Featured Exhibits
USAF C-130
Enigma Cipher Machines
USS Pueblo
Purple Analogs
American Civil War
GRAB & Poppy Satellites
The Korean War
Battle of Midway
Native Code Talkers
Venona
Zimmerman Telegram
Enigma Cipher Machines
One of the Allies’ true keys to victory in Europe during World War II was one of Nazi Germany’s most trusted tools – the Enigma. First utilized commercially at the end of the 1920s, Enigma was a German engineered electro-mechanical rotor machine that generated ciphers for the encryption and decryption of secret messages.
Even before the start of World War II, however, Polish cryptologists had already decrypted Enigma. Later they passed on that information to British and French intelligence. Because of this, and with American advancements, Allied cryptologists were able to decrypt a vast number of messages that had been enciphered on the machine.
The exact influence of the intelligence, codenamed ULTRA, is still hotly debated, but the prevailing thought is that decryption of German ciphers hastened the end of the European war, Nazism, Hitler and the Holocaust, all by two years.
As a permanent testament to how technology can be misapplied in the service of evil the museum owns 44 authentic Enigma machines. Two of them are “hands on” models that visitors can actually use.
