern Poland on 17 September—into Romania, on the way destroying their cryptological equipment and documentation. Eventually, crossing Yugoslavia and still-neutral Italy, they reached France. Some personnel of the Cipher Bureau's German section who had worked with Enigma, and most of the workers at the AVA Radio Company that had built
Enigma doubles and cryptologic equipment for the German section, remained in Poland. Some were interrogated by the
Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organi ...
, but no one gave away the secret of Polish mastery of Enigma decryption.
At ''
PC Bruno'', outside
Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...
, on 20 October 1939 the Poles resumed work on German Enigma ciphers in close collaboration with Britain's
Government Code and Cypher School at
Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes ( Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years following ...
.
In the interest of security, the allied cryptological services, before sending their messages over a
teleprinter
A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. Initia ...
line, encrypted them using ''
Enigma doubles''.
Henri Braquenié
Henri Braquenié was an interbellum and World War II French Air Force officer and cryptanalyst.
Captain Braquenié attended, with French Major Gustave Bertrand and another French Army officer, the 9–10 January 1939 Paris meeting of French, Poli ...
often closed messages with a "''
Heil Hitler!''" As late as December 1939, when Lt. Col.
Gwido Langer
Lt. Col. Karol Gwido Langer (Žilina, Zsolna, Austria-Hungary, 2 September 1894 – 30 March 1948, Kinross, Scotland) was, from at least mid-1931, chief of the Polish General Staff's Biuro Szyfrów, Cipher Bureau, which from December 1932 decr ...
, accompanied by Captain
Braquenié, visited London and Bletchley Park, the British asked that the Polish cryptologists be turned over to them. Langer, however, took the position that the Polish team must remain where the
Polish Armed Forces
The Armed Forces of the Republic of Poland ( pl, Siły Zbrojne Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, abbreviated ''SZ RP''; popularly called ''Wojsko Polskie'' in Poland, abbreviated ''WP''—roughly, the "Polish Military") are the national armed forces of ...
were being formedon
French
French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
soil. The mathematicians might actually have reached Britain much earlierand much more comfortablythan they eventually did; but in September 1939, when they went to the British embassy in
Bucharest
Bucharest ( , ; ro, București ) is the capital and largest city of Romania, as well as its cultural, industrial, and financial centre. It is located in the southeast of the country, on the banks of the Dâmbovița River, less than north of ...
, Romania, they were brushed off by a preoccupied British diplomat.
In January 1940, the British cryptanalyst
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical com ...
spent several days at PC Bruno conferring with his Polish colleagues. He had brought the Poles a full set of
Zygalski sheets that had been produced at Bletchley Park by
John Jeffreys using Polish-supplied information. On 17 January 1940, the Poles made the first break into wartime Enigma traffic—that from 28 October 1939.
During this period, until the collapse of France in June 1940, ultimately 83 percent of the Enigma keys that were found, were solved at Bletchley Park, the remaining 17 percent at PC Bruno. Rejewski commented:
![German Partol in Warsaw (1940s)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/German_Partol_in_Warsaw_%281940s%29.jpg)
The inter-Allied cryptologic collaboration prevented duplication of effort and facilitated discoveries. Before fighting had started in
Norway
Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and t ...
in April 1940, the Polish-French team solved an uncommonly hard three-letter
code
In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication ...
used by the Germans to communicate with fighter and bomber squadrons and for exchange of meteorological data between aircraft and land.
The code had first appeared in December 1939, but the Polish cryptologists had been too preoccupied with Enigma to give the code much attention.
With the German assault on the west impending, however, the breaking of the ''
Luftwaffe
The ''Luftwaffe'' () was the aerial-warfare branch of the German ''Wehrmacht'' before and during World War II. Germany's military air arms during World War I, the ''Luftstreitkräfte'' of the Imperial Army and the '' Marine-Fliegerabtei ...
'' code took on mounting urgency. The trail of the elusive code (whose system of letters changed every 24 hours) led back to Enigma. The first clue came from the British, who had noticed that the code's letters did not change randomly. If ''A'' changed to ''P'', then elsewhere ''P'' was replaced by ''A''. The British made no further headway, but the Poles realized that what was manifesting was Enigma's ''exclusivity principle'' that they had discovered in 1932. The Germans' carelessness meant that now the Poles, having after midnight solved Enigma's daily setting, could with no further effort also read the ''Luftwaffe'' signals.
The Germans, just before opening their 10 May 1940 offensive in the west that would trample
Belgium
Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...
