this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
725 points (100.0% liked)
History Memes
1313 readers
645 users here now
A place to share history memes!
Rules:
-
No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, assorted bigotry, etc.
-
No fascism (including tankies/red fash), atrocity denial or apologia, etc.
-
Tag NSFW pics as NSFW.
-
Follow all Piefed.social rules.
Banner courtesy of @setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world
OTHER COMMS IN THE HISTORYVERSE:
- !historymusic@quokk.au
- !historygallery@quokk.au
- !historymemes@piefed.social
- !historyruins@piefed.social
- !historyart@piefed.social
- !historyartifacts@piefed.social
- !historyphotos@piefed.social
founded 7 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I thought this was mainly because they intercepted the same message which was sent twice
It's slightly "way more complicated". They occasionally forgot to update the key settings between messages, resent identical messages with different keys or encryption systems, or just chose easy to guess keys.
There was also a defect in enigma where no letters could be encoded as themselves. This meant that you could use knowledge of what was likely in a message at a certain location to rule out keys, since any letters in common disqualified the guess.
That’s a brilliant description, thank you
I believe that was Lorenz, not enigma. The higher level code. Basically Hitler and his generals only.
An operator missed a letter in a message. He then reset the machine and re-encrypted it. 2 almost identical messages like that were enough to figure out how the encryption operated. They didn't see a physical Lorenz machine till after the war.
Read that the guy cracking it had like a mental breakdown because it was so complicated.
The sheer pressure. It should be a crack too small to prise open. However, if you do, all of Hitler's personal messages are up for the reading.
With a slight error somewhere in the middle of the second one. Or so I remember.