The Breaking of the Enigma - An Interview with Dermot Turing

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the first breaking of the Enigma Code by three Polish mathematicians: Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski - on the 31st of December 1932, Marian Rejewski was able to decipher and read messages sent by the German coding machine Enigma for the first time.

In this 23-minute interview, hear Alan Turing's nephew Dermot Turing talk about the origins and purposes of the famous Enigma machine. He explains how the machine worked and why the German military came to adopt it in the 1930s, as well as the critical contribution of the Polish codbreakers to its deciphering and how Polish intellgence helped to inform a later collaboration between the Polish, British and French military intellgience teams on the breaking of further Enigma codes during #WWII.

The film is a prelude to a second film about the cyclometer machine, the first machine used for code breaking by Marian Rejewski, which was reconstructed at Cambridge University and is the world’s only known replica, reconstructed on the basis of sketches made by Rejewski. The original machine was destroyed just before the outbreak of WWII to prevent the Germans finding out that the Enigma had been broken.

Keep an eye out for the publication of this video on our Social Media channels on the 11th of November.

This film was produced by the Polish Cultural Institute.

#enigma #cryptography #wwii