Description
(Please note NEW date: Monday, April 3 at 1 pm.) The now legendary Enigma machine was used by all branches of Nazi Germany’s military to encode messages by scrambling letters that could only be read by another machine with proper keys to decode the message. The fact that the Allies were able to intercept and read messages sent at the highest levels of secrecy likely shortened the war. This class will explain the general principle of encrypting messages, describe how the Enigma machine worked, and how the Allies exploited a small weakness in the design of the machine to read Enigma’s secret messages. The class will combine a discussion of codebreaking with WWII history, and the later history of how the effort to break the Enigma code came to light.