,
Luxembourg
Luxembourg ( ; lb, Lëtzebuerg ; french: link=no, Luxembourg; german: link=no, Luxemburg), officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, ; french: link=no, Grand-Duché de Luxembourg ; german: link=no, Großherzogtum Luxemburg is a small lan ...
and the
Netherlands
)
, anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau")
, image_map =
, map_caption =
, subdivision_type = Sovereign state
, subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands
, established_title = Before independence
, established_date = Spanish Netherl ...
in order to reach the borders of France, once again changed their procedure for enciphering message keys, rendering the Zygalski sheets "completely useless" and temporarily defeating the joint British-Polish cryptologic attacks on Enigma. According to
Gustave Bertrand, "It took ''superhuman'' day-and-night effort to overcome this new difficulty: on May 20, decryption resumed."
Following the capitulation of France in June 1940, the Poles were evacuated to
Algeria
)
, image_map = Algeria (centered orthographic projection).svg
, map_caption =
, image_map2 =
, capital = Algiers
, coordinates =
, largest_city = capital
, relig ...
. On October 1, 1940, they resumed work at "''
Cadix
''Cadix'' was a World War II clandestine intelligence center at Uzès, in southern France, from September 1940 to 9 November 1942. During this period southern France was under the control of Vichy France and not occupied by Nazi Germany. At ''Cad ...
''", near
Uzès in unoccupied southern,
Vichy France
Vichy France (french: Régime de Vichy; 10 July 1940 – 9 August 1944), officially the French State ('), was the fascist French state headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II. Officially independent, but with half of its ter ...
, under the sponsorship of Gustave Bertrand.
A little over two years later, on 8 November 1942, Bertrand learned from the
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board ex ...
that the Allies had landed in
French North Africa
French North Africa (french: Afrique du Nord française, sometimes abbreviated to ANF) is the term often applied to the territories controlled by France in the North African Maghreb during the colonial era, namely Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. In ...
("
Operation Torch
Operation Torch (8 November 1942 – Run for Tunis, 16 November 1942) was an Allies of World War II, Allied invasion of French North Africa during the Second World War. Torch was a compromise operation that met the British objective of secu ...
"). Knowing that in such an eventuality the Germans planned to occupy
Vichy France
Vichy France (french: Régime de Vichy; 10 July 1940 – 9 August 1944), officially the French State ('), was the fascist French state headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II. Officially independent, but with half of its ter ...
, on 9 November he evacuated
Cadix
''Cadix'' was a World War II clandestine intelligence center at Uzès, in southern France, from September 1940 to 9 November 1942. During this period southern France was under the control of Vichy France and not occupied by Nazi Germany. At ''Cad ...
. Two days later, on 11 November, the Germans indeed marched into southern France. On the morning of 12 November they occupied Cadix.
Over the two years since its establishment in October 1940,
Cadix
''Cadix'' was a World War II clandestine intelligence center at Uzès, in southern France, from September 1940 to 9 November 1942. During this period southern France was under the control of Vichy France and not occupied by Nazi Germany. At ''Cad ...
had decrypted thousands of
Wehrmacht
The ''Wehrmacht'' (, ) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the ''Heer'' (army), the ''Kriegsmarine'' (navy) and the ''Luftwaffe'' (air force). The designation "''Wehrmacht''" replaced the previous ...
,
SS and
Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organi ...
messages, originating not only from French territory but from across Europe, which provided invaluable intelligence to Allied commands and
resistance movement
A resistance movement is an organized effort by some portion of the civil population of a country to withstand the legally established government or an occupying power and to disrupt civil order and stability. It may seek to achieve its objective ...
s. Cadix had also decrypted thousands of
Soviet
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
messages.
Having departed Cadix, the Polish personnel evaded the occupying Italian security police and German
Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organi ...
and sought to escape France via
Spain
, image_flag = Bandera de España.svg
, image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg
, national_motto = ''Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond")
, national_anthem = (English: "Royal March")
, i ...
.
Jerzy Różycki,
Jan Graliński
Jan Józef Graliński (February 8, 1895 – January 9, 1942) was chief of the Polish General Staff's interbellum Cipher Bureau's Russian section, ''B.S.-3.''
After Poland was overrun by the Germans and Soviets in September 1939, Graliński ma ...
and
Piotr Smoleński
Piotr Smoleński (died 9 January 1942) was a cryptologist in the Russian section (''B.S.-3'') of the interbellum Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau.
With other cryptologists, including Jan Graliński, he died in the sinking of the passenger ...
had died in the January 1942 sinking, in the
Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean Basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Western and Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa, and on the ea ...
, of a French passenger ship, the ''Lamoricière'', in which they had been returning to southern France from a tour of duty in
Algeria
)
, image_map = Algeria (centered orthographic projection).svg
, map_caption =
, image_map2 =
, capital = Algiers
, coordinates =
, largest_city = capital
, relig ...
