11:30am Wednesday 9th September 2009
By Adam Cornell
A NAZI enciphering machine whose code the Allies cracked to hasten the defeat of the the Germans in the Second World War, has been loaned to a museum.
The Combined Military Services Museum in Station Road, Maldon has the Enigma machine on show, courtesy of an unnamed friend of the museum.
It is the same one used in the film Enigma, starring Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet, based on the Robert Harris novel.
The musuem staff are delighted to have the machine on show this month to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the war.
Curator Marilyn Bullivant said: “We are ecstatic. It is something that is just so iconic from that time.
“It is really a stroke of luck and the best time we could have had it. It is in perfect condition.”
The German military used the Enigma machine to keep their communications secret. It is an electro-mechanical device that relies on a series of rotating wheels to scramble messages into incoherent text.
There are billions of combinations and the right one can only be found if you know how the machine has been set up in the first place.
The Nazis believed it could not be broken, but with the help of Polish mathematicians, British codebreakers stationed at Bletchley Park, in Buckinghamshire, cracked the code.
About 9,000 people were working at Bletchley Park at the height of the codebreaking efforts in January 1945.
It meant the Allies could identify locations of U-boat submarines and impending attacks.
The codebreakers believed that the work at Bletchley Park shortened the war by two years, and General Eisenhower gave them credit for saving countless of lives.
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