How Heroic Polish Codebreakers set the Foundations for the Allies to Crack Enigma
(For high school students, teachers, and adults). This 12-minute video shows that the overall success against Enigma, and its contribution to the Allied victory over Germany, was the collaboration and cooperation between Poland, France, and England. However, the heart of this success was the contribution of the Polish code-breaking team of mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki, and Henryk Zygalski.
In December 1932, in the bathroom of a Belgian hotel, a French spymaster, Gustave Bertrand, photographs secret documents, which were the operating instructions of the cipher machine, Enigma. Bertrand obtained the documents from anti-Nazi German Hans Tilo Schmidt, and these were passed to the Poland’s Cipher Bureau. A few weeks later, Polish mathematician Rejewski in Warsaw began to decipher the coded communications of the Third Reich. This would then lay the foundations for the British code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park.
Six weeks before Hitler attacked Poland, a crucial meeting took place in Poland in which the Poles provided to their French and British intelligence counterparts a copy of the Enigma machine, the Bombe mechanism, and all associated documents. In the estimation of those who were there at the time, that what the British learned at the meeting advanced their program by a year.
In truth, Britain’s code-breakers made no progress against the military version of the Enigma before 1940. As confirmed by Gordon Welchman at 10:10 in the video, they were only able to bring a rapid and quick transformation of their capabilities because of the contributions of Rejewski and his two code-breaking experts, Zygalski and Rozycki.
In December 1942, it is the middle of World War II. The Polish code-breakers are in France on the run from the Germans. People who know the Enigma secret are not supposed to be in the combat zone for fear of capture. As a result, British Intelligence MI6 devises a plan to exfiltrate them. If it goes wrong, if they are caught, they could give away the greatest secret of the war. Luckily, the Germans were unable to track them down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIRi8qdFRMA