.
Marian Rejewski
Marian Adam Rejewski (; 16 August 1905 – 13 February 1980) was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in late 1932 reconstructed the sight-unseen German military Enigma cipher machine, aided by limited documents obtained by French mili ...
and
Henryk Zygalski hiked over the
Pyrenees
The Pyrenees (; es, Pirineos ; french: Pyrénées ; ca, Pirineu ; eu, Pirinioak ; oc, Pirenèus ; an, Pirineus) is a mountain range straddling the border of France and Spain. It extends nearly from its union with the Cantabrian Mountains to C ...
with a guide (who robbed them at gunpoint) to the Spanish border, where they were arrested on January 30, 1943. They were incarcerated by the Spaniards for three months before being released, upon
Red Cross
The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is a Humanitarianism, humanitarian movement with approximately 97 million Volunteering, volunteers, members and staff worldwide. It was founded to protect human life and health, to ensure re ...
intervention, on 4 May 1943. They then managed, by a circuitous land–sea–air route, to join the
Polish Armed Forces
The Armed Forces of the Republic of Poland ( pl, Siły Zbrojne Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, abbreviated ''SZ RP''; popularly called ''Wojsko Polskie'' in Poland, abbreviated ''WP''—roughly, the "Polish Military") are the national armed forces of ...
in Britain, Rejewski and Zygalski were inducted into the Polish Army as privates (they would eventually be promoted to lieutenant) and put to work breaking German ''
SS'' and ''
SD'' hand ciphers at a Polish signals facility in
Boxmoor. Because of their having been in occupied France, the British considered it too risky to invite them to work at Bletchley Park.
Finally, with the end of the two mathematicians' cryptologic work at the close of World War II, the Cipher Bureau ceased to exist. From nearly its inception in 1931 until war's end in 1945, the Bureau, sometimes incorporated into aggregates under
cryptonym
A code name, call sign or cryptonym is a Code word (figure of speech), code word or name used, sometimes clandestinely, to refer to another name, word, project, or person. Code names are often used for military purposes, or in espionage. They may ...
s (PC Bruno and Cadix), had been essentially the same agency, with most of the same core personnel, carrying out much the same tasks; now it was extinguished. Neither Rejewski nor Zygalski would work again as cryptologists.
In late 1946 Rejewski returned to his family in a devastated and politically altered Poland, to live there another 33 years until his death in February 1980. Zygalski would remain in England until his death in August 1978.
Secret preserved
Despite their travails, Rejewski and Zygalski had fared better than some of their colleagues. Cadix's Polish military chiefs,
Langer and
Ciężki, had also been capturedby the Germans, as they tried to escape from France into Spain on the night of March 10–11, 1943along with three other Poles:
Antoni Palluth
Antoni Palluth (11 May 1900, Pobiedziska, Province of Posen – 18 April 1944) was a founder of the AVA Radio Company. The company built communications equipment for the Polish military; the work included not only radios but also cryptographic ...
,
Edward Fokczyński
Edward Fokczyński was one of the four directors of the AVA Radio Company, an electronics firm established in Warsaw, Poland, in 1929. AVA produced radio equipment for the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau, which was responsible for the radio ...
and Kazimierz Gaca. The first two became
prisoners of war
A prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held Captivity, captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610.
Belligerents hold priso ...
; the other three were sent as
slave labour
Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...
ers to Germany, where Palluth and Fokczyński perished. Despite the varyingly dire circumstances in which they were held, none of them
Stefan Mayer Colonel Stefan A. Mayer (1895 — 23 March 1981, London) was a Polish military intelligence officer and prewar chief of Counterintelligence within the Polish General Staff's Section II (''Oddział II''). In that capacity, he supervised the General ...
emphasizesbetrayed the secret of Enigma's
decryption, thus making it possible for the Allies to continue exploiting this vital intelligence resource.
Before the war,
Palluth, a lecturer in the 1929 secret
Poznań University
Poznań () is a city on the River Warta in west-central Poland, within the Greater Poland region. The city is an important cultural and business centre, and one of Poland's most populous regions with many regional customs such as Saint John ...
cryptology course, had been co-owner of AVA, which produced equipment for the Cipher Bureau, and knew many details of the decryption technology. In Warsaw, under German occupation, other Cipher Bureau workers were interrogated by German intelligence commissions, and some AVA workers were approached by German agents, but all kept silent about compromises to Enigma.
In popular culture
In 1967 the Polish military historian
Władysław Kozaczuk Władysław Kozaczuk (23 December 1923 – 26 September 2003) was a Polish Army colonel and a military and intelligence historian.
