Start of the sale:
Saturday, 30 June 2012 at 04:30
Item n°178874269
Sale ends:
Sunday, 21 April 2024 at 19:06
NEVER HINGED MINT - DAY OF ISSUE 16 AUGUST 1983.
Cryptanalysis of the Enigma enabled the western Allies in World War II to read substantial amounts of secret Morse-coded radio communications of the Axis powers that had been enciphered using Enigma machines. This yielded military intelligence which, along with that from other decrypted Axis radio and teleprinter transmissions, was given the codename Ultra. This was considered by western Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower to have been \"decisive\" to the Allied victory.
The Enigma machines were a family of portable cipher machines with rotor scramblers. Good operating procedures, properly enforced, would have made the cipher unbreakable. However, most of the German armed and secret services and civilian agencies that used Enigma employed poor procedures and it was these that allowed the cipher to be broken.
The German plugboard-equipped Enigma became the Third Reich´s principal crypto-system. It was reconstructed by the Polish General Staff´s Cipher Bureau in December 1932—with the aid of French-supplied intelligence material that had been obtained from a German spy. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the Polish Cipher Bureau initiated the French and British into its Enigma-breaking techniques and technology at a conference held in Warsaw.
From this beginning, the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park built up an extensive cryptanalytic facility. Initially, the decryption was mainly of Luftwaffe and a few Army messages, as the German Navy employed much more secure procedures for using Enigma.
Alan Turing, a Cambridge University mathematician and logician, provided much of the original thinking that led to the design of the cryptanalytical Bombe machines, and the eventual breaking of naval Enigma. However, when the German Navy introduced an Enigma version with a fourth rotor for its U-boats, there was a prolonged period when those messages could not be decrypted. With the capture of relevant cipher keys and the use of much faster U.S. Navy Bombes, regular, rapid reading of German naval messages resumed.
An Enigma machine is any of a family of related electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines used for the encryption and decryption of secret messages. Enigma was invented by German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I. The early models were used commercially from the early 1920s, and adopted by military and government services of several countries — most notably by Nazi Germany before and during World War II. Several different Enigma models were produced, but the German military models are the ones most commonly discussed.
In December 1932, the Polish Cipher Bureau (in particular Rejewski, Rozycki and Zygalski) first broke Germany´s military Enigma ciphers. Five weeks before the outbreak of World War II, on 25 July 1939, in Warsaw, they presented their Enigma-decryption techniques and equipment to French and British military intelligence. From 1938, additional complexity was repeatedly added to the machines, making the initial decryption techniques decreasingly successful. Nonetheless, the Polish breakthrough represented a vital basis for the later British effort. [6] During the war, British codebreakers were able to decrypt a vast number of messages that had been enciphered using the Enigma. The intelligence gleaned from this source, codenamed \"Ultra\" by the British, was a substantial aid to the Allied war effort.
The exact influence of Ultra on the course of the war is debated; an oft-repeated assessment is that decryption of German ciphers hastened the end of the European war by two years. Winston Churchill told Britain´s King George VI after World War II: \"It was thanks to Ultra that we won the war.\"
Although Enigma had some cryptographic weaknesses, in practice it was only in combination with procedural flaws, operator mistakes, captured key tables and hardware, that Allied cryptanalysts were able to be so successful.
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