Enigma | The True Story | A Talk by Sir Dermot Turing in Oxford

Alan Turing broke the Enigma cipher – not after years of struggle, but in 1939, shortly after the war had begun.

How was this possible? Did he actually work alone? And where did the idea for his machine solution come from?

Dermot Turing, the nephew of Alan Turing, tells the real story of how Enigma was broken.

In the Oscar-winning movie The Imitation Game, code-breaker Alan Turing battles to master the problem of the German Enigma machine. But the real story begins in the bathroom of a Belgian hotel, where a French spymaster is photographing secret documents. A few months later, a mathematician in a dingy room in Warsaw begins to decipher the coded communications of the Third Reich, and to lay the foundations for the code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park. What is the truth behind the Enigma myth?

About the Speaker

Dermot Turing is the author of Prof, the acclaimed biography of his uncle, Alan Turing. He spent his career in the legal profession after graduating from Cambridge and Oxford, and is a trustee of the Turing Trust. He is the Bletchley Park Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford. He has extensive knowledge of World War II code-breaking and speaks regularly at events around the world, such as the US National Security Agency’s Centre for Cryptologic History.