Hans- Thilo Schmidt, an Employee Of

German names and they also gathered information on the code machine they were making. 14 “Hans- Thilo Schmidt, an employee of the German cryptographic agency…offered to sell German cryptographic information [to the French]”.15 Eventually, the whole group reconvened in August 1939 at Bletchley Park, Great Britain. This was a small country house which was perfect for the codebreakers. 16 Bletchley’s original purpose was to be an air raid shelter for Admiral Sinclair, who was in charge of English Naval Intelligence, and the newly developed “British Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS), the name for Britain’s signals intelligence (SIGINT)”. Bletchley Park was called the Government Communications Bureau, in order to conceal it true purpose.17 It was the perfect place to focus on breaking an unbreakable code. It was noted that after the war, some Polish officers who lived in Britain “stated that the Poles constructed a number of Enigma machines from the information extracted from the factory in Germany coupled with the help of their own cryptographers” and that was the machine they gave to mathematicians at Bletchley Park. 18 There were other people besides mathematicians, however. There was a chess champion, a director of research for a chain of department stores in England and an accountant, as well as a stockbroker. 19 There were also women who were involved in the process of decoding and breaking Enigma.20 Though the Polish started the decoding and breaking of Enigma process, historians argue that the English were actually the ones to break Enigma, and that is a valid point. The Polish gave the Enigma machine they had created to the English so the English could Figure 4: Hut 3 at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire in 1942. Here, civilian and service personnel worked together at code- break the code. However, when the Polish broke breaking top-secret military communiques between Hitler and the Enigma, the plugboard for the Enigma his armed forces. This is to show the amount of work that machine had used six of the twenty-six plugs. went into to break the Enigma codes. When the British got around to breaking the code, ten of the twenty-six plugs were used. 21 This meant the English could somewhat use what the Polish had cracked to start with, but they had to start over due to the Germans changing their north of London, where the British cipher bureau was strategy. Also, according to an eyewitness meeting that Marian Rejewski had with the British codebreakers, Rejewski said the British had managed to get past the first difficulties. They did not have the drum connections. They had no methods whatsoever. Bletchley Park was in England, so it made sense to staff it with English people. Another valid reason to suggest that the English broke the code first and were also considered the most important members of the cracking of Enigma was a letter sent to General 14 Winterbotham, 11. 15 Jennifer Wilcox, Solving the Enigma: History of the Cryptanalytic Bomb, (Fort George G. Meade: Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2001), 2. 16 Winterbotham, 11. 17 Rodney P. Carlisle and Blaire M. Harms, "Bletchley Park." Encyclopedia of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. Vol. 1, (Armonk, NY: Sharpe Reference, 2005),77. 18 Winterbotham, 16. 19 Welchman, 84-85. 20 Welchman, 86. 21 Christensen, 254. 38.

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