Talk:Cryptanalysis of the Enigma

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Remark

Hello

I am very surprised after reading this article about Enigma. The authors cite the article of Gaj and Orlowski and the book of W. Kozaczuk, but there in the article is not written that polish mathematicians as first people in the world broke Enigma cipher ( I haven't found such sentence). There is only described their work, however without clear ascertaintion, that they broke this cipher. Only concerning Bletchley Park, the authors write about breaking the cipher of Enigma. The reader, who is not an expert in this matter may be desoriented.

I think it is not good.

Observer

Thanks for taking the time to post your observations! It's certainly true that this article needs work, and that the nature and importance of the role of the Poles needs to be much more clearly stated — I'll try and get round to it soon, if noone else works on it (this being Wikipedia, you're very welcome to edit the page yourself, of course!).

One note, though — the Polish were the first to break Enigma in the sense that they were the first to read live encrypted German military Enigma traffic, which they did after 1932. However, other codebreakers had "broken" some versions of Enigma earlier, in the sense of finding cryptanalytic weaknesses — GC&CS's Hugh Foss had found weaknesses in the commerical Enigma C as early as 1927 (and I suspect he wouldn't have been the only one). The Polish work was orders of magnitude more significant, but we just have to be careful and precise in how we phrase it. — Matt 06:55, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

sorry for direct language but the pole with wooden mockup enigam model is bs , no question. it comes from the time of around 1974 when Winterbothams "the ultra secret" book came out, archives were still secret and polish sources were ignored in the western world. that stuff should be deleted !

Elizebeth Friedman

Elizebeth Friedman broke some Enigma traffic to and from German agents in South America, largely by exploiting the Germans' habit of enciphering multiple messages with the same key. See her biography by Jason Fagone for much more detail.24.170.225.138 (talk) 12:25, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Describing how Poznań went from belonging to Germany to belonging to Poland

An editor has a phrase as

"...the Polish Cipher Bureau invited mathematics students at Poznań University – who had a good knowledge of the German language due to the area having only after World War I been liberated from Germany – to take a course..."

(Emphasis added.)

I want to change "Liberated" to "transferred" or something, because:

"Transferred" is neutral, while "liberated" implies that the goodies got if from the baddies. That may be true, but let the reader decide that, don't lead the reader, that's POV.
I mean, at the time Germany had owned the city for like 150 years and the population was half German by then. I don't suppose that half of the population felt particularly liberated.
Heck, we could say "siezed from Germany" as after all it was taken under duress. I wouldn't, but just to show there could be POV on both sides.

The Germans had been pushing west for many centuries. Berlin started as a Slavic village. Most neutral people would say that Poznań was "rightfully" Polish. I would. But what I think doesn't matter, and "rightful" ownership of this land... it's been fought over for millennia, and I guess it's pretty complicated here... the Germans could say "hey we've had it for 150 years and made it half German. How far back are we going to go to allow people to claim something? 300 years? 1000 years? If the Romans (Italians) took Istanbul, would they be liberating it? C'mon". I don't think we should take a side on that. Herostratus (talk) 05:34, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]