This article was published in British periodic "Everyone's War" in summer of year 2000.

The truth about some facts, especially those kept secret in various state archives, is slow to surface. Even when it does, for various reasons, known only to authors of reports, some facts are blown out of proportion, while other facts are downplayed or outright ignored. Journalists and historians are human beings, like everyone else. They are not all entirely free of biases, personal likes and dislikes, their own agendas and, in some cases, submissiveness to a higher and more powerful authority.
Such is the case with the history of breaking the code of the German Enigma cipher machine.  While all historians agree that the interception of German secret  traffic by the Allies was a major factor in the ultimate victory in World War II, for many years, even after the declassification of  official wartime documents on the subject, the role of Poles was  either totally ignored or skimmed over with only vague references in historical literature. Unfortunately, dissemination, on a broad scale, of  untrue or - to say the least - incomplete information, serves only to ingrain and perpetuate false conceptions in the collective memory of  readers. Here are only two examples:
Several years ago, sitting in my Montreal home, I read an article in a local newspaper on a subject relating to World War II, which misrepresented some facts. I responded by writing a letter to the editor, in which I happened to mention, in passing, the crucial role of Polish code-breakers in solving the secret of the Enigma. No sooner was the letter printed than I received a phone call from an Englishman living in Montreal who vehemently denied any role of the Poles, claiming that all the credit should go to the British. I sent the gentleman some documents on the subject and he later called again, this time to apologize and acknowledge, stating that he had just found out about something he had no idea about. Similarly, two years ago I read another newspaper article about the “Secrets of Bletchley Hall” in which not even one mention was made of Polish cryptologists. Again I responded and this time the author of the article, a historian, agreed with me. His explanation as to why he omitted all that had any reference to the Poles sounded like a poor excuse, to say the least.
The first work on the subject, written by Dr. Wladyslaw Kozaczuk appeared in Poland in 1967.  In his book  the author provided well documented evidence of how Polish mathematicians broke the Enigma code already before the outbreak of World War II. The problem was that the author was Polish himself which placed him and his findings in a less easy position with critics. In 1970, Heinz Bonatz, a former officer of German navy intelligence, questioned the breaking of the Enigma codes by the Poles.  The first confirmation of the Polish cryptologists’ vital role came from General Gustave Betrand  from France, in a book which described Polish-French intelligence cooperation in the 1930’s and emphasized the French contribution of supplying the Poles with vital intelligence information. The British were the last to break the silence. In 1974, F.W. Winterbotham, a retired RAF intelligence officer published a book  in which he described the impact of  monitoring German secret dispatches through deciphering of the Enigma on the course of the war. Yet, he ascribed all the credit and glory to the British code breakers without even mentioning the Poles. His account, however, begins at the time when the Enigma was already operating in the huge intelligence compound known as Bletchley Hall, north of London. The book, unfortunately, remains completely silent about all that had led up to the setting up of the Enigma in Bletchley Hall.
I myself am NOT a historian and the present article is not meant to be viewed as a scientific historical work. It is simply an attempt to rectify some misconceptions that still linger in the minds of those many people who had been exposed to only one side of the story. I based this piece of free-lance journalism on the works quoted, as well as on numerous publications in the Internet, notably those by Bill Momsen  and by Lech Maziakowski .
The story of the Enigma begins in 1918 when a German inventor, Arthur Scherbius obtained a patent for his enciphering machine, intended for corporations to guard industrial and technical secrets. The name Enigma was to come later. It was marketed commercially and the German High Command did not show any specific interest at first. Some time after the German defeat in World War I, however, it was revealed that the German naval code book had been salvaged intact from a wrecked German warship by the Imperial Russian Navy as early as in 1914 and passed on to the British. The Royal Navy had thus been able to intercept all radio traffic throughout the war and to  maintain its supremacy on the high seas. Made aware of this, the German High Command began rethinking its philosophy and soon bought the commercial enciphering machine which by 1926 was upgraded and given the code name of Enigma. The machine subsequently underwent several modifications and by the year 1930 was a powerful encrypting tool with an amazing number of cipher combinations.

