United Kingdom reveals last decoded
Nazi message to mark VE Day
Fox News,
by
Louis Casiano
&
Christopher Carbone
Original Article
Posted By: MissMolly,
5/9/2020 4:20:22 AM
To mark Friday's 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, the British government revealed the final Nazi message intercepted and decoded by U.K. codebreakers as Allied forces were advancing through Germany.
"To mark #VEDay75 our Historian Tony Comer tells an untold tale from our archives. For the first time he reveals the final messages intercepted by GCHQ from a German communications network in the days leading up to #VEDay," tweeted Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
At 7:35 a.m. on May 7, 1945, a Nazi soldier identified as "Lt. Kunkel" sent a final message to colleagues from the town of Cuxhaven on Germany's North Sea coast.
Reply 1 - Posted by:
lftrn97 5/9/2020 8:50:27 AM (No. 405779)
Think about the horrendous loss of life and economic devastation Germany cost the world in the 20th Century. Seems to have been forgotten.
5 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
DVC 5/9/2020 12:08:51 PM (No. 406054)
An interesting story. My wife and I spent an entire day at Blechely Park last year. For a computer oriented guy and gal with serious interests in history, it was a fascinating day. And I finally got to understand exactly what the "Bombs" that they used to get the daily wheel settings were for and how they worked.
Smart folks, and a lot of hard work. And a huge number of mostly female clerks working to get the daily wheel settings by 'brute force methods'.
5 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
Harlowe 5/9/2020 3:19:36 PM (No. 406251)
#2- The Duchess of Cambridge (Kate Middleton) revealed in 2014 that her paternal grandmother was a civilian member of staff at Bletchley Park and worked in Hut 16, originally Hut 6, “where staff deciphered German army and air force messages sent using electro-mechanical rotor Enigma cipher machines.” Records from October 1944 indicate that her grandmother was “probably” a duty officer.
6 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
DVC 5/10/2020 2:01:07 AM (No. 406639)
#3, that is pretty good. So many ordinary Brits worked very hard on the war effort. The number of young women and men who were motorbike couriers in ALL weather, running messages around at all hours is amazing. Many hundreds of women ran the 'bomb' machines, by rote, not really knowing what they were
doing beyond their narrow jobs, for security reasons.
The key to breaking the Enigma codes, once a huge amount of work had been done to know what wheels that the particular sender was using, was the daily wheel settings. If you had a duplicate Enigma machine, and the correct wheels, in the correct locations (4 wheels, could be swapped around) you STILL had to know "today's settings" used to start the machine encoding, and changed each day,if you were going to decode.
So, these huge mechanical machines (bombs) were started up each morning and the wheels started out at the first position of the first wheel, first position of all the other wheels, in the "Bomb" machines, and they tested a sample of a mesage to see if sense came out. If not, the first wheel was indexed to the next position, all the rest left alone. Check again. Index to the third position on first wheel, all others the same...check the message. Once all the positions of the first wheel had been tried with all the other wheels on position 1, wheel 2 was set to position 2 and all the other wheels left on pos 1 while all the possible positons of wheel one were tried again. Each combination was checked against a sample message.
In practice the first wheel was spinning rapidly, and you could see the second wheel index once per rev of the first wheel,second wheel indexing one position about every second. Then the third wheel would index after a full rev of the second (tried all positions of the second wheel).
They were doing a 'brute force attack', literally trying ALL POSSIBLE combinations of starting points on the wheels, looking for words to come out, not gibberish. Once they had "a possible" - a word was output, they sent it back and the team tested it against the whole message. Sometimes the "possibles" were just flukes, created a word, but not decoded the message and the hunt continued. They spread the search amongst many "bombs", each doing a portion of the "all possible combination" in parallel to speed things up. Sometime in the day, they would stumble on that day's wheel settings and "they were in", could read all messages that day, from that particular Enigma machine.
But, start over tomorrow, or for a different Enigma machine, sending from a different radio station. Fascinating to me. Probably boring as hell to a lot of folks.
3 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
Harlowe 5/10/2020 6:20:58 PM (No. 407366)
#4- Fascinating. Thank you. Gratitude and blessings upon them all.
3 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
Harlowe 5/10/2020 10:59:04 PM (No. 407515)
#5 Addendum for #3 --- Informational: PBS produced a drama mystery series, Bletchely Circle, that was set in 1952-53 about four women who worked as codebreakers at Bletchley Park who turned their codebreaking skills into criminal investigation to save women from being murdered by a killer who stalked and tortured his victims. This household could not tolerate the emotional tension generated by the episodes so did not watch more than three or four episodes.
2 people like this.
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