The machine Adolf Hitler used to send coded messages to his generals met the supercomputer that revealed its secrets on Friday as veterans operatives whose painstaking work helped end World War II watched.Margaret Bullen, who helped build Colossus, and veterans who fed encrypted German messages into the machine, including Irene Dixon, were also present for the viewing.
Hitler’s Lorenz machine boasted 1.” end-of Location: Canada, Ontario, London.“We said ‘Thank you very much, how much was it again ’ She said ‘£9.“Some of the Wrens did ask why it was so hot (close to the Colossus room), and some used to dry their washing next door,” recalled Dixon.He travelled to the southern English town of Southend and found the machine on the floor of a shed, covered “with rubbish”. It had helped the Allies confirm that Hitler mistakenly believed the D-Day landings would target Calais, which may have shortened the war by two years.“Hitler would’ve been furious if he had known, we were decrypting the messages even before his generals were”. ‘Impossible task’ It was only decades after the war that Dixon discovered she had been processing the most sensitive of information.
“The last 25 years, life has been Bletchley Park.Scientists at Bletchley Park in southern England, the WWII code breaking headquarters, fired up the valves, whirring wheels and spinning tors of the two machines to recreate how German military chiefs sent secret messages and how they were deciphered.Colossus is regarded as the world’s first programmable, electronic-digital computer, but was kept secret for decades, depriving its makers of due accolades.Dixon and other.
“Wrens” from the women’s branch of the Royal Navy were sworn to secrecy, and even other workers at Bletchley Park were unaware of the existence of the massive computer, which took up a whole room.The 10 Colossus machines are believed to have been destroyed in order to maintain secrecy, but late scientist Tony Sale dedicated his life to rebuilding one as part of efforts to protect the Bletchley Park complex from developers.Museum researcher John Wetter saw a “telegram machine” for sale on auction site eBay and realised it was actually a Lorenz teleprinter. The ingenuity of engineer Tommy Flowers, scientists were able to deduce how the machine operated and then build a machine to work out the settings of Lorenz’s rotors.
“I’m glad that my late husband’s dream is being carried forward,” his wife Margaret told AFP.“We found out we were intercepting coded messages sent by Hitler to his generals,” she told AFP. Quite a lot of people said it was an impossible task.The main Lorenz cypher machine is on loan from the Norwegian Armed Forces Museum China Double-action and two-speed flour mixer Factory in Oslo, but the special keyboard used to send the message to the rotors is a recent discovery.6 million-billion possible coding combinations thanks to a series of 12 rotors, a million times more complex than the Enigma machine
