Nazi Enigma machines helped General Franco in Spanish Civil War

October 24, 2008

Nazi Enigma machines helped General Franco in Spanish Civil War
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Graham Keeley in Barcelona

Sixteen crates locked in a dark store room in Madrid for more than 70 
years hold the secret to how General Franco might have won the Spanish 
Civil War.

Inside the crates are Enigma code-making machines that Franco had bought 
from Nazi Germany and used to co-ordinate his troops who fought on fronts 
hundreds of miles apart.

The 26 machines were discovered this week by the Spanish daily newspaper 
El País, hidden in army headquarters since the Civil War ended in 1939, 
most still in perfect condition.../snip/


...The Madrid cache comprises commercial Enigma machines, invented in 
1920, rather than the more effective and highly secret military version 
that the German army used so effectively during the war.

Rafael Moreno Izquierido, a professor of journalism at Complutense 
University, Madrid, said : "Hitler was aware of the risk of one of these 
machines falling into British or Soviet hands and most likely did not 
trust the Spanish fully as the smallest slip-up could have compromised 
his secret weapon."

Even the inferior Enigma machine was highly complex and required two 
operators, with each message assigned a different code.

Commander Antonio Sarmiento was in charge of training operators at 
Franco's headquarters in Salamanca.

In a 1936 report he said : "To give an idea of how secure these machines 
are, suffice to say that the number of possible combinations is a 
remarkable 1,252,962,387,456."

Franco was said to have taken an Enigma machine with him when he travelled 
to the front. Impressed with their performance, he eventually bought up to 
50 of them, and they were in use until the 1950s.

Professor Denis Smyth, of the University of Toronto, an expert on Second 
World War intelligence operations, said that the British code breaker 
Alfred Dilwyn Knox cracked the code of Franco's machine in 1937, but 
"this information was not passed on to the Republicans"..../snip/


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5003411.ece

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00419/Enigma_419419a.jpg