Free Republic

Sixteen crates locked in a dark store room in Madrid for more than 70 years hold the secret to how General Franco might have won the Spanish Civil War. Inside the crates are Enigma code-making machines that Franco had bought from Nazi Germany and used to co-ordinate his troops who fought on fronts hundreds of miles apart. The 26 machines were discovered this week by the Spanish daily newspaper El País, hidden in army headquarters since the Civil War ended in 1939, most still in perfect condition. The Enigma machines gave Franco's Nationalists a crucial advantage because their code was...

The M4 Project began in early January, as an attempt to break three original Enigma messages that were intercepted in 1942 and are thought never to have been broken by the Allied forces. These messages were encrypted using a four-rotor Enigma. That version was considered by Germany to be completely unbreakable, as it could be set up in any one of a vast number of ways (2 times 10 to the 145th power), each of which would encrypt a plain text message differently.

It was one of the most bizarre episodes of the Second World War. When Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, landed by parachute in 1941 near the estate of the Duke of Hamilton in Lanarkshire, it raised the question of whether British intelligence or members of the aristocracy were trying to broker a secret peace deal with the Nazis. But recently declassified MI5 files shed more light on Hess’s mysterious flight to Scotland, and finally prove the conspiracy theories to be unfounded, according to the duke’s son, Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, the Lothians MSP. The Conservative peer said yesterday that the new MI5...