Day 7: The Deutches Museum

The Deutches Museum was brimming with  history on technology and its advancements throughout time. From pharmaceuticals to physics, the museum covered a vast array of scientific fields and interests. Walking through, I found myself intrigued mostly in the things that pertained to medicine and advancements made in that realm. However, my favorite find was a display that showed an enigma machine like that used in WWII.

Enigma machines were used during World War II to encode messages between German troops for their protection. It worked by scrambling letters in the alphabet and making, essentially, a secret code for the recipient to read and decipher. This system of communication slowed for secure communication incase these messages were intercepted by others. They could not, or so the Germans believed, be understood by other parties.

The supposedly unbreakable code of the enigma was broken in 1932 by the Polish General Staff’s Cipher Bureau. This part of the museum really fascinated me because I love learning about war history in my own time, especially reading about WWII. To see in person how complex the machine was made it might more real to me in seeing how difficult it must have been to crack the code the Germans were using. The enigma machine breakthrough was a monumental turning point in go bing the Allies an upper hand in the war. To see in person what made such a turning point possible was surreal to me.