Enigma: How the Enigma code breaking story links to Chichester

By Councillor Martyn Bell, in conjunction with the Novium Museum
Published 28th Nov 2022, 12:04 BST
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In a quiet corner of the Rose Garden in Chichester Crematorium is a small memorial marking where the ashes of Henryk Zygalski, ‘Son of Poland, British Subject’, were scattered in 1978.

Henryk was born in Poznan, Poland, in 1908 and was one of a ‘trio’ of Polish mathematicians who first ‘broke’ the encoded messages of the German military Enigma cipher machine during December 1932 and January 1933.

The Poles had established a Polish Army Cipher Bureau in an attempt break the Enigma code. Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Rozycki were working at the bureau in 1929. Rejewski was asked to work on a project secretly, without his friends, which involved trying to understand the wiring inside the Enigma machines.

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After a breakthrough, Zygalski and Rozycki were called in to help. To successfully decode the messages, the trio tried to understand how the machines worked. They had two machines constructed with the exact same internal wiring and programmed with the same key settings and rotor positions. This, along with intelligence material provided by the French including manuals and code books, allowed the trio to break the code for the first time. In 1938, Henryk developed the ‘Zygalski sheets’ which could be used to read Enigma messages.