26 Nazi Enigma machines discovered - Helped General Franco in Spanish Civil War

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5003411.ece

Nazi Enigma machines helped General Franco in Spanish Civil War


Sixteen crates locked in a dark store room in Madrid for more than 70 years hold the secret to how General Franco might have won the Spanish Civil War.

Inside the crates are Enigma code-making machines that Franco had bought from Nazi Germany and used to co-ordinate his troops who fought on fronts hundreds of miles apart.

The 26 machines were discovered this week by the Spanish daily newspaper El País, hidden in army headquarters since the Civil War ended in 1939, most still in perfect condition.

The Enigma machines gave Franco's Nationalists a crucial advantage because their code was never cracked by their Republican foes. Hitler used the machine to devastating effect to command his forces during the Second World War, until the code was finally deciphered by cryptologists at Bletchley Park, Oxfordshire.

After the Nationalist rebellion in July 1936, General Franco realised that the Civil War could be won only by co-ordinating simultaneous offensives in different parts of the country.

Franco needed to improve communications between his generals as encryption of top-secret messages was far from sophisticated: at the start of the war both sides used the same codes.

He bought ten Enigma machines from Germany, distributing them among his generals. Hitler supported Franco, but only to a degree.

The Madrid cache comprises commercial Enigma machines, invented in 1920, rather than the more effective and highly secret military version that the German army used so effectively during the war.

Rafael Moreno Izquierido, a professor of journalism at Complutense University, Madrid, said: “Hitler was aware of the risk of one of these machines falling into British or Soviet hands and most likely did not trust the Spanish fully as the smallest slip-up could have compromised his secret weapon.”

Even the inferior Enigma machine was highly complex and required two operators, with each message assigned a different code.

Commander Antonio Sarmiento was in charge of training operators at Franco's headquarters in Salamanca.

In a 1936 report he said: “To give an idea of how secure these machines are, suffice to say that the number of possible combinations is a remarkable 1,252,962,387,456.”

Franco was said to have taken an Enigma machine with him when he travelled to the front. Impressed with their performance, he eventually bought up to 50 of them, and they were in use until the 1950s.

Professor Denis Smyth, of the University of Toronto, an expert on Second World War intelligence operations, said that the British code breaker Alfred Dilwyn Knox cracked the code of Franco's machine in 1937, but “this information was not passed on to the Republicans”.

Some of the surviving machines are displayed in Spanish military museums. Those unearthed by El País were found by chance in an attic of the Army headquarters when an inventory was being carried out.

British efforts to crack the Enigma code used by Germany were dramatised in the 2001 film Enigma, starring Kate Winslet.

 

The information (James Dunnigan, "Dirty little secrets of world war 2")i have says they got an Enigma machine from Poland, before the war. The poles had started work on cracking the code but were invaded and defeated before this could be done. Somehow the Poles managed to smuggle an enigma machine to Britain, like you said, before they were overrun. The British were able to figure out how it worked and even how to decrypt many, but not all, messages transmitted by it.

Allied code breakers depended greatly on the laziness of the individual German enigma operator. The enigma machine worked by first sending a special code, to tell the other machine what code it should use to decrypt the incoming message. The operator was supposed to change the special code from time to time to make it harder to decrypt. While the coding combinations were indeed quite secure when the machine was used as ordered, alot of operators were lazy and did not change the code often enough. This sometimes gave the allies the opportunity to crack the code from this particular machine for a while. The problem was not only decrypting German messages, but being able to do it in time for the information to be useful. But if the enigma operator changed the code it was back to square one for the allied codebreakers.

 

Up until more rotors where added to the machine which complicated breaking the code.

 

So what will Spain do with the machines? Do they go off to 26 Spanish museums? Stay with the Spanish government? Auction them off? That is a lot of very desireable relics to come to light all at once.

 

That is a good question. I wonder if they would somehow offer them up to museums.

 

What I find funny about the whole spanish civil war (Not that people dying is funny) But that Germany before the war participated in the neutality blockade along with British ships. Example Graff Spee actually on patrol less than 200 miles away from HMS Exeter and she being one of 3 ships that fought her into montevideo.

I think it makes one giggle inside

 

If such a relic goes on sale I wonder how much it would sell for? Such a large amount at the time is certainly unique.

 

True enough. My guess would be in the low 6 figures. I'm sure there are some wealthy WWII buffs out there willing to dish out some $$$.

 

Hi , I visited Blechley park last year and a very interesting place it is
I was given a guided tour be a gent who work there during the war (can not remember his name) as marc said in this earlyer post the Poles cracked the code first. They then gave the fourmulars to English agents in a forest outside Walsaw, I am not sure that thay gave us and enigma machine though??
I thourght that our first one came off a U boat