OVERVIEW

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The first international conference of cryptologists took place in Germany in November 1978.

The backroom boys of World War II - Allied communications intelligence experts and Axis communications security specialists - met under scholarly sponsorship to try to determine the effect of codebreaking on the war. They concentrated particularly on the Allied codebreaking of the German Enigma and Geheimschreiber machines (these solutions were codenamed ULTRA). The enormous Allied success in cracking these high-level German ciphers and in thereby gaining insight into top German plans and capabilities was the greatest secret of the war after the atom bomb. It also became the longest-held secret of the war: the British did not expose it until 1974, when they allowed F. W. Winter-botham's The Ultra Secret to be published. That revelation touched off almost frantic activity among historians of the war. Had it made their work nugatory? Would they have to rewrite the whole history of the war? What was the weight of this intelligence in the conflict as a whole?

It was to answer such questions as these that the conference was organized - and brilliantly run - by Dr. J rgen Rohwer. Germany's leading naval historian, Rohwer is also director of the Bibliothek f r Zeitgeschichte (Library for Contemporary History) in Stuttgart, an adjunct professor at the University of Stuttgart, and current head of the Arbeitskreis f r Wehrforschung (Working Circle for Military Research). The extraordinary warmth of...