Dismantling the beast
Last week, the U.K.'s Prince Andrew brought the original Enigma coding machine, used by Nazi Germany in World War II, back to Poland after 61 years.
Three Polish mathematicians decoded the Enigma in 1933. Six years later, two months before the start of the war, they handed the machine along with its coding patterns to the French and British authorities.
"The visit was important because it was noticed throughout the world," said Zbigniew Wawer, a historian at the Historical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). "It's been generally believed that English cryptologists broke the Enigma's code," he said.
Wladyslaw Kozaczuk, a historian who wrote a book about the Enigma, "W kregu Enigmy" ("The Enigma Circle"), said that Poland's earliest efforts to decipher the German coding machine began in 1928, shortly after it had been developed. The first attempts yielded no results. All that changed when the Polish Coding Bureau, a military intelligence branch, recruited three young mathematicians: Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski, to unlock the mystery of the Enigma in 1931. It took them two years to achieve their aim.
Jerzy Kocinski, a physicist at Warsaw's Politechnical University, is a Kozaczuk enthusiast.
"The three studied at Poznan University and were students of Zdzislaw Krygowski, an algebra lecturer," Kocinski said. He also joined a group of Krygowski's students years after the three "code breakers" had studied there.
"He lectured on 'permutation group theory' when nobody at Oxford or Cambridge was dealing with those kinds of mathematical problems," Kocinski said. "Krygowski was a very good mathematician."
Kocinski said that the reasons these three Poles succeeded in breaking the Enigma code was because they had a vast knowledge of permutation group theory and two of them spoke German.
"The English and the French had better resources and a larger group of mathematicians, but were not able to decode it," he said.
The code breakers, who were assigned to the Polish Coding Bureau after getting the highest scores in preliminary tests, worked on a simplified version of the Enigma produced for civilian companies in Germany. Kocinski said that after they had broken the code they created a formula that could be used to decipher other codes.
He added that the three mathematicians' contribution to decoding the Enigma hasn't been well known in the U.K.
"(People) know what they've read in Encyclopedia Britannica," Kocinski said.
In Poland, even mathematics students aren't all that familiar with the history of the enigma, and their forefathers' role in its disarming.
Krzysztof Wozniakowski, a graduate of Warsaw University's mathematics department, learned who Rejewski was from television many years ago. He added that Rejewski received an honorary membership in the Polish Mathematics Association (PTM) in the 1970s.
Wawer said that understanding the Enigma proved immensely valuable to the Allies in World War II. "The English said that (was especially the case) in North Africa and during air bombing attacks against England," he said. "The fact that Prince Andrew delivered the Enigma now is very important, considering the fact that studies on Polish Intelligence Archives in England are underway."
Rejewski said he gave up mathematics after the war because he was afraid that the communist secret police would link him to the Enigma. Rozycki drowned in the Mediterranean in 1942. The third mathematician, Zygalski, lectures on mathematics in England.
