On June 27, 1941, British cryptologists help break the secret code used by the German army to direct its strategic military operations on the Eastern front in the Soviet Union.
British and Polish experts had already broken many of the Enigma codes for the Western front. Enigma was the Germans’ most sophisticated coding machine, necessary to secretly transmit information. The Enigma machine, invented in 1918 by Arthur Scherbius looked like a typewriter and was originally employed for business purposes. The German army adapted the machine for wartime use and considered its encoding system unbreakable. They were wrong.
Bletchley Park codebreaker Alan Turing developed a machine designed to decipher Enigma codes. Turing's prototype "bombe" unit, named Victory, was first installed in the spring of 1940.
The British had broken their first Enigma code as early as the German invasion of Poland and had intercepted virtually every message sent through the occupation of Holland and France.
Now, with the German invasion of Russia, the Allies needed to be able to intercept coded messages transmitted on this second, Eastern, front. The first breakthrough occurred on June 27, but various keys would continue to be broken by the British over the next year, each conveying information of higher secrecy and priority than the last. (For example, a series of decoded messages nicknamed “Weasel” proved extremely important in anticipating German anti-aircraft and antitank strategies against the Allies.) These decoded messages were regularly passed to the Soviet High Command regarding German troop movements and planned offensives, and back to London regarding the mass murder of Russian prisoners and Jewish concentration camp victims. Turing personally broke the Enigma code that was used by U-boats attacking North Atlantic shipping lanes.
