possess the mathematical skills necessary and the linguistic skills possibly helpful for attacking the Enigma. An instructor assembled a group with those qualifications for Pokorny and Ciȩżki, who invited them to join a class in cryptology. Some twenty accepted. Pledged to secrecy, they attended a night course once a week at the university’s Mathematics Institute in the fake-medieval castle built by Kaiser Wilhelm II. The instructors—Ciȩżki, Pokorny, and a civilian cryptanalyst, engineer, and radio ham named Antoni Palluth—came from Warsaw, 200 miles away.
Palluth lectured first, on the basics of cryptology. Then Ciȩżki spoke on the German army field cipher that Warsaw had solved. It was not the Enigma but a pencil-and-paper system called a double transposition. It mixed the letters of the plaintext message rather than replacing them with other letters. The cryptanalyst’s task was to unscramble them, to restore their original order. Ciȩżki assigned the students someactual intercepts to break. To help them, he told them that the messages dealt with winter quarters and bivouacs on training grounds.
Within a few hours, three students had solved the cryptograms. Gradually, as the test cryptograms became harder, more and more students dropped out of the course. And then one of the three who had solved the double transposition, Marian Rejewski, left—but not for lack of ability or interest. He had received his degree in mathematics and wanted to pursue studies in actuarial mathematics at one of the world centers for mathematics, the university at Göttingen.
Rejewski, a short, unprepossessing twenty-three-year-old, did not impress the other Polish mathematicians at Göttingen by his mind or his manner, by his looks or his personality. He had no close friends at the university, but he tagged along on the long walks that one of the Polish mathematicians, Henry Schaerf, liked to take. Rejewski’s political views, in particular his opinion that the Jews should be expelled from Poland, seemed derived from newspaper articles on the program of the National Democratic Party. But he was not so rigid as not to listen to contrary positions. Schaerf thought him relatively immature in his mathematical work and saw in him no extraordinary ability, no flashes of brilliance.
For a year Rejewski studied applied mathematics, specializing in actuarial questions. He expected eventually to work in a relative’s insurance firm. But upon his return home for the 1930 summer vacation, he found a letter offering him a teaching assistantship at Poznán. He accepted it and, with the Depression rapidly making job prospects scarce, kept the position instead of returning to Göttingen. He wondered what had become of the cryptology course and soon learned that the other two students who had cracked the double transposition were now solving German cryptograms twelve hours a week in a basement office of the Poznán military command post in St. Martin’s Street. Rejewski told one of them that he wouldn’t mind working there as well. After an interview, he was hired. In mid-1931 the unit formally became an outpost of Warsaw’s Biuro Szyfrów, orBS, which had been expanded by putting together several intercept and codebreaking units.
Ciȩżki, short, corpulent, jovial, now head of the bureau’s fourth, or German, desk—BS-4—had progressed no further in the solution of the Enigma than he had when Pokorny first presented the problem to him. In desperation, Ciȩżki called in a noted clairvoyant, but even his crystal ball could not reveal the mind of the machine. Ciȩżki’s long-range plan, however, seemed hopeful; his three part-time mathematician cryptanalysts were showing promise. He offered them full-time jobs as cryptanalysts in Warsaw, and on September 1, 1932, Rejewski and his two younger colleagues, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski, who had only recently graduated from the university, began work in a wing of the Saxon Palace,
Palluth lectured first, on the basics of cryptology. Then Ciȩżki spoke on the German army field cipher that Warsaw had solved. It was not the Enigma but a pencil-and-paper system called a double transposition. It mixed the letters of the plaintext message rather than replacing them with other letters. The cryptanalyst’s task was to unscramble them, to restore their original order. Ciȩżki assigned the students someactual intercepts to break. To help them, he told them that the messages dealt with winter quarters and bivouacs on training grounds.
Within a few hours, three students had solved the cryptograms. Gradually, as the test cryptograms became harder, more and more students dropped out of the course. And then one of the three who had solved the double transposition, Marian Rejewski, left—but not for lack of ability or interest. He had received his degree in mathematics and wanted to pursue studies in actuarial mathematics at one of the world centers for mathematics, the university at Göttingen.
Rejewski, a short, unprepossessing twenty-three-year-old, did not impress the other Polish mathematicians at Göttingen by his mind or his manner, by his looks or his personality. He had no close friends at the university, but he tagged along on the long walks that one of the Polish mathematicians, Henry Schaerf, liked to take. Rejewski’s political views, in particular his opinion that the Jews should be expelled from Poland, seemed derived from newspaper articles on the program of the National Democratic Party. But he was not so rigid as not to listen to contrary positions. Schaerf thought him relatively immature in his mathematical work and saw in him no extraordinary ability, no flashes of brilliance.
For a year Rejewski studied applied mathematics, specializing in actuarial questions. He expected eventually to work in a relative’s insurance firm. But upon his return home for the 1930 summer vacation, he found a letter offering him a teaching assistantship at Poznán. He accepted it and, with the Depression rapidly making job prospects scarce, kept the position instead of returning to Göttingen. He wondered what had become of the cryptology course and soon learned that the other two students who had cracked the double transposition were now solving German cryptograms twelve hours a week in a basement office of the Poznán military command post in St. Martin’s Street. Rejewski told one of them that he wouldn’t mind working there as well. After an interview, he was hired. In mid-1931 the unit formally became an outpost of Warsaw’s Biuro Szyfrów, orBS, which had been expanded by putting together several intercept and codebreaking units.
Ciȩżki, short, corpulent, jovial, now head of the bureau’s fourth, or German, desk—BS-4—had progressed no further in the solution of the Enigma than he had when Pokorny first presented the problem to him. In desperation, Ciȩżki called in a noted clairvoyant, but even his crystal ball could not reveal the mind of the machine. Ciȩżki’s long-range plan, however, seemed hopeful; his three part-time mathematician cryptanalysts were showing promise. He offered them full-time jobs as cryptanalysts in Warsaw, and on September 1, 1932, Rejewski and his two younger colleagues, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski, who had only recently graduated from the university, began work in a wing of the Saxon Palace,
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