The Enigma machine is an icon of World War II. It was the machine with which Nazi Germany sent messages using a cipher that was impossible for the Allies to decipher until British mathematician Alan Turing succeeded in 1943. An original model K723 of the Enigma machine is the crown jewel of the Battalion of Transmissions IV/22, which has been kept in perfect working order since 2007, together with other historical pieces of military telecommunications.
The first Enigma machine dates back to 1923, when it was manufactured by a Berlin company after acquiring a Dutch patent. It was initially conceived for commercial use, until the German army adopted it to transmit messages with maximum security. In 1936, Hitler sent a batch of Enigma machines to Franco, as part of Germany’s contribution to the coup side. In this way, the Spanish Civil War also became the first testing ground for Enigma in a war conflict.
After the war, the machines were withdrawn from service and abandoned in a warehouse at the army headquarters, until a few years ago they were located and turned into museum pieces. The Bruc K723 was one of the last to arrive in Spain, so if it was used during the Civil War, it was at the end of the conflict.
The Enigmas sent by Hitler to Franco were not as sophisticated as those later used by Germany in World War II. To encrypt messages, they were equipped with various rotors and other mechanisms that provided more than 1.8 million possible combinations of letters. The K723 has three interchangeable 26-character rotors, but the ones used by the Nazis had as many as five, which multiplied the encryption options and made it virtually impossible to decipher. Until Turing’s privileged mind broke the code, which is estimated to have shortened the end of the war by two years.
