The Polish guests were received at Bletchley Park by Ian Standen, Chief Executive Officer of the Museum, and representatives of its UK trust institutions. On the eve of the Bletchley Park visit, the Polish cryptologists’ relatives were entertained to a dinner given by the Polish Embassy in London.
Back in the 1930s, Polish mathematicians: Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski were decrypting first cables that had been coded with the Enigma machine. They made a few decoding devices, including the so-called cryptologic Bomba. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Poles without any preconditions turned their expertise and a copy of the Enigma over to the UK and French secret services, at a meeting in a radio intelligence facility in Pyry. That helped the Allies in instantly working out the movements and intentions of the German forces.
The late Professor John Irving Good, who worked at Bletchley Park during the war, years later called one of Rejewski’s formulas devised in his pioneering attempt at breaking the Enigma code as “the formula that had won the Second World War.”
The work to crack the Enigma code using the breakthrough discoveries by the Polish Cipher Bureau cryptologists was taken up by the British services at Bletchley Park in autumn 1939.
Photo © Konrad Jagodziński /Polish Embassy in London
Source: Press Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Republic of Poland