Poles launch campaign for Enigma code-breaking recognition

It is hailed as an masterstroke of British code breaking that helped defeat Adolf Hitler and save the lives of thousands of Allied soldiers. However, decades after Nazi Germany's Enigma code was first cracked, Poland has gone on the offensive to reclaim the glory of a cryptological success it feels has been unjustly claimed by Britain.

Frustrated at watching the achievements of the British wartime code breakers at Bletchley Park lauded while those of Poles go overlooked, Poland's parliament has launched a campaign to "restore justice" to the Polish men and women who first broke the Enigma codes.

Read More: Poles launch campaign for Enigma code-breaking recognition - Telegraph

 

How sad they have been denied this much admired and specially remembered place in history in the films depicting these actions of the early code breakers that did receive such special tributes. Perhaps now they will get some of the recognition they deserve for their early work on the Allies behalf.

 

(2/12) World War II Mind of a Code Breaker - YouTube

This is an excellent documentary about the breaking of the Enigma machine by Blechley Park and the Polish Mathematicians, in particular the Pole Rejewski and the Englishman Turing. Two absolute geniuses. But it's doubtful the Poles could have broken the Enigma initially without help from a German army clerk, who offered some 300 documents to both the French and British secret services, who turned them down. However, the Polish Secret Service was happy to accept them, as this part of the documentary shows.

This aired on NOVA a long time ago, I remember watching it when I was a kid. Still holds a lot of childhood memories for me.

 

Maybe they should make a movie instead. Wonder if people today care much about those things or understand the meaning of breaking enigma.

 

That's the whole thing Kai, a movie would seem interesting to us , but would it be the case for anyone?

 

Every serious book I've read about Enigma has gone into detail about the Polish efforts Just picking one off my shelf at random ( Ronald Lewin's Ultra Goes To War published in 1978 ) : the entire first chapter is devoted to this and concludes 'They ( the Poles ) had made Ultra possible'.

A movie-based-on-a-popular-novel is never going to be a solid historical resource and to tell the full story of Ultra would be very boring to an everyday cinema audience......

 

It's a shame too, since in the end Ultra and the Poles saved countless lives...

It's amazing how the code breakers at Blechley Park were able to crack Luftwaffe "Red" in 1940 and broke it every single day until the end of the war from what I know

 

Any half decent book that deals with the topic I read so far tell the story from the beginning. And that were the Polish efforts of the 1930s.

a) That is a movie!
b) It is set in 1943!
c) The British government is being depicted as a far bigger traitor and rightly so!

 

The Poles get mentioned in all my extensive Enigma and crypto library and histories...In fact Gubbins went to Poland in 39 to rescue some of them.

The Polish Military have to be looked at into how they kept back much of the signals from their own mathermaticians and scientists before the war. Bletchley Park could have in fact had its forerunner in Poland otherwise.