Life
Born in the village of Babiki near Sokółka, Kozaczuk joined the army in 1944, during World War II, at Bia ...
, in his book ''Bitwa o tajemnice'' (The Battle for Secrets), first revealed that the German Enigma had been broken by Polish cryptologists before World War II. Kozaczuk's disclosure came seven years before
F. W. Winterbotham
Frederick William Winterbotham (16 April 1897 – 28 January 1990) was a British Royal Air Force officer (latterly a Group Captain) who during World War II supervised the distribution of Ultra intelligence. His book ''The Ultra Secret'' was t ...
's ''The Ultra Secret'' (1974) changed conventional views of the history of the war.
The 1979 Polish film ''
Sekret Enigmy'' (The Enigma Secret) is a generally fair, if superficial, account of the Cipher Bureau's story. Twenty-two years later, the 2001 Hollywood film ''
Enigma'' was criticized for its many historical inaccuracies, including omission of Poland's fundamental work in Enigma
decryption.
How Poles cracked Nazi Enigma secret
Laurence Peter, BBC News, 20 July 2009
See also
* Ultra
adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by breaking high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. '' ...
* Marian Rejewski
Marian Adam Rejewski (; 16 August 1905 – 13 February 1980) was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in late 1932 reconstructed the sight-unseen German military Enigma cipher machine, aided by limited documents obtained by French mili ...
* Tadeusz Pełczyński
Tadeusz Walenty Pełczyński (codenames: ''Grzegorz'', ''Adam'', ''Wolf'', ''Robak''; Warsaw, 14 February 1892 – 3 January 1985, London) was a Polish Army major general (''generał brygady''), intelligence officer and chief of the General Staf ...
* Polish School of Mathematics The Polish School of Mathematics was the mathematics community that flourished in Poland in the 20th century, particularly during the Interbellum between World Wars I and II.
Overview
The Polish School of Mathematics subsumed:
*the Lwów Schoo ...
* History of Polish Intelligence Services
This article covers the history of Polish Intelligence services dating back to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Commonwealth
Though the first official Polish government service entrusted with espionage, intelligence and counter-intelligence w ...
* Wilfred Dunderdale
Commander Wilfred Albert "Biffy" Dunderdale, (24 December 1899 – 13 November 1990) was a British spy and intelligence officer.John Bruce Lockhart, "Dunderdale, Wilfred Albert (1899-1990)", rev., ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxfor ...
Notes
References
Bibliography
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* Good, I.J., and Cipher A. Deavours, afterword to Marian Rejewski
Marian Adam Rejewski (; 16 August 1905 – 13 February 1980) was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in late 1932 reconstructed the sight-unseen German military Enigma cipher machine, aided by limited documents obtained by French mili ...
, "How Polish Mathematicians Deciphered the Enigma", ''Annals of the History of Computing'', July 1981.
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* A revised and augmented translation of ''W kręgu enigmy'', Warsaw
Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is officia ...
, Książka i Wiedza, 1979, supplemented with appendices by Marian Rejewski
Marian Adam Rejewski (; 16 August 1905 – 13 February 1980) was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in late 1932 reconstructed the sight-unseen German military Enigma cipher machine, aided by limited documents obtained by French mili ...
* Largely an abridgment of , minus Rejewski's appendices, which have been replaced with appendices of varying quality by other authors
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* Appendix B to
* Appendix C to
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External links
* Laurence Peter
How Poles cracked Nazi Enigma secret
BBC News, 20 July 2009
"Polish Enigma Double"
Enigma and Intelligence
* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20081231174812/http://www.uwic.ac.uk/shss/djs/STMsubtypes-pt3.htm A Brief History of Computing Technology, 1930 to 1939
"The Poles Crack Enigma" (from Greg Goebel's ''Codes, Ciphers, & Codebreaking'')
NSA/CSS National Cryptologic Museum Unveils New Polish Enigma Exhibit
IEEE History Center: "The Invention of Enigma and How the Polish Broke It Before the Start of WWII"
* Sir Dermot Turing
Sir John Dermot Turing, 12th Baronet (born 26 February 1961) is a British solicitor and author.
Education
Turing was educated at Sherborne School and King's College, Cambridge. He then undertook a DPhil degree in genetics of the Drosophila me ...
said that his uncle's achievements in cracking German communications encrypted on the Enigma machines were based on work by a group of Polish mathematicians:
Turing cult has obscured role of Polish codebreakers
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cipher Bureau (Poland)
Signals intelligence agencies
Defunct Polish intelligence agencies
Cryptography organizations
History of cryptography
Second Polish Republic
Military history of Poland during World War II
Science and technology in Poland