AVA factory

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The AVA factory , more precisely: Radio technology factory AVA (Polish: Wytwórnia Radiotechniczna AVA ), was a small electrotechnical company in Warsaw , which existed from 1929 until the beginning of the Second World War and manufactured special electromechanical devices especially for the Polish Biuro Szyfrów (BS) ( German: "Chiffrenbüro") produced. The most important devices that this small company produced were replicas of the German Enigma rotor key machine from 1933 onwards, as well as the special cryptanalytical devices such as the cyclometer and bomba needed to decipher it .

history

On the Polish Enigma replica, buttons (1), lamps (2) and sockets (7) were simply arranged alphabetically , as on the German Enigma-C .
The cyclometer was used to decipher the Enigma ...
... just like the bomba

In 1927 Edward Fokczyński opened a small workshop for radio technology on Warschauer Neue Welt-Straße , not far from the headquarters of the Polish General Staff in the Saxon Palace (Polish: Pałac Saski ) . He received from the local cipher office BS , in the person of Captain Maksymilian Ciężki , whom he knew from their time together from 1919 to 1922 in the Polish army, from time to time smaller orders for the production of special electromechanical and radio equipment. In 1929, on the initiative of Fokczyński and Antoni Palluth as well as the two brothers Leonard Danilewicz and Ludomir Danilewicz, the Wytwórnia Radiotechniczna AVA (German: Funkechnische Fabrik AVA) emerged from this workshop . The three letters "AVA" for their new company were formed by the young company founders, who were all enthusiastic radio amateurs , as a combination of their amateur radio call signs "TPAV" by the Danilewicz brothers and "TPVA" by Palluth. Shortly afterwards, in the same year, they changed the company headquarters and moved to new premises in the southern Warsaw district of Mokotów , which lies between the inner city and the Kabaty forest, which later became so important for them and the world (see also: Meeting from Pyry ). The new company address was now Stepinska Street No. 25 (Polish: Ulica Stepinska 25 ).

After in 1932 the young cryptanalyst Marian Rejewski with the help of his colleagues Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski in charge of Germany Unit BS4 had managed the cipher offices, the first break- in by the German Reichswehr used to encrypt her secret message traffic Enigma machine achieved and the wiring of the rollers could be uncovered, the BS commissioned the AVA factory with the construction of reconstructed military Enigma machines under the highest degree of secrecy. These differed from the commercial Enigma models not only because of the changed wiring, but above all because of the newly added plug board . At least 15 replicas were made.

In the period from 1932 to 1935, the exact times are not known, AVA also manufactured its own Polish rotor key machine , the " Lacida ". The name Lacida was an acronym from the first letters of the surname of its inventor Gwido Langer ("La"), the head of the BS , Ciężki ("Ci"), his deputy and head of the BS4 department , and the Danilewicz brothers ("Da") ) was formed. Presumably at least 40 copies of the Lacida were built, possibly 125 pieces.

An important cryptanalytic device, probably manufactured by AVA in 1934 or 1935, was the cyclometer (Polish: Cyklometr ), which was also devised by Rejewski. It served to unlock the key that the Germans used to encrypt their radio messages . On September 15, 1938, the German procedural regulation was changed and a freely selectable basic position for the spell key encryption was introduced. The cyclometer suddenly became useless.

However, it took only a few weeks in the autumn of 1938 until Rejewski found a suitable method to break the key again. The technical implementation of his new cryptanalytic attack method consisted in the construction of an electromechanically operated machine, which contained six complete sets of Enigma rollers and thus embodied two Enigma machines three times in a row and each offset by three rotary positions. The Poles succeeded not only in developing the concept of this new type of “cracking machine”, which they called Bomba , very quickly , but also in October 1938 to manufacture six functional machines and successfully put them into operation with the help of AVA and under the leadership of Palluth. Since there were six (= 3 · 2 · 1) different possible roller positions of the Enigma at that time, six bombies (Polish plural of Bomba ) were required, one for each roller position. Driven by an electric motor, a bomba exhaustively (completely) ran through all 17,576 different roller positions (from “AAA” to “ZZZ”) within a time of about 110 minutes.

The final assembly of the machines manufactured by AVA did not take place in the company's premises on Stepinskastraße, but for reasons of confidentiality in a specially secured room of the BS , room no. 13 in the Saxon Palace, also known as the “clock room”. Very few people had access to this room. Besides the BS bosses, Langer and Ciężki, there were the AVA directors Fokczyński, Palluth and the Danilewicz brothers, as well as their precision mechanic Czesław Betlewski . With the move of the BS4 in 1937 to the Kabaty forest just under 20 km south of Warsaw, the final production of AVA was also relocated to the underground rooms of the newly built secret seat of the cipher office, which had the Polish code name Wicher (German "storm") .

