NEWS RELEASE
The full story of the pinnacle of Bletchley Park code-breaking from encrypt to decrypt
1940’s cutting edge crypto technology revealed at The National Museum of Computing
7 April 2016
The pinnacle of code-breaking at Bletchley Park can now be told in its entirety from encrypt to decrypt using the full set of 1940’s cutting edge technology following the presentation today
of an extremely rare Lorenz SZ42, Hitler’s “unbreakable” cipher machine, for display at The National Museum of Computing.
The breaking of the top-secret Lorenz messages of German High Command is credited with shortening the war and saving countless lives. Much more complex than Enigma, the Lorenz cipher could
be broken only thanks to Bill Tutte’s deduction of the architecture of a Lorenz machine without ever having seen it. As a result, the Allies were routinely able to read German High Command’s top secret messages. From 1944, with the creation of the Colossus
computer by Tommy Flowers, the Allies were able to reduce the decrypt time from weeks to hours, a speed that effectively undermined the German military machine.
At a ceremony in central London, Lieutenant Colonel Stein Wilhelm Aasland of the Norwegian Armed Forces Museum presented a Lorenz SZ42 as a long-term loan to Andy Clark, Chairman of TNMOC.
The audience included two Wrens who had worked on Colossus along with relatives of those involved in the breaking of Lorenz.