The Enigma-Code

How Alan Turing beat the Nazis

Intelligence agencies, armies and agents use radios to stay in contact and the opponent has to listen in if they want to stay a step ahead. It is the circle of war. Rudolf Staritz (*1921), the last contemporary witness from Hitler’s military intelligence “Amt Ausland/Abwehr”, and Sir Dermot Turing, nephew of Alan Turing, are connected by the past. Now Staritz and Turing are meeting for the first time in the German Spy Museum.

There is hardly another technical achievement with as mystical a meaning as the German Enigma cipher machine. It was made to protect the Third Reich’s radio traffic from opponent’s listening ears. At least that was the idea. It was not known until the 1970s that the brilliant British mathematician Alan Turing, and his team at Bletchley Park in London, had cracked the concept of the Enigma and had been listening in to all radio traffic. The story of Turing, a homosexual who met a tragic end after a court-ordered sterilization, gained worldwide attention thanks to the 2014 film “The Imitation Game.”

We will turn back the hands of time for a moment with the help of Staritz and Turing, listening to their stories of inventions, momentous events, dramas of the second world war, and the lonely death of a hero.

 

Participants
Rudolf F. Staritz Former Radio Operator for the NS-Abwehr
Sir John Dermot Turing Nephew of Alan Turing

Moderation
Philip Oltermann Journalist “The Guardian”

 

This presentation will take place in English.

Free admission