German code breaking in World War II German code breaking in World War II German code breaking in World War II achieved some notable successes cracking British Naval ciphers until well into the fourth year of the war, but also suffered from a problem typical of the German armed forces of the time: numerous branches and institutions maintained their own cryptographic departments, working on their own without collaboration or sharing results with equivalent units. This led to duplicated effort, to a fragmentation of potential, and to lower efficiency than might have been achieved. There was no central German cryptography agency comparable to the British Bletchley Park facility.
Cryptanalysis of the Enigma defined somewhat differently in that era than in modern cryptography. First, there is the "identification" of the system in use, in this case Enigma; second, "breaking" the system by establishing exactly how encryption takes place, and third, "solving", which involves finding the way that the machine was set up for an individual message, "i.e." the "message key". Today, it is often assumed that an attacker knows how the encipherment process works (see Kerckhoffs's principle) and "breaking" is often used for "solving" a key. Enigma machines, however, had so many potential internal wiring states that reconstructing the machine, independent of particular