Sgt Eagle
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The Poles and Enigma
After WW1 Poland found itself squeezed between nationalistic Germany and communist Russia. The Treaty of Versailles, a mere slap on Germany's wrist, offered little security. Political, economic and social unrest gave rise to fascism and to rapid rearmament. Russia, after a bloody revolution, continued its imperialism by engaging in war with Poland and by annexing its Asian neighbours.
The adoption of an encrypting machine called Enigma for the German army's high level communications created a problem for Polish intelligence in decoding intercepted messages. Consequently, in 1932, Poland established a modern cryptology department at the University of Poznan. After a few months the three young Polish mathematicians shown below derived very smart methods and succeeded in breaking the Enigma cipher.
Their names :
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Marian Rejewski , Jerzy Rozycki , Henryk Zygalski
For the next few years, before and during the war, Poland had the ability to decrypt intercepted coded German messages. As Enigma evolved into a more complex and sophisticated machine, so too did the Polish methods and techniques. Just before the beginning of WW2 the Poles transferred all their know-how and equipment to the French and British Allies for their use in the coming war. When war started on September 1st, 1939, the Polish cryptologists were quickly evacuated through Romania to France. By October 1939 the reorganised cryptology unit started to decrypt Enigma messages again. Until the fall of France on June 17th, 1940 the Polish unit operated officially in France. After that they went underground in "Vichy" France, where they operated until November 1942 when the Germans occupied southern France. Their escape to neutral, but friendly with Germany, Spain was a disaster as they were apprehended and imprisoned in cruel interment camps. Two key cryptologists and three radio operators managed to escape and reach England but most fared much worse. Two senior intelligence officers and three engineers were caught by the Gestapo and were sent to German concentration camps. The two officers were liberated by the US Army but the three engineers perished.
The British, using the Polish decrypting methods amongst others, established a secret organisation of about 10,000 people at Bletchley Park to intercept, decrypt and disseminate German Enigma messages and intelligence. Selected Allied high-ranking commanders received these decrypted German, rephrased for extra security and protected by the explicit Ultra regulations, starting with the Battle of Britain, through the Battle of the Atlantic, the landing in Africa, the invasion of the Continent and the bombing of the V1 and V2 weapon sites.
The Polish effort in breaking Enigma's code shortened World War 2 in Europe by six to twelve months, sparing hundreds of thousands of casualties and saving Western Europe from occupation by the Red Army. This, however, did little to help Poland which was abandoned to the mercy of communism by its allies. Fifty years of oppression brought economic disaster and personal suffering to its 35 million people. None of the Polish cryptologists received any recognition from the French, British or Americans.
In the year 2000 the Polish president, Mr. Aleksander Kwasniewski, made posthumous awards of the highest Polish military medals to Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski. The breaking of the Enigma code has been singled out by many war historians and great leaders as one of the greatest contributions to the war effort.
Sgt Eagle
Last edited by Sgt Eagle, 6/2/2004, 11:18 am
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From this day till the ending of the world we in it shall be remembered ,we Band Of Brothers Henry V-W.Shakespear
Eendracht maakt Macht !
GO Belgium
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6/2/2004, 11:17 am
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Sgt Eagle
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The Poles and Enigma/Breakingt the code
To understand the chronology of breaking the Enigma code we have to go to 1920 Poland.
After regaining independence following 123 years of German and Russian occupation, Poland was attacked in 1920 by an overwhelming Soviet army. The Polish military commander, Marshal J. Pilsudski, was able to hold the attack at Warsaw and then turn it back. This was due, to a large extent, to the Polish ability to intercept orders from the Soviet headquarters and quickly relay the contents to the Polish field commanders. This victory sealed the importance of intelligence in the Polish Army at the highest level.
n 1926 German intelligence was able to intercept and decrypt about 6000 messages between headquarters and military airfields in Poland. This caused the Polish high command to initiate steps to form a modern cryptoanalysis unit with Colonel Guido Langer in charge and Major Maksymilian Ciezki as his deputy. The first step was to establish a cryptoanalysis course at Poznan University, which had a very good mathematical department. After several weeks into the course, students were given encrypted German messages which, though already decrypted, were considered very difficult to break. Several students were able to break the code and amongst them were M. Rejewski, J. Rozycki and H. Zygalski, who later became the nucleus of the modern Polish cryptology team.