Its basic design was that of a typewriter. The keys were electrically connected to another set of letters, energized by current generated by pressing the initial key. The second set of letters was placed on a rotor which moved  1/26th of a revolution every time it was energized. The initial letter could be encoded as any of the 26 letters of the alphabet on the rotor, depending on cross-wiring and the initial position of the rotor. The German military later complicated the design by adding more rotors, raising the number of possible combinations to far beyond reasonable security considerations. It was regarded as totally safe, absolutely unbreakable, but guarded as top secret.
On the eastern side of the border, the Polish state which had just regained its independence after over 120 years of partition, set about organizing military intelligence. Within this framework was a listening post for interception of German and Soviet military dispatches. Resurfacing sentiment for German remilitarization and the constant threat from Communist Russia forced Poland to keep a vigilant eye on the two neighboring countries. Until 1926, interception of air traffic was an easy task for Polish cryptologists who regularly decoded  German and Soviet secret dispatches. From that year on, decrypting became progressively difficult and by July of 1928 German codes became a complete mystery to Polish intelligence. That is when machine encoding was implemented across all German military services.
Realizing the challenge, Polish intelligence bought one of the commercial  encoding machines marketed by Scherbius and brought it to Poland but it proved to be quite useless. At that moment, the General Staff of the Polish Army organized a course in cryptology at the Institute of Mathematics of Poznan University. The object of this course was to fish out talents for later work with the intelligence service. It was during one session of this course that the instructor presented the listeners with a puzzle - a piece of German encrypted message which he had earlier decoded himself. Within a few hours it was solved by three young mathematics students: Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski. These and a handful of others were  soon working in a specially adapted building, deciphering German codes. Rejewski, the most brilliant of them all, was sent to Goettingen to study mathematical statistics. He came back to Poland in 1930. The trio took up their posts together again, this time in Warsaw, in the Cipher Bureau of the Polish Army.
Rejewski developed a set of permutation equations which became the first major breakthrough in the tough job. Elated with the initial results, his immediate superior, Maj. Gwidon Langer  decided to show him materials obtained from the French intelligence.

Let’s pause a little to catch up on other developments which took place in France. Capt. Gustave Bertrand from the French  “Deuxième Bureau”, faced with difficulties encountered by his own staff in decoding German dispatches, decided to enter into cooperation with Polish military cryptologists. Earlier, he had been approached by a German calling himself Asche (real name Hans-Thilo Schmidt) who sold him several documents relating to secret ciphering keys.
Capt. Bertrand passed the documents over to Polish intelligence. Luckily, one of the keys obtained from Asche enabled Marian Rejewski to guess the connections of the second ciphering rotor. Once that was accomplished, the connections of the third rotor were solved with only minor difficulties. Meanwhile, Henryk Zygalski designed very complicated perforated sheets which led to determining the sequence of the rotors. Jerzy Rozycki designed special machines which he himself called “Bomba”. These machines served to determine the initial positioning of the rotors. The combined efforts of Rejewski, Rozycki and Zygalski bore fruit. As of January 1933, the Cipher Bureau of the Polish Army was able to read almost all German secret traffic, encoded by the Enigma machine. The secret of the Enigma was broken.
For several years the Poles kept up with constant improvements and complications of the Enigma machine, implemented by the Germans and went on to build two clones of the Enigma. Realizing the looming danger of impending war with Hitler, the Polish High Command decided to share the closely guarded secret with her Allies - Britain and France. This happened during a meeting of Polish, British and French military cryptology experts which took place 24-26 July, 1939 in Warsaw. The Poles presented both countries with one clone each of the Enigma, along with all the necessary coding materials. One of the sources quoted here tells of a paradox. The conversations between the three Allied teams took place in... German, the only language known well to all three sides. Members of the British and French delegations were speechless and could not conceal their utter bewilderment. They could not find enough words to thank the Polish experts because their own experts, though very talented, had made no progress at all in solving the German codes.  Several weeks later, Gustave Bertrand, by then a colonel, took the Enigma copies to France in a diplomatic pouch and on August 16th, one of these clones was personally handed over by him to the chief of British Intelligence, col. Steward Menzies, in London. From that moment on, some of the greatest brains in the British cryptology school, including the genius Alan Turing, were able to benefit from the Polish trail blazing and to carry on the work started by the Poles, to help the Allied war effort.
Two weeks later, the world woke to hear and read that Hitler invaded Poland. Within three days, a new war set the world on fire. When, after the Soviet stab-in-the-back invasion on September 17th, 1939, Poland was left with no chances of survival, the military evacuated itself by any means possible, through Hungary and Rumania, to reach France where a new Polish Army was being organized.
The Cipher Bureau of the Polish Army, including Rejewski, Zygalski and Rozycki, managed to escape Poland and by October 1939 a joint Polish-French decrypting center, code-named “Bruno” began operating on French soil. After the fall of France in 1940, the center was moved to unoccupied France where it continued operations. These were, of course, clandestine because the Vichy government was actually a client state of Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, the center, code-named “Cadix” operated until November of 1942. At the same time, Operation Magic in England brought the giant decrypting complex at Bletchley into being. The three Polish mathematicians found themselves working in Bletchley Hall.
It is true that after the Germans added more rotors to their Enigma machines, the listening posts became deaf and the decoding developed by the Poles suddenly came up against new challenges. But that was at a time when the world was already at war. The challenge was taken up by the international team at Bletchley Hall. Among them was the genial Alan Turing who designed machines which he called the “Bombe” - a worthy continuation of the Rozycki “Bomba”. If not for the help of the three brilliant Poles in the thirties, Turing would not have had the huge head start which he admitted freely. For some reason his historian many years later, chose to highlight only his work and that of the British, without giving any credit to the Poles.
The decrypting of secret German radio transmissions by the Allies, armed with their own Enigma had an overwhelming impact on the course of the war. For that reason it was one of the most highly guarded secrets.
From what I know, Marian Rejewski returned to Poland after the war. He died in Poland in 1980. I do not know the fate of Henryk Zygalski or Jerzy Rozycki.
As I wrote in the beginning of this short article,  the surfacing of information about the Enigma secret came slowly and with a lot of bias, half-truth and, in some instances, complete omission of the vital role of the Polish mathematicians. Today, there are numerous books, brochures and  Internet pages relating to this subject, ranging from complex descriptions of the wiring connections of the Enigma machine to detailed historical background. What is important is that most of them finally convey the truth, giving due credit to those who had deserved it but for many years were denied this simple, human satisfaction. This truth should be voiced out loud and spread to reach enough people to change the still prevailing misconceptions. It is enough to go to any search machine on the Internet, enter the word “Enigma” and click on “search”. The truth about the Enigma surfaces. At long last.

