Enigma - Anita

• The Enigma machine is a piece of hardware invented by a German and used by British code breakers to decipher signals and messages of attack between the Germans during World War II.
• Arthur Scherbius, a German engineer, developed the Enigma, a machine capable of decoding coded messages and transcribing them. He hoped that his invention would interest commercial companies. In 1923 he set up his company, Cipher Machines Corporation, in Berlin to began to manufacture his product. In three years, the German navy was producing their own prototype, along with the air force and army later on.
• Enigma allowed an operator to input a specific message, them would scramble the characters and words by using three to five different notches, or rotors, which displayed different letters to confuse the receiver. The receiver needed to know the exact settings of this machine in order to reconstruct the message. Over the years, the functions of the machine became more complicated and complex as German expert coders began to add plugs with electronic circuits.
• The Germans were convinced that their Enigma code was unbreakable, so they used the machine to send important messages related to the battlefield, navy, and diplomatic communications. The Germans also enjoyed some code breaking success, such as in 1935, when they broke the British Naval code, which enabled them to locate Allied convoys during the war. That same year, the US altered their code too late to prevent the damage German U-boat campaigns caused off America's coast. The Germans also were successful in managing cracking Soviet and Dutch Codes. This information obscured from high-level German sources was named ULTRA.
• The first to come close to breaking the German's Enigmatic code were the Polish, because their engineering industries were closely linked and similar. Since war brewing, the Polish Cipher Bureau decided to share their findings with the British. The British then decided to establish the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. Mathematicians and intelligence experts were recruited to began the difficult and urgent task of cracking the Enigma code. Their success began when they were able to read and understand German code in 1940. But their work only began to have meaning when they were able to reconstruct German codes and gather evidence about an invasion on Greece, along with Italian naval plans gained by the German. In March 1941, the German Naval code was finally deciphered and could be read. The British went on to accomplish much more on breaking German codes, but Bletchley Park and its staff made a crucial and groundbreaking contribution in defeating the Axis.