How Did Nazi Germany Break Enigma And How It Was Broken

During World War II, Nazi Germany had a machine called Enigma that sent coded messages to and back from German airships and generals (Grime). There were 150 million million million ways these messages could have been coded, and it changed daily (“Military Use of the Enigma”). It was known as “the unbreakable code”. I’m going to tell you how that code was broken. Not many people know how it was broken, or even what it was, but without breaking Enigma, historians are confident that Germany would have won the war. Today I am going to be informing you about Enigma, how it was broken, and who broke it. I chose this topic because I’m interested and wanted to look more into it for details. I researched this topic and read a lot about it not only

The team that broke Enigma held five men and one woman, whom they were reluctant to let in, but did anyway. They were the best of the best, the most amazing or quickest working minds they could find, and they worked the hardest and fastest together in hope they would break the coded messages faster than other people. Their names were Hugh Alexander, Joan Clarke, John Cairncross, Peter Hilton, Jack Good, and the main man Alan Turing. He was the head of the team and the most advanced mind. They worked in one of many buildings or, as they called them, huts in Bletchley Park in Bletchley, England. Their hut was Hut 8 (Farndale). They worked by hand for a while, until Alan Turing had an idea to fight machine with machine. And so Alan spent months designing and building a machine that no one besides him, his team, and the man in charge of Bletchley Park, Stewart Menzies, believed in. And they built it and named it The Universal Turing Machine (IWM Staff). This machine didn’t really work. It was too slow to go through all of the codes before the day was over. Then, a member of the team, Jack Good had a dream. He didn’t remember exactly what happened in the dream, but he woke up wondering if the code was less random. That maybe the code started with the same letters every time to make it easier for the Germans to uncode on the battlefield. He was right. The first letter

The Universal Turing Machine was actually the first breakthrough towards computers. This is why many people recognize him as “the father of computer science”. Making and using this machine saved two years off of the war and saved between 14 and 21 million lives (Cashill). Alan wanted to keep improving his machine. He worked and worked to make it better and more efficient. But Alan had a secret and it got out. He was prosecuted in 1952. He was offered either four years in prison or chemical castration for “gross public indecency”, or in other words for being homosexual. Alan chose chemical castration, meant to try and “fix” him, so he could continue to work on his machine. The chemicals were slowly deteriorating his brain and he had not been the genius he used to be. On top of that, the treatment was painful physically and sent him spiraling into madness. Two years after he started chemical castration, Alan committed suicide