Enigma Machine - Fiction

Fiction

The play Breaking the Code, dramatised by Hugh Whitemore, is about the life and death of Alan Turing, who was the central force in continuing to break the Enigma in the United Kingdom during World War II. Turing was played by Derek Jacobi, who also played Turing in a 1996 television adaptation of the play. Although it is a drama and thus takes artistic license, it is nonetheless a fundamentally accurate account.

Robert Harris's 1995 novel Enigma is set against the backdrop of World War II Bletchley Park and cryptologists working to read Naval Enigma in Hut 8. The book, with substantial changes in plot, was made into the 2001 film Enigma, directed by Michael Apted and starring Kate Winslet and Dougray Scott. The film has been criticized for many historical inaccuracies, including neglect of the role of Poland's Biuro Szyfrów in breaking the Enigma cipher and showing the British how to do it. The film—like the book—makes a Pole the villain, who seeks to betray the secret of Enigma decryption.

An earlier Polish film dealing with Polish aspects of the subject was the 1979 Sekret Enigmy, whose title translates as The Enigma Secret.

Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 film Das Boot includes an Enigma machine which is evidently a four-rotor Kriegsmarine variant. It appears in many scenes, which probably capture well the flavour of day-to-day Enigma use aboard a World War II U-Boat. The plot of U-571, released in 2000, revolves around an attempt to seize an Enigma machine from a German U-boat.

A re-imagined version of an Enigma Machine is used heavily in the 'Riddler's Revenge' side-mission in the 2011 video game, 'Batman: Arkham City.'

An Enigma machine makes a very brief appearance in the 1980s TV show Whiz Kids, episode 12.

Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon prominently features the Enigma machine and efforts by British and American cryptologists to break variants of it, and portrays the German U-boat command under Karl Dönitz using it in apparently deliberate ignorance of its having been broken.

In the comedy war film All the Queen's Men, released in 2001 and starring Matt LeBlanc alongside Eddie Izzard, four World War II Allied soldiers are parachuted into Germany, where, dressed as women, they attempt to steal an Enigma machine. They eventually learn that the Allies already had the machine and that the mission was a ruse intended to mislead the Germans into thinking that Enigma was a closed book to the Allies.

EnigmaWarsaw is an outdoor city game in Warsaw organised by StayPoland travel agency. This treasure hunt game is devised to help the players imagine pre-war Warsaw. EnigmaWarsaw is named to commemorate the pioneering work of Polish cryptographers Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski at decrypting the Enigma machine cipher.

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a science fiction novel about time traveling historians in which the importance of the Allies obtaining the German Enigma machine is heavily stressed.

In the TV show Sanctuary, the deciphering of the Enigma cipher is credited to Nikola Tesla during the episode "Into the Black", released on 20 June 2011.

In Ian Fleming's From Russia, with Love, released in 1957, the fictitious Spektor code machine, based on the real-life Enigma cipher machine, is used as a plot piece. This device would supposedly intercept Russian coded traffic and decipher it, allowing MI6's cryptanalysts to access decoded information.