A "Ertel-Werke" 3-rotor Enigma Enciphering Machine,

Munich, circa 1944,

Footnotes

Patented by Arthur Scherbius in 1918, the Enigma machine utilizes three interchangeable rotors which scramble plain-text messages and produce a cipher text message which is then sent, generally via Morse code, to a receiving party with an Enigma set up in the same configuration as the sending Enigma. All of the machines could use the interchangeable wheels from any enigma, so to find a matching set of wheels with the same serial number as the Enigma is quite rare. Though the German military was familiar with the Enigma, it was not adopted as their primary cipher device until 1926, when they discovered that all German naval coded messages had been intercepted and read by the British during the latter half of WWI.

It is unknown exactly how many enigma machines were made, but we know that few survived the war. Rather than have the machines fall into enemy hands, they were destroyed by the Germans upon retreat and documents pertaining to their manufacture were burned or in many cases simply lost. On top of this, Churchill ordered all Enigma machines to be destroyed at the end of the war, so few machines remain intact.

This example of the three rotor enigma machine was used principally by the army (Wehrmacht), and was their favoured enciphering device. British attempts to break the German Military Enigma code were fruitless for years. The breakthrough eventually came after the creation of the famous British code breaking centre Bletchley Park. Using the technology transferred to them from the brilliant Polish code breaking team, as well as documents supplied by the French Intelligence from a German spy, the great Alan Turing, along with Knox, Foss and many others were able to break the Enigma code and deal with changes over time, shortening the war by an estimated two years, and saving countless lives.