Breaking Enigma Shortened the War by Two Years — and Was Kept Secret for Decades

Ajouté : 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]Germany believed its Enigma machine produced unbreakable codes. They were wrong. British code breakers at Bletchley Park, led by Alan Turing, cracked the Enigma code in 1941.

[00:00:13]For the rest of the war, Britain was reading German military communications in near real time. But there was a problem. If Britain acted on every decoded message, Germany would realize Enigma had been broken.

[00:00:26]So British intelligence let some operations succeed, including German U-boat attacks that killed Allied sailors, to protect the secret.

[00:00:35]Historians estimate that breaking Enigma shortened the war by two to four years.

[00:00:40]Hitler was never told his codes had been broken. He died believing Enigma was unbreakable.

[00:00:46]Follow for more hidden stories of World War II.