 |
 |
The Enigma
One of the hardest ever codes to break was used by the Germans during the Second World War. It was written and decoded by machines called Enigma.
Enigma
could code messages in over 150 million million ways, so you can see why
the Germans thought that no one would ever be able to break it. The machine
itself looked a bit like a typewriter.
The key to making the code so hard to break were a series of rotors (wheels) - a bit like the ones in our Encoder - that could be changed from day to day. Unless you had both an Enigma machine and the daily instructions for setting the rotors, the task of breaking the code was an extremely difficult one.
Getting hold of the coded messages sent by the Germans wasn't a problem - the British would intercept thousands of them every day. But what could be done with them? How could the code be broken?