Re: Nazi Enigma machines helped General Franco in Spanish Civil War

Franco was not alone in Civil War, Hitler and Mussolini were his allied.

Fernandes Almeida

Martin Postranecky escreveu:
> October 24, 2008
>
> Nazi Enigma machines helped General Franco in Spanish Civil War
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
>