OVERVIEW

ADDRESS: ul. Bobrowskiego, 3/M15, Warsaw POLAND.

ABSTRACT: In the summer of 1976, Marian Rejewski, Polish mathematician-cryptologist, the solver of the German Enigma cipher, was sent, by a former signals office from England, a letter including a photocopy of an enciphered message, dated 26 April 1904. This was the period of the Russo- Japanese War. The piece was a correspondence between the Polish Socialist Party (of which J zef Pilsudski was a leader) and its emissaries in London. Despite his advanced age and prolonged ailment, and contrary to his initial objections, Rejewski solved the cipher, which turned out to reveal an interesting historical document.

KEYWORDS: Enciphered message, cryptanalysis, codebreaking, Marian Rejewski, Pilsudski, Poland, Japan, Russia.

[Ed. note: Appreciation is expressed to Christopher Kasparek for suggestions on this manuscript and his assistance in translating some of Marian Rejeski's reemarks. ]

The story I wish now to recount, poring over old but only recently acquired documents about Enigma, happened in the mid-1970's, when heated discussions in newspapers and learned debates of historians over two sensational books ^[1] were at their peak.

By 1976, in Poland's capital, a kind of "hotline" existed between the 71-year-old Marian Rejewski, the mathematician-cryptologist who had just become world famous as the solver of the German Enigma machine cipher, and myself, a historian who strove to keep pace with the burgeoning mass of publications on Enigma, some enlightening but many inaccurate.

So it was not unusual that on that sunny summer afternoon of August 17, 1976,...