The Polish Mathematician Who Opened the Door to Victory

In 1932, a 23-year-old Polish mathematician named Marian Rejewski accomplished what every intelligence service in Europe had tried and failed to do: he broke the German Enigma cipher machine. Using pure mathematics — specifically permutation group theory — Rejewski mathematically deduced the internal wiring of Enigma from intercepted encrypted messages, without ever seeing the machine itself. He and two colleagues (Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski) built replica machines, created techniques for breaking daily key settings, and built the 'Bomba' — an electro-mechanical device designed specifically to find Enigma settings automatically. This was seven years before the war even began. In July 1939, with Germany on the verge of invading Poland, the Polish intelligence secretly handed all their Enigma research to British and French counterparts at a meeting in the Kabacki Woods near Warsaw. British codebreaking at Bletchley Park was built directly on this Polish foundation. The Poles continued their work from France and then, after France fell in 1940, from Vichy France. Rozycki was killed in 1942 when his ship was torpedoed. Rejewski and Zygalski eventually made it to Britain, where they were told they were not cleared to work at Bletchley Park — the very people who had cracked Enigma were deemed a security risk and reassigned to manual labor.