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Intercept #1

First Transmission

The intercept

Eastern Front, summer 1943. A radio operator has just copied down an intercepted transmission. No indicator to untangle yet — set the machine to match the sheet below and start typing.

SCHLÜSSELTAFELNUR FÜR DEN DIENSTGEBRAUCHNetz: Luftwaffe – Fernaufklärung OstDatum: 14. Juli 1943WalzenlageII – I – IIIRingstellungX P LUmkehrwalzeBSteckerverbindungenQW ER TYAnfangsstellungJ L CGEHEIM

Transcription

Netz
Luftwaffe – Fernaufklärung Ost
Datum
14. Juli 1943
Walzenlage
II – I – III
Ringstellung
X P L
Umkehrwalze
B
Steckerverbindungen
QW ER TY
Anfangsstellung
J L C

Ciphertext

CEUNY VSTSM ZUGYJ ZNWGY WNTRH FPHXU BFBOC EBXVB

Notes

  • The sheet gives every setting needed to configure the machine: rotor order, ring settings, reflector, plugboard, and the starting position to dial in. That starting position is labeled Anfangsstellung rather than Grundstellung because this warm-up is simplified. By 1943 a real key sheet never carried a message’s starting position. The operator picked it himself and sent it disguised at the head of the message. Challenge 3 covers that kind of procedure.
  • The plugboard is also simplified: three pairs here, where real 1943 Luftwaffe sheets used ten.
  • Dial the rotors to the Anfangsstellung, not the ring settings — those are two different knobs. On the Enigma Touch, ring setting and rotor position are set as separate steps in the model’s setup flow.
  • The message was typed with the spaces stripped, which is standard Enigma practice — the machine has no space key. Ciphertext is shown in groups of five purely for readability; the groups don’t mean anything and aren’t part of what you type.

Hint

Click for a hint

Enigma is reciprocal — the same settings that encrypted this message will decrypt it. There’s no separate “decrypt mode” to find on the machine; type the ciphertext in with the sheet above dialed in, and the plaintext comes out the lampboard letter by letter.

Only three rotor slots are on the sheet, and the reflector is plain B, not a thin variant — that alone tells you this is a standard 3-rotor service Enigma, not the Kriegsmarine’s four-rotor machine.

Solution

Click to reveal the solution

Plaintext: AUFKLAERUNGMELDETPANZEROSTWAERTSSMOLENSK — “Aufklärung meldet Panzer ostwärts Smolensk” (“Reconnaissance reports armor east of Smolensk”). Umlauts are written out as their standard telegraphic substitutes — ä → ae, ö → oe, ü → ue — since the machine’s keyboard only has the 26 plain letters.

Full trace

With the sheet dialed in exactly as given and AUFKLAERUNGMELDETPANZEROSTWAERTSSMOLENSK typed in, the lampboard lights, letter by letter:

A->C   U->E   F->U   K->N   L->Y
A->V   E->S   R->T   U->S   N->M
G->Z   M->U   E->G   L->Y   D->J
E->Z   T->N   P->W   A->G   N->Y
Z->W   E->N   R->T   O->R   S->H
T->F   W->P   A->H   E->X   R->U
T->B   S->F   S->B   M->O   O->C
L->E   E->B   N->X   S->V   K->B

The right-hand rotor steps on every keypress, so the wiring path changes with each letter. The plaintext has six Es, and every one of them enciphers to a different letter (S, G, Z, N, X, B), all under the same settings.

This was a 3-rotor Luftwaffe setup. The Army (Heer) ran traffic on the same machine type, just on different radio nets with different keys.

easywarm-up

Solvable on: Enigma Touch, Physical Enigma replica, cryptii.com Universal Enigma — set the model to match the key sheet.