Rejewski was born on August 16, 1905 in Bydgoszcz (then Bromberg) in western Poland. He studied mathematics at the University of Poznań and, before graduating in 1929, joined a secret cryptology course run by Poland’s Cipher Bureau.
The training focused on applying mathematical methods such as combinatorics and probability to breaking German ciphers.
By 1932, long before the Bletchley Park engagement which is today seen as the epicenter of work on breaking the Enigma code, Rajewski and fellow mathematicians Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski at the Cipher Bureau in Warsaw, succeeded in reconstructing the workings of the Enigma message coding machine - without ever having seen the inside of one, and basing their work on mathematical analysis of intercepted Nazi military radio traffic.
In January 1933, the team began practical decoding, providing Poland’s military and foreign ministry with valuable intelligence about Nazi Germany for the next six years.
In July 1939, just weeks before Germany invaded Poland, the Polish team shared their methods and a replica Enigma with British and French intelligence.
After the outbreak of war, Rejewski and his colleagues were evacuated to France, where they continued their cryptographic work at a facility near Paris codenamed Bruno.
Following the fall of France, they operated in southern France under the Vichy regime at another secret station, Cadix.
In 1942, after Germany occupied the south, Rejewski and Zygalski escaped to Spain, were briefly arrested, and then made their way via Portugal and Gibraltar to Britain.
There they joined the Polish army in exile and worked on German ciphers at a radio intelligence unit near London.
Throughout the war, the German military considered Enigma unbreakable. They used it for their most secret communications, unaware that Allied cryptologists were reading vast amounts of their traffic.
While Britain’s Bletchley Park team carried on the main effort against Enigma, historians note that the Polish breakthrough of 1932 was the foundation of the Allied success.
The British electro-mechanical devices designed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman to speed up Enigma decryption were inspired by the earlier Polish invention, the cryptologic bomb, which Rejewski’s team had created in 1938.
The British historian Ronald Lewin wrote in his 1978 book Ultra Goes to War: “The Polish contribution to the common struggle during the war entered history … Yet their first achievement was the most important.”
Historians generally agree that the cracking of Enigma shortened the war by two to three years, saving untold thousands of lives.
Rejewski returned to Poland in 1946, working quietly as an office clerk in factories in Bydgoszcz.
For decades his wartime role remained a secret, and only in 1967 did he disclose his work on Enigma in a memoir lodged with Poland’s military historical institute.
He died in 1980 and was buried at Warsaw’s Powązki Military Cemetery.
(rt/gs)
Source: polskieradio.pl, PAP