Enigma was a family of machines used by the German armed forces to encode their secret messages. By the outbreak of the Second World War, it was widely considered unbreakable.

The first wartime Enigma messages were deciphered by the British in January 1940. However, this was the culmination of a process of examination and analysis that had begun in the 1920s when the first ‘glow-lamp’ Enigma machine was introduced. The final breakthrough was a hard-won team effort, involving experts in the UK, France and Poland.

In this revealing talk, Dr Thomas Cheetham traces the story of the international attack on Enigma from London, via Paris and Warsaw, to Bletchley Park.

Dr Thomas Cheetham is Research Officer at Bletchley Park. He studied at the University of Kent and completed his PhD, which examined oral histories of British Army veterans of the Second World War, at the University of Wolverhampton in 2018. He has published on Bletchley Park and works to broaden understanding of British codebreaking and signals intelligence during the Second World War.

From Warsaw to Bletchley Park: The International Effort To Break Enigma