The Polish military’s prewar codebreaker course was so clandestine that it was even concealed from the lead professor’s secretary, who had German roots.
A handpicked group of Poland’s brightest mathematics students would spend a dozen hours each week unscrambling German ciphers. In 1932 three of them hit the jackpot: they broke the “unbreakable” Enigma code, laying the foundations for similar British feats during the Second World War.
Now the original site of Poland’s codebreaking office is opening as a museum, the Enigma Cipher Centre, to tell the story of how the country’s cryptologists paved the way for later efforts at Bletchley Park.
The new Polish museum to its codebreakers is at the site of their work in Poznan
From the 1920s Polish intelligence suspected that the Germans had started using typewriter-like machines to code their correspondence. The army founded a cipher