Breaking an unbreakable code to save at the very least millions and millions of lives to possibly

stop Hitler from taking over the world. That was the unimaginably stressful task assigned to a

select group of codebreakers during World War II. A task with the stakes could not have possibly

been any higher. And many thought accomplishing this task was quite literally impossible.

The code breaking all stars were initially primarily composed of. And if you listen to this podcast

for any length of time, you know it pains me to say this primarily a group of Polish

mathematicians. I know, right? And then later British, French and Americans all racing against

the clock to deconstruct the most powerful encoding machine of their day, the Enigma machine.

The Enigma machine allowed its operator to type in a message and then scramble it. Really,

really scramble it. One three rotor Enigma machine, the most common configuration could encode a

military message into over 15 quintillion different ways. That's a 15 followed by 18 zeros.

And by the end of World War II, the Enigma machine would evolve into an eight rotor machine,

upgrading its possibilities into the septilians over 400 septillion possibilities, 26 zeros,

over 400 trillion trillions, an absurd number. The Enigma encryption to many felt completely

unbreakable. First developed in Germany for commercial use as Hitler was legally beefing up this

military during the Third Reich to fulfill his plans of world domination. The Enigma machines

military uses soon became a very important part of the German war machine. They would end up

using it for all their important military communications, ambushes, bombing raids, youboat attacks

in the North Atlantic on allied supply lines, etc, etc, etc. The Enigma machine allowed for

truly secret communications between central command and a variety of field commanders. As long as

the Enigma machines encryption remained indecisurable, the Germans could plan and execute strategies

with little to no fear that the allies would have any idea what they were up to, what they were about

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