How Was Hitler's Enigma Machine Cracked?

September 1939 as Britain declared war on Nazi Germany an extraordinary motley army was being assembled at Bletchley Park in the English countryside near London to fight a secret war their mission was to crack one of the hardest codes ever devised created on a machine called enigma enigma lay at the heart of Hitler's Armed Forces communications system two of this elite with a renowned mathematician Alan Turing and the Dean of a Cambridge College Gordon Welshman Gordon welchman was actually quite glamorous he was good-looking and he knew he was good-looking he had a way with the ladies he was fantastically bright very pugnacious obviously very proud man Welshman was one of the original elite code breakers given the Herculean task of decoding the Enigma machine enigma used a combination of rotors plugs and wiring to put German messages into secret code there were 1 in 159 million million million possible combinations while others sought to crack the codes Welshman took a different approach instead he focused on what would come to be known as traffic analysis the body of the message was unreadable but the first few letters and numbers were not encode this was the callsign the address identifying who the message was to and from there was crucial information in the call signs and welshman started to track it linking up who was sending and receiving the messages where they were where they went it was a brilliantly simple observation yet it would prove crucial they call it chat that comes over there and by this means we can build up a picture of a German unit the headquarters any outstations it has and how they keep in touch with it we saw and sent messages just using traffic analysis Welshman started to reveal the precise enemy forces that faced the Allies modern code-breaking was born and they had a big warm up and you could visually see the whole setup the German communication system traffic analysis was Bletchley 's first major breakthrough without an analysis of traffic you would never have been able to use cryptography to win the war you

Channel: Smithsonian Channel

Views: 370,347

Keywords: Alan Turing, communications, outstation, video, london, central, free videos, Bletchley Park, covert, Military, Facts, Episodes, command, channel, WWII, Welchman, stream TV, breaker, Turing, analysis, watch, free tv, nazi, Reich, traffic, message, Germany, War, ww2, unit, smithsonian, number, World, crack, code, Documentary, enigma, England, cryptography, Hitler, Britain, TV online, allies, intelligence

Id: mXZNayEPFKc

Length: 3min 5sec (185 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2015