Marian Rejewski

Life & Legacy

Marian Adam Rejewski (Polish: [ˈmarjan rɛˈjɛfskʲi] ; 16 August 1905 – 13 February 1980) was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in late 1932 reconstructed the sight-unseen German military Enigma cipher machine.
Over the next nearly seven years, Rejewski and fellow mathematician-cryptologists Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski, working at the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau, developed techniques and equipment for decrypting the Enigma ciphers, even as the Germans introduced modifications to their Enigma machines and encryption procedures. Rejewski's contributions included the cryptologic card catalog and the cryptologic bomb.
Five weeks before the outbreak of World War II in Europe, the Poles shared their achievements with French and British counterparts who had made no progress, enabling Britain to begin reading German Enigma ciphers. The intelligence gained by the British from Enigma decrypts formed part of what they code-named Ultra and contributed—perhaps decisively—to the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Soon after the outbreak of war, the Polish cryptologists were evacuated to France, where they continued breaking Enigma ciphers. After the fall of France in June 1940, they and their support staff were evacuated to Algeria in North Africa; a few months later, they resumed work clandestinely in southern Vichy France. After the Vichy "Free Zone" was occupied by Nazi Germany in November 1942, Rejewski and Zygalski escaped via Spain (and Spanish imprisonment), Portugal, and Gibraltar to Britain. There they enlisted in the Polish Armed Forces and were put to work solving low-grade German ciphers.
After the war, Rejewski returned to Poland and his family. For two decades, he remained silent about his prewar and wartime work so as to avoid the attention of Poland's Soviet-dominated government. In 1967, he broke his silence, providing Poland's Military Historical Institute his memoirs of work at the Cipher Bureau.