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Comment by Moodles | Hacker News Reader

This is nice to see because I've always found it surprisingly difficult to get any information whatsoever on the German efforts in WWII.

Generally rotar machines were used a lot before WWII by banks and such. The Enigma and Typex were much more difficult to crack than commercial products because of the plugboard, while commercial machines only had spinning rotors. I think the Typex didn't have the weakness that letter x encrypts to x either. The Germans basically concluded that it was even tougher than the unbreakable Enigma so gave up.

Germany also had little success because, unlike in Bletchley Park, they didn't exactly tolerate eccentric academic types. The codebreaking efforts of the Germans were also so incredibly fragmented across different departments that once two different departments had a bust up on the street.

Wikipedia has some good references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_code_breaking_in_World_...

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That and they brutality exterminated many of their most talented mathematicians.

It was the fact that a letter could never encrypt to itself that was, perhaps, the single biggest fault of the Enigma. In routine messages, the position of expected or candidate plaintext could be inferred from a lack of correlation of any characters, and any candidate plugboard configurations that forced auto-mapping could be immediately discarded. (Rotor choices, particularly the right-hand wheel, could be determined statistically, leaving the ring settings and plugboard configuration as the tedious, time-consuming bit.)

> Germany also had little success because, unlike in Bletchley Park, they didn't exactly tolerate eccentric academic types.

Would Konrad Zuse qualify? If so the allies were pretty lucky he wasn't born a few years earlier.

> The codebreaking efforts of the Germans were also so incredibly fragmented across different departments that once two different departments had a bust up on the street.

Hitler also systematically embedded a divide and conquer principle in organizations. Basically all institutions were duplicated to have them compete against each other instead of potentially forming an opposition against Hitler.

USSR did the same thing. Pretty sure it was done to promote competition and not for divide and conquer. Secret police was more than enough to handle dissidents. Hitler and his party actually had a lot of support because most of the bad stuff they did was hidden from the people or justified super hard through propaganda. And as bad as the Nazis were overall they still managed to have major successes in economy and science.

>And as bad as the Nazis were overall they still managed to have major successes in economy and science.

They weren't actually succeeding economically. They simply racked up internal debt, stopped paying their foreign debt, and invaded Europe in order to plunder it's riches and resources.

They had been plummetting toward economic collapse.

They knew they weren't ready to defeat the UK militarily, knew their technology wasn't properly built up yet, and actually didn't anticipate their own early military successes in mainland Europe.

But they had no choice. Fascism itself had backed Hitler into a corner. It was invasion or abdication (which was unimaginable).

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