After completing their studies the three were engaged on September 1st, 1932 to work in the bureau of cryptology at the Army Headquarters in Warsaw. Initially they were occupied in decrypting pre-Enigma coded messages using standard statistical and linguistic methods. Since all of them were fluent in German, they were remarkably successful.
In January 1929 Polish customs intercepted a package sent from Germany to a German company in Warsaw. The recipients and the German consul were very anxious, insisting that the package should be immediately returned to Germany. Customs alerted Polish intelligence which, with the assistance of cryptologists and taking the utmost care not to be spotted by German surveillance, opened the package. They realized that it was an unknown crypto machine and took photographs and made drawings for future use. The machine was repackaged with the utmost care so that the Germans would not suspect that the package had been opened. A report was made but, since nobody knew what the machine was or how to use it, nothing further was done.
Later in the year French intelligence officer Capt. G. Bertrand learned, from an independent intelligence source that the German Navy had been introducing a new encrypting machine called Enigma since 1926 and that more and more German messages could not be decrypted. Initially French intelligence would not believe that secure encryption was possible using a commercially available machine. However, Capt. Bertrand realized that a military version would have additional elements, refinements and procedures to make it unbreakable.
In the fall of 1931, a German national who worked in a German cryptology department approached French intelligence with an offer to sell information relating to military intelligence and cryptology. After an extensive and independent verification of his background Hans-Thilo Schmidt, a younger brother of an army general, was engaged and given the code name "Asche". He was able to confirm that the Germans were rapidly introducing an encrypting machine called Enigma and provided some construction details. Using this information, the Polish cryptologists were able to reconstruct the wiring of the Enigma rotors. Other important information were the operational instructions and some keys for selecting rotors and their positions. Furthermore, it was learned that the Germans were resetting rotor positions every three months and the patch-panel daily. This allowed the Polish cryptology team to sort German coded messages into quarterly and daily groupings for analysis.
On December 7th, 1934, Capt. Bertrand arrived in Warsaw to exchange information about the Enigma machine. On comparing his information with the earlier interception of an encrypting machine in the Polish mail, it was concluded that they were the same. On the basis of that conclusion it was decided to buy a commercial version and to start reconstructing the military version. A small unobtrusive company, AVA, was entrusted to make the copies since a small commercial electrical component manufacturer would not arouse the interest of German intelligence. On the second visit Capt. Bertrand brought tables of rotor settings for the months of September and November, further reducing the number of encryption combinations that had to be considered.
Mr. H. Zygalski developed his own method, based on perforated sheets, and the Poles were then able to decrypt a substantial number of Enigma coded German messages.
It is essential to understand the distinction between the machine set up and the encrypting/decrypting processes. The machine set up consists of selecting rotors, rotor sequence, rotor positions and patch panel interconnect. This places the message to be encrypted in a particular range of an extremely long encryption chain, which could be billions and billions of steps.
The encryption process may be very complex and consist of a very long combinational sequence but it still follows an established pattern defined by the mechanical and electrical construction of Enigma. Once the Enigma machine set up is known, the decryption process is simple and fast, but that was hardly the case throughout the war. In the majority of cases the machine set up had to be obtained by painstaking analyses of encrypted messages that contained the names of the sender and receiver, rank, address, as well as machine set up and peculiarities associated with a particular operator and organisation. These standard contents substantially increased the probability of a correct guess. Comparison with the previously decrypted messages, kept in a large library, gave an appreciable number of possible solutions.
All these bits of information were fed into "Bomba" until the proper solution was found. It must be emphasised that in order to have a reasonable chance of success a substantial number of messages with the same machine set-up were required for analysis. The solution time depended upon how many bits of information were collected and could vary from hours, through days, to weeks.
The decryption processes that were developed by Rejewski, Rozycki and Zygalski provided a very strong foundation for the successful Enigma code breaking at Bletchley Park. Furthermore, machines much more powerful than "Bomba" were built, such as "Colossus" which could rapidly check millions of combinations. This round the clock operation was supported by a staff of more than 10,000 people. The mathematical analysis developed by the Poles was omitted because of its complexity.
Sgt Eagle
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From this day till the ending of the world we in it shall be remembered ,we Band Of Brothers Henry V-W.Shakespear
Eendracht maakt Macht !
GO Belgium
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6/2/2004, 11:22 am
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blacksheepone
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Re: The Poles and Enigma
Nice add on
Good piece of forgotten history
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6/7/2004, 3:56 pm
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