http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8158782.stm
How Poles cracked Nazi Enigma secret
By Laurence Peter
BBC News
20 July 2009
A silk scarf bearing the image of a horse race was a suitably cryptic gift for a Polish mathematician to receive from a British code-breaker.
The Poles had got there first - that seemed to be the message.
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The fictional film Enigma, made in 2000, had dismayed Poles by neglecting these achievements and portraying a Pole as a traitor.
It has taken a long time to establish the historical facts, but the picture is much clearer now, in the run-up to the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.
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One of the lessons the British learned from the Polish experience was the importance of engaging the country's best mathematicians in the code-breaking project.
While British code-breakers were undoubtedly bright - Knox was a translator of ancient Greek poetry - they were not necessarily mathematicians.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/9594403/Poles-launch-campaign-for-Enigma-code-breaking-recognition.html
Poles launch campaign for Enigma code-breaking recognition
By Matthew Day, Warsaw
08 Oct 2012
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Frustrated at watching the achievements of the British wartime code breakers at Bletchley Park lauded while those of Poles go overlooked, Poland's parliament has launched a campaign to "restore justice" to the Polish men and women who first broke the Enigma codes.
As part of the effort the upper house of Poland's parliament is to pass a resolution praising Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski, the three Polish mathematicians who first broke the codes back in 1932.
Hailed as "heroes" in the resolution, Rejewski, Rozycki and Zygalski worked at the Polish Cipher Bureau in the early 1930s, and in late 1932 came up with three methods for breaking the encrypted codes produced on the Enigma machine, which the Germans thought were unbreakable.
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The campaign to garner greater recognition for the Polish code breakers reflects a more widespread annoyance in Poland over how the country's contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany has often been overlooked or downplayed in post-war accounts.
Polish pilots had the highest kill rates in the Battle of Britain, Polish troops fought in the North African, Italian and Normandy campaigns, and were involved in the Battle for Berlin.
Despite their efforts, a British desire to appease Stalin meant that Polish forces, still under the command of Poland's independent government in exile, were banned from taking part in official V-E Day celebrations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#Polish_breakthrough
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.
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The German plugboard-equipped Enigma became the Third Reich's principal crypto-system. It was broken 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 (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park built up an extensive cryptanalytic facility.
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Polish breakthrough
Main article: Polish Cipher Bureau
In the 1920s the German military began using a 3-rotor Enigma, whose security was increased in 1930 by the addition of a plugboard.[35] The Polish Cipher Bureau sought to break it due to the increasing threat that Poland faced from Germany. On 1 September 1932, a 27-year-old Polish mathematician, Marian Rejewski, joined the Bureau along with two fellow Poznań University mathematics graduates, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki.[36] Their first task was to solve the logical structure of the military Enigma, which differed from the commercial version.
In December 1932, the Bureau received from Gustave Bertrand of French Military Intelligence, two German documents and two pages of Enigma daily keys[37] which had been obtained by the French from an agent who worked at Germany's Cipher Office in Berlin, Hans-Thilo Schmidt.[38] This material enabled Rejewski to achieve "one of the most important breakthroughs in cryptologic history"[39] by using the theory of permutations and groups to work out the Enigma scrambler wiring.[40][41]
Rejewski found that the connections between the military Enigma's keyboard and the entry ring were not, as in the commercial Enigma, in the order of the keys on a German typewriter. He made an inspired correct guess that it was in alphabetical order. Britain's Dilly Knox was astonished when he learned, in July 1939, that the arrangement was so simple.[42][43] Having worked out the logical structure of the machine, Rejewski had replicas made, which he called 'Enigma doubles'.
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http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/virtualbp/poles/poles.htm
The Breaking of Enigma by the Polish Mathematicians
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The Polish Mathematicians
Polish Intelligence were initially unable to break the German Enigma traffic, however driven by the imperative of finding what the Germans were up to, they, uniquely among other nations at that time, decided to try a mathematical approach. In 1932 a team of young mathematicians was set up. It included Jerzy Rozycki, Henryk Zygalski and Marian Rejewski (all of whom were products of the notable flowering of Polish mathematics in the 1920s and 1930s).
Rejewski quickly showed that mathematical techniques could be used to attack the problem of finding the message key by exploiting the German's cryptographic error in repeating the message key at the start of a transmission.
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