Hitler code machine, which had 1.6 quadrillion combinations, loses again to Bletchley Park supercomputer
Scientists recreate how German military chiefs sent secret messages and how they deciphered them during the second world war
The machine Hitler used to send coded messages to his generals met the supercomputer that revealed its secrets on Friday, watched on by veteran operatives whose painstaking work helped bring the second world war to an end.
Scientists at Bletchley Park in southern England, the second world war code breaking headquarters, fired up the valves, whirring wheels and spinning motors of the two machines to recreate how German military chiefs sent secret messages and how they were deciphered.
Hitler’s Lorenz machine boasted 1.6 million billion possible coding combinations, thanks to a series of 12 rotors, a million times more complex than the more feted Enigma machine.
Through luck and the ingenuity of engineer Tommy Flowers, scientists were able to deduce how the machine operated and then build a machine to work out the settings of Lorenz’s rotors.
“Colossus” is regarded as the world’s first programmable, electronic digital computer, but received little attention as the project was kept secret for decades, depriving those responsible of due accolades.
Among those watching at the National Museum of Computing were Margaret Bullen, who helped build Colossus, and some of the remaining operatives who fed encrypted German messages into the machine, including Irene Dixon, now in her nineties.