The Nazi’s Enigma Machine – and the mathematics behind it – was a crucial part of World War II

In order to more fully understand the enigma machine I quote this story:

“But the work of Bletchley Park – and Turing’s role there in cracking the Enigma code – was kept secret until the 1970s, and the full story was not known until the 1990s. It has been estimated that the efforts of Turing and his fellow code-breakers shortened the war by several years.

The Enigma machines were a family of portable cipher machines with rotor scramblers. Good operating procedures, properly enforced, would have made the plugboard Enigma machine unbreakable. However, most of the German military forces, secret services, and civilian agencies that used Enigma employed poor operating procedures, and it was these poor procedures that allowed the Enigma machines to be reverse-engineered and the ciphers to be read.

The German plugboard equipped Enigma became Nazi Germany’s principal crypto-system. It was broken by the Polish General Staff’s Cipher Bureau in December 1932, with the aid of French-supplied intelligence material obtained from a German spy. A month before the outbreak of World War II, at a conference held near Warsaw, the Polish Cipher Bureau shared its Enigma-breaking techniques and technology with the French and British. During the German invasion of Poland, core Polish Cipher Bureau personnel were evacuated via Romania to France, where they established the PC Bruno signals intelligence station with French facilities support. Successful cooperation among the Poles, the French, and the British at Bletchley Park continued until June 1940, when France surrendered to the Germans.”

This video further complements this story.