On July 26th and 27th 1939 the legendary secret meeting of French, British and Polish code breakers took place here , at which the Poles disclosed all their cryptanalytic methodologies to the amazed British and French and also presented all the Enigma “cracking machines” manufactured by AVA. This laid the foundation stone for the historically significant Allied Enigma decipherments (code name: "Ultra" ) during the Second World War.

Shortly after the meeting, the AVA employees had to experience the German invasion of their land that sparked World War II. They were forced to burn all of their records and documents as well as destroy all technical devices, machines, tools and spare parts. The valuable parts were smashed with heavy hammers and sometimes even melted down. A few young employees stayed behind briefly and covered the last traces. They did this so thoroughly that the Germans later found nothing suspicious. For this reason there are practically no authentic documents or artifacts from this period. In September 1939 the employees of the AVA plant, like all other employees of the BS , fled from the advancing German troops from Poland and their company went under.

literature

  • Friedrich L. Bauer : Deciphered Secrets. Methods and maxims of cryptology. 3rd, revised and expanded edition. Springer, Berlin et al. 2000, ISBN 3-540-67931-6 .
  • Krzysztof Gaj: Polish Cipher Machine - Lacida . Cryptologia . Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 16.1992,1, ISSN  0161-1194 , pp. 73-80.
  • Gustave Bertrand: Énigma ou la plus grande enigme de la guerre 1939–1945 . Librairie Plon, Paris 1973.
  • David Kahn : The Code Breakers - The Story of Secret Writing . Macmillan USA, Reissue 1974, ISBN 0-02-560460-0 .
  • David Kahn: Seizing the Enigma - The Race to Break the German U-Boat Codes, 1939-1943 . Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, USA, 2012, ISBN 978-1-59114-807-4 .
  • Władysław Kozaczuk : Enigma - How the German Machine Cipher Was Broken, and How It Was Read by the Allies in World War Two . Edited and translated by Christopher Kasparek, Frederick, MD, University Publications of America, 1984, ISBN 0-89093-547-5 .
  • Władysław Kozaczuk, Jerzy Straszak, Enigma - How the Poles Broke the Nazi Code . Hippocrene Books, 2004, ISBN 0-7818-0941-X .
  • Władysław Kozaczuk: Secret Operation Wicher . Bernard et al. Graefe, Koblenz 1989, Karl Müller, Erlangen 1999, ISBN 3-7637-5868-2 , ISBN 3-86070-803-1 .
  • Władysław Kozaczuk: Under the spell of Enigma . Military publishing house, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-327-00423-4 .
  • Hugh Sebag-Montefiore : Enigma - The battle for the code . Cassell Military Paperbacks, London 2004, ISBN 0-304-36662-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Chris Christensen: Review of IEEE Milestone Award to the Polish Cipher Bureau for `` The First Breaking of Enigma Code '' . Cryptologia . Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 39.2015,2, p. 185. ISSN  0161-1194 .
  2. ↑ David Kahn: Seizing the Enigma - The Race to Break the German U-Boat codes 1939 -1943 . Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, USA, 2012, p. 81. ISBN 978-1-59114-807-4 .
  3. ^ Marian Rejewski: An Application of the Theory of Permutations in Breaking the Enigma Cipher . Applicationes Mathematicae, 16 (4), 1980, pp. 543-559. Accessed: April 16, 2015. PDF; 1.6 MB ( memento from October 30, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ^ Gordon Welchman: The Hut Six Story - Breaking the Enigma Codes . Allen Lane, London 1982; Cleobury Mortimer M&M, Baldwin Shropshire 2000, p. 207. ISBN 0-947712-34-8
  5. ^ Hugh Sebag-Montefiore: Enigma - The battle for the code . Cassell Military Paperbacks, London 2004, p. 355. ISBN 0-304-36662-5
  6. ↑ Friedrich L. Bauer: Deciphered secrets. Methods and maxims of cryptology. 3rd, revised and expanded edition. Springer, Berlin et al. 2000, p. 419.
  7. ^ Hugh Sebag-Montefiore: Enigma - The battle for the code . Cassell Military Paperbacks, London 2004, p. 434. ISBN 0-304-36662-5
  8. ↑ a b Ralph Erskine: The Poles Reveal their Secrets - Alastair Dennistons's Account of the July 1939 Meeting at Pyry . Cryptologia. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 30.2006,4, p. 294
  9. ↑ Action This Day: A Book Announcement ( Memento of March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (English) Retrieved May 4, 2015.