http://www.theage.com.au/breaking/0004/05/A50330-2000Apr5.shtml
Milton Keynes, England, April 4 - Police arrested a 50-year-old man
today in connection with the theft of an Enigma machine, used by the
Nazis to send messages in code during World War II.
The machine was stolen at the weekend from a museum at the British
site where the code was cracked.
Police said the man was being questioned at a police station in Milton
Keynes, southern England.
"The Enigma machine itself has not been recovered," a spokesman said.
The machine, one of only three left in the world, was stolen from a
glass cabinet at Bletchley Park, the mansion in southern England
codenamed Station X during the war.
The mansion housed British codebreakers who finally managed to crack
the Enigma code used by the German military, shortening the war by
several years.
The house was open to the public when the machine, worth an estimated
STG100,000 ($A263,000), went missing on Saturday, police said.
Grouped together in the so-called 'Ultra' project, the code-breakers,
chief among them British mathematical genius Alan Turing working
alongside mathematicians, linguists and champion chess players,
endeavoured to decipher messages sent between Nazi leaders and
military chiefs through what the Nazis was convinced was an
unbreakable code.
Their success in breaking the code was widely seen as crucial to the
Royal Air Force's victory in the 1940 Battle of Britain, and to Allied
success in the 1944 Normandy invasion when signals between Hitler and
General Guenther von Kluge were interrupted and deciphered.
At its height, the Bletchley Park team dealt with around 2,000
incoming signals from the German armed forces and political leaders.
In the opinion of Winston Churchill, the park's employees were 'the
geese that laid the golden eggs, and never cackled'.
The work of Bletchley Park remained secret until 1967.
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"Communications without intelligence is noise;
Intelligence without communications is irrelevant."
Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
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