by Witold K. Liliental, Ph.D.
Montreal, Canada

  Kozaczuk W.: Enigma: Struggle for Secrets: Intelligence Services of Poland and the Third Reich, 1932-1939. Warsaw, 1967.
  Bonatz H.: Die Deutsche Marine-Funklauf/Drung 1914-1945, Darmstadt, 1970
  Bertrand G.: Enigma ou la plus grand enigme de la guerre 1939-1945. Paris, 1973
  Wintherbotham F.W.: The Ultra Secret. London, 1974.
  Momsen B.: Codebreaking and Secret Weapons in World War II, 1996-199
  Maziakowski L.: ENIGMA Home Page, 1997.
 
 

Poland receives  the historical Enigma coding machine from Great Britain September 18, 2000, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, has presented the Polish Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek with the original of the German coding machine Enigma. Present at the ceremony in the Premier’s office were, among others, the Minister of Defence Bronislaw Komorowski and the deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Radek Sikorski. The Enigma code was broken by three young mathematicians who were employed by the Polish intelligence service. The Poles passed on data relating to the method of encryption of German dispatches to Great Britain and France. The Duke of York stressed that the breaking of the Enigma code by the Poles was a significant contribution to Allied military successes during World War II. “They helped us, among other, during the Battle of Britain and in the Battle of the Atlantic” stated Prince Andrew. During the handing over ceremony, Prime Minister Buzek pointed out that to this day the Encyclopaedia Britannica credits predominantly the British for breaking the Enigma code. The Duke of York promised to look into this matter and that the text in the encyclopaedia would be changed. At the end of the meeting Prince Andrew demonstrated the functioning of the Enigma.

Finally honoring the Polish scientists.

In July 2002 a great ceremony took place in Bletchley Park , England. Bletchley Park is located in the county of Buckinghamshire, north of London. The ceremony was presided over by the Duke of Kent, cousin of Queen Elizabeth II. Present were representatives of Polish Combatants Association, The Polish Association in England, Polish diplomatic representatives and members of the families of the famous scientists honored at this ceremony.
The Duke of Kent inaugurated a monument in the form of an open book, cast in bronze and placed on a granite base, to honour and commemorate the three outstanding Polish scholars of the University of Poznan, Poland. Their names were: Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rózycki and Henryk Zygalski. These scientists were pioneers, deeply involved in breaking the code of German cryptograph machine ENIGMA as part of Polish military intelligence activities before the 1939 war. The Polish military intelligence was successful in producing and delivering two copies of the ENIGMA machine to the British and French authorities before the start of the 2nd World War. Later on, the more advanced version of the ENIGMA machine was produced by British scientists with full cooperation of the experienced Polish scientist.
After the 1939-1945 war, historians concluded that the breaking of the code of ENIGMA machine shortened the war by two years and saved the lives of hundreds of thousand of military and civilian individuals.

Prepared by Mr. Henryk Winiarski